Ethernet pioneer Bob Metcalfe helped build an industry based on an ethernet LAN developed at Xerox Parc. Now, he is a Turing Award winner.
The high-tech and venture capital (VC) communities continue to generate charismatic leaders, but few can compete with Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet at Xerox Parc and cofounder of local-area networking pioneer 3Com in the 1970s.
While still an actively developed technology, Ethernet is overshadowed now by closely-related Internet and totally-unrelated Ethercoin technologies. But it seeded a new world of connectivity.
[Follow along with VB’s ongoing Nvidia GTC 2022 coverage »]
Metcalfe’s spirited efforts to push forward high-tech and VC innovations still bear fruit. Today, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) named Metcalfe as recipient for the 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award for the invention, standardization and commercialization of Ethernet.
Metcalfe walked with no little swagger from his grade school days, when he told a teacher he would go to MIT — which he did — to his days at fabled Xerox Parc, where he named Ethernet after the imagined substance Newton used to describe a transmission medium for the propagation of electromagnetic forces. Metcalfe showed fierceness and flair in the LAN battles that pitted 3Com against the likes of IBM, Wang, Ungermann-Bass, Interlan and many others.
Metcalf followed his time at 3Com with forays into publishing — he was CEO, publisher and pundit for InfoWorld Magazine — and VC community building in Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin. These days he is an emeritus professor at The University of Texas at Austin and a researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
He spoke with VentureBeat just ahead of formally accepting the Turing Award. (Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
VentureBeat: Your work along David Boggs on Ethernet took some cues from Norm Abramson’s ALOHANet, forged some performance enhancements and met some skepticism there at Xerox Parc.
