Ethernet at 40: Its daddy reveals its turbulent youth
“Ethernet was developed in the context of the internet with its seven levels of the ISO reference model,” he said. “So we had a job to do at level one and two, and we didn’t burden Ethernet with all the other stuff that we knew would be above us. We didn’t do security, we didn’t do encryption, we didn’t even do acknowledgements.”
It’s not that Ethernet was incapable of handling acknowledgements, Metcalfe said, it’s just that he and his cohorts wanted to keep things simple. “Ethernet carried packets. Now, they could be acknowledgement packets, or not, whereas the other methods built some sort of elaborate acknowledgement scheme to boost reliability and so on.”
As a result, “By virtue of knowing our place, we built something that turned out to be faster and cheaper.”
Stick to your knitting.