Stefan Mileschin

Bob Metcalfe created the tech 50 years ago

Bob Metcalfe has finally been given a Turing Award for inventing Ethernet networking more than 50 years ago.

Metcalfe played a central role in standardising and commercialising his invention.

When working at Harvard University for graduate school, the US Department of Defense was just ramping up its investment in Arpanet. Metcalfe proposed building an interface connecting the network to Harvard’s mainframe computer, but the university turned him down. He made the same proposal at MIT, where he was hired as a researcher while still a Harvard graduate student.

However, when he presented a thesis describing the work to his dissertation committee in 1972, he failed his defence because the topic wasn’t theoretical enough.

By then Metcalfe had already accepted a job at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in California. The lab’s director, Bob Taylor, told him to come anyway and finish his dissertation in Palo Alto. Once there, Metcalfe started building another Arpanet interface for a new PARC computer while searching for a theoretical topic to make Harvard go away.

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