Economy Size Geek

Does Anyone Still Use Token Ring?

Metcalfe sometimes jokingly credits Jerry Saltzer for 3Com’s success. Saltzer cowrote an influential paper suggesting that token-ring architectures were theoretically superior to Ethernet-style technologies. This result, the story goes, left enough doubt in the minds of computer manufacturers that they decided not to make Ethernet a standard feature, which allowed 3Com to build a business around selling add-in Ethernet network cards. This also led to the saying “Ethernet works better in practice than in theory,” which, though a joke, actually makes a valid technical point: the characteristics of typical traffic on actual networks differ from what had been expected before LANs became common in ways that favor the simple design of Ethernet.