Principles of Communications - Week 6 - Nov 18

Today, I wil finish the section on switching (covering routers as well as TDB and Space switch designs) - since we have "Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge" in the building today, its worth talking about the link between
Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Stanford University, then we can also mention the link with Granite and Google (Dave Cheriton) and Arista. Also, the early Sun 3 and CIscos were same M68000 multibus motherboard + ether*n + T1 serial line....alas, only sun ran BSD Unix, whereas Cisco wrote a low level executive called IOS (nowhere near as innovative as 3 years later when Apple wrote an Operating System for the iPhone and called it IOS...)....if routers had run BSD unix, the Internet might be a better place:-)

Next week, we;ll cover contention networks (shared media0 as well as capacity of multihop radio nets.