Ethernet Pioneer Bob Metcalfe Takes Home Computing's Most Prestigious Prize
Today, computer networking pioneer Bob Metcalf has been recognized for the creation of Ethernet, receiving one of the highest honors of the computing world. MIT graduate Metcalfe has been named by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) as the winner of the 2022 A.M Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” Thanks to the generosity of Google, this prestigious award has a juicy cherry on top – a $1 million prize.
Where would we be without the invention, standardization and commercialization of Ethernet? Thankfully, we have no idea, as Bob Metcalfe came up with this still core and omnipresent networking standard back in 1973, while working as a computer scientist at the fabled Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
Ethernet’s proving ground was the aforementioned PARC, where Metcalfe worked with David Boggs, a co-inventor of Ethernet, to build a 100-node PARC Ethernet. This installation was replicated throughout Xerox to provide a corporate network.
Metcalfe left Xerox in 1979, but through continued work with the firm plus major tech players like DEC and Intel, he helped steer the IEEE 802 committee to establish a local area network (LAN) standard. In the same year, he set up 3Com Corporation to sell Ethernet hardware and software. IBM’s first PC models would use Ethernet networking, and the success of the PC would guarantee the place of Ethernet in personal computing.
Nowadays, mainstream Ethernet speeds are measured in Gigabits, and even Wi-Fi (Wireless Ethernet) has entered this scale of measure. There are approximately five billion internet users worldwide who rely on Ethernet technology for their entertainment, study, and even their livelihoods.
Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow and SVP of Google Research and AI, congratulated Metcalfe on his award, and thanked him for his “enduring vision that every computer needed to be networked.”
