Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe wins the Turing Award, the ‘Nobel Prize of computing’

Even in case you’re not plugging an Ethernet cable into the wall, someplace alongside the chain you are still counting on that expertise to get on-line. You’ve acquired Bob Metcalfe and the late David Boggs to thank for that. Together at Xerox’s famend Palo Alto Research Institute (higher referred to as Xerox PARC), the pair developed Ethernet and set the stage for a networking revolution. Yesterday, Metcalfe obtained the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award, which is usually pegged the “Nobel Prize of computing.”

Thanks to funding from Google, that prize is now value $1 million, and it is yet one more spotlight for Metcalfe’s storied profession. After leaving Xerox PARC, he based 3com, a networking tools firm that introduced Ethernet to the mainstream. “It is dangerous to accept an award for developing Ethernet, which turns 50 on May 22, 2023,” Metcalfe instructed the University of Texas, the place he now serves as a professor emeritus. “Over Ethernet’s 50 years, hundreds of people have earned some claim of inventorship. Join me in saying to these folks, ‘Thank you.’”

Despite its notoriety as a cable expertise, Metcalfe instructed the New York Times that he initially envisioned it to be extra like the Wi-Fi we all know right now. “We wanted to make it wireless,” he mentioned. “But we couldn’t have zero wires. It would have been too slow and too expensive.”

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