By Amir Bar-Niv, VP of Marketing, Automotive Business Unit, Marvell
The roots of Ethernet technology began in 1973, when Bob Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox Research Center (who later founded 3COM), wrote a memo entitled “Alto Ethernet,” which described how to connect computers over short-distance copper cable. With the explosion of PC-based Local Area Networks (LAN) in businesses and corporations in the 1980s, the growth of client/server LAN architectures continued, and Ethernet started to become the connectivity technology of choice for these networks. However, the Ethernet advancement that made it the most successful networking technology ever was when standardization efforts began for it under the IEEE 802.3 group.