The Making of the Ethernet Protocol Standard
Lucio Lanza’s September 2025 contribution to EE Times offers a captivating look at the development history of the Ethernet protocol standard.
Ethernet is the ubiquitous standard that everyone knows. In the early 1980s, its position was far from destined. The de facto recipient of industry-standard status was Token Ring, a technology for local area networks.
It took three plucky semiconductor industry executives ––two from Intel and one from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation)–– to significantly alter the direction of computer networking technology. They were Gordon Bell (1936-2024), Digital Equipment Corporation’s vice president of engineering and inventor of the minicomputer, Phil Kaufman (1942-1992), who oversaw Intel’s microprocessor operations and went on to be President and CEO of Quickturn Systems (now Cadence) and President of Silicon Compiler Systems, and me.
Jeff Katz (1943-2018), the Intel executive whose group I had recently joined, pointed out to me that his group designed several controllers—floppy disks, Synchronous Data Set Link Controllers (SDLCs), and cathode ray tubes (CRTs)—but needed to do a next-generation controller for a peripheral for communication.
Connecting computers via modems was not very fast because it relied on telephone lines. I suggested looking at where the industry was going. The processing speed of microprocessors was growing exponentially, and Intel was leading the industry in that direction by increasing both density and speed.
