“Tickled pink”is Bob Metcalfe’s reaction to his newest distinction– the Association for Computing Equipment’s A. M. Turing Award for inventing and advertising Ethernet. The award was revealed today and will be presented at an event June 10 in San Francisco.With his trademark sense of humor, Metcalfe says, “It’s a huge surprise and a pleasure. I’ve received other awards in the previous so I’m familiar with the idea that I have a new commitment to behave myself and measure up to the standard of the award and be a good example based on that.”
The award brings a $1 million prize. “My spouse suggests I invest it on her,” Metcalfe quipped, prior to adding that he hasn’t exercised the details but will most likely put most of it into his household structure (after he fills up his boat with diesel fuel).
He states the award represents crucial recognition for the function of networking, which occupies a “little corner” of the wider field of computer science.Ethernet turns 50 years
old on May 22, and Metcalfe states he keeps in mind that day in 1973 really plainly.”I was sitting in Building 34 (at Xerox PARC), at a Selectric typewriter, typing a summary of my ideas on how networks must work, and after that I hard-drew the diagrams. I wrote the memo on the Orator ball on the Selectric, which was sans serif since I liked that font.”
David Boggs, the co-creator of Ethernet, passed away in 2015 and Metcalfe has fond memories of their collaboration. “He and I were the Bobbsey Twins. We were wonderfully complementary; I being the more articulate of the 2 and he being the more comprehensive oriented. Together we developed this thing, and I miss him. He was a good friend.”
Ethernet at 50
After co-inventing and working to standardize Ethernet, Metcalfe commercialized the innovation at 3Com, the business that he established in 1979.
“Ethernet is the fundamental technology of the internet, which supports more than five billion users and makes it possible for much of contemporary life,” states Jeff Dean, Google Senior Citizen Fellow and SVP of Google Research and AI. “Today, with an approximated seven billion ports around the globe, Ethernet is so common that we take it for given. It’s simple to forget that our interconnected world would not be the exact same if not for Bob Metcalfe’s invention and his long-lasting vision that every computer needed to be networked.”
Initial Ethernet ran at 2.94 mbps. Today, Gigabit Ethernet releases are widespread and 400Gig Ethernet is slowly getting momentum among hyperscalers, telcos, and other organizations that require ultra-high-speed backbones. In the lab and on the roadmap are 800Gbps Ethernet and even 1.6 Tbps Ethernet. Metcalfe says there’s no limit to how fast Ethernet can go– the next frontier is 1.6 T/bit Ethernet on a single Lambda.Hot on geothermal energy Metcalfe has actually used many hats during his career: innovator, business owner, investor, scholastic, and pundit. During the 1990s, he was publisher of InfoWorld(a Foundry publication)and composed a popular column.The 76-year-old says that taking on brand-new
obstacles is what has actually kept him engaged and encouraged:”I figured out that the fun part is at the steepest part of the learning curve.”Today, Metcalfe is a research affiliate in computational engineering at the Computer Science and Expert System Lab (CSAIL) at MIT.His focus is on modeling geothermic wells.
Metcalfe states eothermal energy has the prospective to … Source
