Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet Pioneer, Wins Turing Award
Bob Metcalfe has always been a believer in the power of networking. In the 1980s and 1990s he helped popularize the idea that a network’s value grows rapidly with the number of users, a precept now known as Metcalfe’s law. Today, with the internet ubiquitous, he thinks on a grander scale. “The most important new fact about the human condition is that we are now suddenly connected,” he said.
Today Metcalfe was named the winner of the A.M. Turing Award, an annual prize considered the highest honor in computer science, for his part in ushering in our hyperconnected age. Fifty years ago, Metcalfe helped invent Ethernet, the local networking technology that links personal computers around the world to the global internet. He also played a central role in standardizing and commercializing his invention.
“Bob is one of the people who lived on both sides. He could see the big picture,” said Steve Crocker, a computer networking pioneer who worked with Metcalfe on a precursor to the internet known as Arpanet.
