Bob Metcalfe

Ethernet

He wrote his doctoral thesis about ARPANET, but his work was rejected, because it was “not theoretical enough”. ("They let me go into this thing and they gunned me. I'm even willing to stipulate that it wasn't very good. But I'd still justify my anger at those bastards for letting me fail. Had they been doing better jobs as professors, they never would have allowed that to happen. But I hated Harvard and Harvard hated me. It was a class thing from the start.")

He had already accepted a job at Xerox PARC when he called his new boss Bob Taylor to tell him about the problem with his doctoral thesis, and Taylor’s answer surprised Metcalfe. ("Come on anyway! Finish it up out here.")

Just like he will never forgive Harvard, Bob Taylor will always be his hero.("There's nothing Bob Taylor can do wrong.")

In 1972 he visited his friend Steve Crocker in Washington where he couldn’t go to sleep and found a book about the ALOHANET ("As I'm reading it, not only do I understand it, but I disagree with it")

He dealt with ALOHANET, improved its design and eventually got his Harvard Ph.D.

In 1973 he was supposed to develop a network technology to connect the computers from Xerox to a laser printer.

Therefore he revised his version of ALOHANET – he used cables instead of radio technology, made some adjustments and a new technology called Ethernet was born

On May 22nd 1973 he sent the first memo called „Alto Ethernet“, outlining the basic data of Ethernet.

In one of his columns he predicted a complete collapse of the internet by 1996 ("It will go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.")

History proved that he was wrong, so he put his column in a mixer in front of an audience, added a little water and ate the self-made mush.

He invented the expression “ping”. ("Let me ping that computer and see if it's running.")

Bob Metcalfe

born in 1946 in Brooklyn

Studied at MIT and in Harvard

Xerox Parc, 3com, Infoworld