hey, not sure whether this is really in your bailiwick, but have you ever heard of Asynchronous Transfer Mode? in the mid-to-late '90s it was IP's main competitor and yet I'd never heard of it. it had 53-byte packets.
god, ATM is a FASCINATING story and I'm probably not the guy to tell it, but let me try for a capsule summary:
- Ethernet gets created in the late 70s, starts becoming huge by the early 80s.
- A few years into the 80s, Ethernet is getting long in the tooth. It is absolute chaos, it has no flow control, and networks are basically ruled by whoever talks loudest. As the amount of bulk network traffic increases, Ethernet starts getting unmanageable.
- In the mid 80s, IBM introduces Token Ring. it helps with some of these problems, but... brings some of its own.
- Things go on like this for several years until they reach a fever pitch
- In the late 80s, this ATM thing trickles out of the telco industry, bringing with it the long-established practice from TDM networking of fixed-size packets, which enables incredibly simple switching hardware. ethernet switches have long existed as a concept at this point, but cost an unholy fortune; ATM proposes to replace Ethernet with a new all-switched network that also runs at 2.5 times the speed.
- a massive chunk of the corporate sphere gets unbelievably hype about this. magazines write editorials for almost ten years about how ATM is going to change everything.
- it never really happens... at least, at the desktop. offices do not put ATM cards in all their PCs and ATM switches in all their closets. this does not happen. everyone sits on their hands, incredibly reluctant to break compatibility with Ethernet, and this goes on for so long that ethernet switches come down in price, and both Full Duplex Ethernet and Fast Ethernet get established as standards, making ATM look both unnecessary and outdated. ATM is forgotten.
- ...except at the provider level, where it ends up being used to build MASSIVE nation-spanning networks for multiple mid- to high-tier internet and network transit providers, who retain it well into the 2010s, and in some cases, the 2020s. they're still trying to get rid of it.
you can't make this shit up
