[Thomas Duvrai]

[Matt Geier] “Thunderbolt is very much like firewire. It’s going to be a local storage bus. It will also be more since it can support peripherals like a PCIE bus. “

Hi Matt, you are right: Thunderbolt is very much like FireWire… and FireWire is very much like Ethernet. All three are all true peer to peer networks without hosts or slaves (unlike usb). That’s why using FW for networking is almost as easy as using Ethernet, just daisy-chain your macs together, like you would do with FW drives, or use a FW hub:

In fact Ethernet over Firewire has been possible in Mac OS since I don’t know when, and Microsoft added it as a feature in an XP service pack. It was a hot topic and a well known secret back in the time when people had macs with 400Mbps firewire, and only 100Mbps Ethernet ports.

A picture says a thousand words:

So, in my opinon we could be very close to TB networking, in theory … Oh wait, Apple just released their new TB display with an ethernet port on it’s back 🙂