Early life
Robert Metcalfe was born in 1946 in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a test technician who specialized in gyroscopes. His mother was a homemaker, but later became the secretary at Bay Shore High School. In 1964, Metcalfe graduated from Bay Shore High School to join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT Class of 1968. He finally graduated from MIT in 1969 with two Scientiæ Baccalaureus, S.B. degrees, one in electrical engineering and the other in industrial management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He then went to Harvard for graduate school, earning his Master of Science, M.S. in applied mathematics in 1970 and his Doctor of Philosophy, PhD in computer science (applied mathematics) in 1973.Career
While pursuing a doctorate in computer science, Metcalfe took a job with MIT's Project MAC after Harvard refused to let him be responsible for connecting the school to the brand-new ARPAnet. At MAC, Metcalfe was responsible for building some of the hardware that would link MIT's minicomputers with the ARPAnet. ARPAnet was initially the topic of his doctoral dissertation, but the first version was not accepted. His inspiration for a new dissertation came while working at Xerox PARC, where he read a paper about the ALOHAnet, ALOHA network at the University of Hawaii. He identified and fixed some of the bugs in the AlohaNet model and made his analysis part of a revised thesis, which finally earned him his Harvard PhD in 1973. Metcalfe was working at PARC in 1973 when he and David Boggs invented Ethernet, initially a standard for connecting computers over short distances. Metcalfe identifies the day Ethernet was born as May 22, 1973, the day he circulated a memo titled "Alto Ethernet" which contained a rough schematic of how it would work. "That is the first time Ethernet appears as a word, as does the idea of using coax as electromagnetic aether, ether, where the participating stations, like in AlohaNet or ARPAnet, would inject their packets of data, they'd travel around at megabits per second, there would be collisions, and retransmissions, and back-off," Metcalfe explained. Boggs identifies another date as the birth of Ethernet: November 11, 1973, the first day the system actually functioned. In 1979, Metcalfe departed PARC and co-founded 3Com, a manufacturer of local area network, computer networking equipment, in his Palo Alto apartment. In 1980 he received the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, Grace Hopper Award for his contributions to the development of local networks, specifically Ethernet. In 1990, in a boardroom skirmish, the 3Com board of directors chose Éric Benhamou to succeed Bill Krause as CEO of the networking company instead of Metcalfe. Metcalfe left 3Com and began a 10-year stint as a publisher and pundit, writing anAwards
In 1996, Metcalfe was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor for "exemplary and sustained leadership in the development, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet." In 1997, he was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for the development of the Ethernet. In 2003 he received the Marconi Award for "For inventing the Ethernet and promulgating his Law of network utility based on the square of the nodeWeb predictions
Metcalfe predicted in 1995 that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass. He had tried to eat his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."Selected publications
* "Packet Communication", MIT Project MAC Technical Report MAC TR-114, December 1973 (a recast version of Metcalfe's Harvard dissertation) * "Zen and the Art of Selling", Technology Review, May/June 1992References
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