Know a Little More · Daily Tech News Show

About ALOHANet

·13 min·1 clip

Robert Metcalf read a paper about AlohaNet, fixed its bugs for his Harvard thesis, and those fixes stuck with him when he co-invented Ethernet at Xerox PARC.

This episode traces the origins of modern networking back to AlohaNet, a 1970s radio-based system developed at the University of Hawaii to connect campuses across islands. It explains how its simple 'send-and-retry' protocol for handling data collisions became the foundation for Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and mobile networks.

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