ETHERNET PIONEER & FOUNDER, BOB METCALFE ...

[Michael Grove]

... Wins Turing Award

The American researcher was recognized for his central role in inventing, standardizing and commercializing the ubiquitous networking technology.

Bob Metcalfe has always been a believer in the power of networking. In the 1980s and 1990s he helped popularize the idea that a network’s value grows rapidly with the number of users, a precept now known as Metcalfe’s law.

Today, with the internet ubiquitous, he thinks on a

grander scale. “The most important new fact about

the human condition is that we are now suddenly

connected,” he said.

So Metcalfe has now been named the winner of the A.M. Turing Award, an annual prize considered the highest honor in computer science, for his part in ushering in our hyperconnected age. Fifty years ago, Metcalfe helped invent ETHERNET, the local networking technology that links personal computers around the world to the global internet. He also played a central role in standardizing and commercializing his invention.

“Bob is one of the people who lived on both sides. He could see the big picture,” said Steve Crocker, a computer networking pioneer who worked with Metcalfe on a precursor to the internet known as Arpanet.

 

[Michael Grove]

[IT] was of course as a result of my involvement with the National Physical Laboratory, here in the UK, whose own implementation of Ethernet as the backbone of a global [ARPA]network, in collaboration with the USA • following on from the RADLAB initiative during the WWII • which subsequently underpinned the development of that which was first publicly demonstrated at the Didacta '84 Event, where Apple first launched the Mac 128K in Europe.

[Michael Grove]

All of which I have been reminded of, by a recent completely out of the blue, Peter Rycraft blast from the past message! which has reminded me of Peter's significant role in the creation of a Computer Networking capability over mains electricity installations that became the precursor to my own @home Ethernet / Virgin 5G wifi network for the last three years or more, which has facilitated our high-speed access to the internet, whilst sitting on our bench at the bottom of the garden.

[gregory shephard]

Thank you Michael. Your insights I hold above all others. I so enjoy reading your biographical excerpts and trust these will be organized into a book one day soon.