6: Voices of Ethernet | A Conversation with Rich Seifert

Waves are still rippling from the splashes that Rich Seifert made over the course of his decades in creation and evolution of Ethernet. In 1979 and ’80, while he was with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Seifert worked alongside engineers from Intel and Xerox to cowrite, “The Ethernet, A Local Area Network. Data Link Layer and Physical Layer Specifications,” the seminal document which greatly informed the initial IEEE Project 802 standardization activities. He went on to play instrumental roles also in development of 10 Megabit per second (Mbps) Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet.

Along the way, Seifert was responsible for the architecture and design of a wide range of network products, as well as a lengthy list of books and papers that introduced or furthered all sorts of interesting ideas across and beyond the ecosystem—“ether-not,” for example, is Seifert’s term for technologies that fail to deliver Ethernet’s unique and differentiating combination of attributes.