ates at both 10-Mbps and 100-Mbps. The ability to link a wide range of computers using a vendor-neutral network technology is an essential feature for today's LAN managers. Most LANs must support a wide variety of computers purchased from different vendors, which requires a high degree of network interoperability of the sort that Ethernet provides.
             Ethernet was invented at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s by Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe. It was designed to support research on the "office of the future," which included one of the world's first personal workstations, the Xerox Alto. The first Ethernet system ran at approximately 3-Mbps and was known as "experimental Ethernet."
             Formal specifications for Ethernet were published in 1980 by a multi-vendor consortium that created the DEC-Intel-Xerox (DIX) standard. This effort turned the experimental Ethernet int
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