Bob Metcalfe
loreThe inventor of Ethernet, at Xerox PARC in 1973, and recipient of the 2022 Turing Award for its invention, standardization and commercialization.
The 1973 memo described a broadcast communication network for connecting PARC's Alto computers, and the first Ethernet ran at 2.94 Mbps - roughly ten thousand times faster than the terminal networks it replaced. The word that mattered was in the name: Metcalfe wrote of communication over an ether, which left the medium unspecified and is why the same design later survived twisted pair, fibre and radio. David Boggs, who died in 2022, co-invented it and co-authored the 1976 paper. The third word in the citation is the one engineers skip: after leaving Xerox, Metcalfe drove DEC, Intel and Xerox to a shared 10 Mbps specification rather than keeping it.
Also known as: robert metcalfe, robert m. metcalfe
Sources
- ACM A.M. Turing Award - Robert Metcalfe, 2022 laureate profile
- ACM press release, March 2023: Turing Award honours Bob Metcalfe for Ethernet
- IEEE Engineering and Technology History Wiki on Ethernet: on 22 May 1973 Metcalfe presented the first schematic and coined the term, and the system first functioned on 11 November 1973