I met Al Marshall, inventor of Token Ring Networking, some 20 years after. I had never heard of him until the guys I was working with ran into him at NetWorld, and we went to dinner. So he wasn’t one of my heroes. I also was more a fan of non-deterministic Ethernet.
We went to dinner and the conversation started around the Buzz at the show: Shell Oil was deploying a 500 megabit network in the Dallas Area. Like a half hour and a dozen topics later, Al just blurts out “they need that bandwidth to ship around the imaging data they collect from their surveys”. It came across like he had two brains, one that was engaged in the conversation, and the other figuring out what in the hell are these guys doing with all that bandwidth. Which was a lot in the day of 14.4k modems and T1 lines. After dinner when we parted ways with Al, our conversation was all about how we thought his brain might work.
We went to dinner and the conversation started around the Buzz at the show: Shell Oil was deploying a 500 megabit network in the Dallas Area. Like a half hour and a dozen topics later, Al just blurts out “they need that bandwidth to ship around the imaging data they collect from their surveys”. It came across like he had two brains, one that was engaged in the conversation, and the other figuring out what in the hell are these guys doing with all that bandwidth. Which was a lot in the day of 14.4k modems and T1 lines. After dinner when we parted ways with Al, our conversation was all about how we thought his brain might work.