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Proteon - token ring, and the road not taken
A serious alternative to Ethernet, built by people who thought deterministic access mattered more than simplicity.
Proteon, of Westborough, Massachusetts, built token-ring networking equipment and routers through the period when the local-area contest was still genuinely open. Token passing gives a network a property Ethernet does not: a bounded worst-case wait, because a station transmits only when it holds the token.
Proteon was founded in Westborough, Massachusetts in 1972 by Howard Salwen, as a communications consulting firm rather than a manufacturer. It became one because of a contract: in early 1979 MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science paid it a hundred thousand dollars to build the second version of their token ring Local Network Interface, on the reasoning that buying would be faster than building. It took until June 1981 to deliver working boards, which is a useful correction to how these stories are usually told.
What came out of that was ProNET-10, a ten megabit token-passing network shipped in June 1981 - the first commercial Token Ring products, years before IBM announced its own in the mid-1980s. The company then did something more consequential and less remembered: in 1986 it shipped the p4200, the first commercially available multiprotocol router, built on the MIT multiprotocol router using code written by Noel Chiappa. And it produced OSPF, the link-state protocol that is still the interior routing protocol running inside a large share of enterprise networks today.
None of that saved it, and the numbers say why. In 1990 IBM held 57.7 per cent of the four megabit Token Ring adapter market and 92.6 per cent of the sixteen megabit market, leaving Proteon and Madge - the two leading independents - about ten per cent each. Being second to IBM in a market IBM defined is not a position, it is a waiting room. The 1987 results show the pressure directly: 22.3 million dollars of sales, up fifteen per cent, against a loss of 5.7 million - a third of everything the venture investors had put in.
It went defunct in 1998 and was relaunched as OpenROUTE Networks, then passed through Netrix, NX Networks and NSGDatacom. The reading worth keeping is about which inventions survive their inventors. Proteon's hardware is gone completely and its protocol is in production on hundreds of thousands of devices, because a specification can be implemented by anyone while a product has to be bought from you.
- Proteon - Westborough, Massachusetts computer network equipment vendor
- Proteon: founded 1972 by Howard Salwen as a communications consulting firm, Westborough Massachusetts; first commercial Token Ring products with MIT, the p4200 multiprotocol router in 1986 based on MIT code by Noel Chiappa, and the OSPF routing protocol; defunct 1998, relaunched as OpenROUTE Networks
- History of Computer Communications on Proteon: the 1979 MIT Laboratory for Computer Science contract of 100,000 dollars for version 2 of the token ring Local Network Interface, delivered June 1981; 1987 sales of 22.3 million dollars with a 5.7 million dollar loss equal to a third of total venture investment
- Sponsors, Communities and Standards: Ethernet vs Token Ring in the Local Area Networking Business - IBM held 57.7 per cent of the 4 Mbps and 92.6 per cent of the 16 Mbps Token Ring adapter market in 1990, leaving Proteon and Madge with about 10 per cent each