My manager David Redell represented Xerox. He complained bitterly that 10 megabits per second was needlessly fast (3 mbps was enough!) and it's true that it greatly slowed adoption - only super mini computers and above got full ethernet initially! However it was the right choice for analog repeaters and to enable large flat networks (few routers) and 10 mbps made ethernet a premium system for those who had the bucks, setting it up for eventual cost reduction (thinwire, 10BT) and long-term success!

Any other old heads in here with Token Ring exerience?

I only had to spend one year dealing with it, then next one running Ethernet everywhere and getting acoustic tile dandruff.

Ethernet was such a great change. Three cheers for open standards, standards bodies, and the people in those groups. Truly the unsung heroes of progress.

> The Ethernet spec was first drafted on this day in 1980 — DEC, Intel, and Xerox defined the standard several years before the internet existed

The Internet existed before 1980. It dates to 1969, in that there's a continuous history from the ARPANET to the modern Internet, even though NCP wasn't replaced by TCP/IP until 1982.