It says it was inspired by Ethernet, and while modern Ethernet might have some significant differences of course, what were the differences between Chaosnet and the Ethernet of the time?
Chaosnet was inspired by the experimental 3 Mbits/s Ethernet in use at Xerox PARC at the time. Experimental Ethernet has a 8-bit node address; Chaosnet has 16 bits, of which 8 is network and another 8 is the node. The Chaosnet data rate is 4 Mbits/s.
On top of the hardware protocol, Chaosnet also defined the higher-level transport and session layer protocol. Applications are addressed by a name string rather than a port number; e.g. "TELNET" instead of 23. This protocol was retained when the NIC hardware was replaced with stock Ethernet.
On top of the hardware protocol, Chaosnet also defined the higher-level transport and session layer protocol. Applications are addressed by a name string rather than a port number; e.g. "TELNET" instead of 23. This protocol was retained when the NIC hardware was replaced with stock Ethernet.