Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, wins Turing Award

Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, won the Turing Award. Nice dedication to this technology that will soon be 50 years old.

Even if you are not currently connected via an Ethernet cable to read this article, there must be a point in your connection chain somewhere, at some time, where you use this technology to access the Internet. And you have Bob Metcalfe and the late David Boggs to thank for that. Indeed, together, working at the very prestigious Xerox Research Institute in Palo Alto, better known as Xerox PARC, they developed Ethernet and laid the foundations for a true networking revolution. Yesterday, Bob Metcalfe received the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Turing Award, an award often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Computing.”

Bob Metcalfe, one of the inventors of Ethernet, received the Turing Award.

Thanks to funding from Google, the prize is now close to $1 million, another milestone in the already eventful and legendary life of Bob Metcalfe. After leaving PARC Xerox, he founded 3com, the network equipment company that really democratized Ethernet. “To accept an award for the development of Ethernet, which turns 50 on May 22, 2023, is dangerous,” said Bob Metcalfe of the University of Texas, where he is now a professor emeritus. “Over the nearly 50 years that Ethernet has existed, hundreds of people have received a small fraction of this award. Join me and say “Thank you”to these people.”

Nice dedication to this technology that will soon be 50 years old.

Despite the high status of cable technology, Bob Metcalfe told The New York Times that he originally envisioned something more like the Wi-Fi we know today. “We wanted to do something wireless,” he explained, “but we could never completely get rid of cables. It would be too slow and too expensive.”The result of the work is the Ethernet that we all know and whose virtues we so often praise – reliability and speed, in particular! -. THANK YOU!