Designed to carry 9,600 The Rebirth of Competition bps data rather than voice, the typical price per port of a port selector was in the $300 range. IVD voice switches simply could not compete on price; worse, they also did not offer compelling feature advantages. So while almost every new PBX advertised data capability, very few ports were actually used for data. All of this did not deter investors, of course. Digital PBX companies were, for a time, hot stocks. But the stock market in the early 1980s was more conser- vative then that it became during a later boom. The venture capital business, on the other hand, was less risk-averse than the stock market and was always look- ing for a "story." While large companies largely dominated the first round of IVD PBXs, the early 1980s saw a new round of start-ups that emphasized a new variation on the theme. Although we take the concept of "local area network" for granted and even forget, at times, what the ubiquitous acronym LAN stands for, in those days the idea was new and hot. The first LAN, arguably, was Datapoint's ARC, which was in production in the late 1970s. But it was Ethernet that really created the industry. Xerox Corp. patented Ethernet in 1973; by 1980, Xerox, Digital Equipment Corp., and Intel Corp. had agreed on a specification, published it, and committed to its manufacture. Ethernet hardware began to hit the streets by 1982. While the earliest Ethernet boards-adapters plugged into the minicom- puters of the day-cost more than $2,000 apiece, the price plummeted after sev- eral semiconductor makers created Ethernet chips. These were soon followed by inexpensive terminal servers, which permitted some number of terminals to share an Ethernet connection. (Although we take desktop computers for granted today, the big move away from terminals was still several years off.) Soon this approach became even less costly, and more flexible, than the port selector. The IVD PBX was falling behind; LAN servers came to outsell both port selectors and IVD PBXs. IBM, it s