Robert Metcalfe

Robert "Bob" Metcalfe was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 7, 1946. He is a US electrical engineer, co-inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com, stated Metcalfe's Law. Since 2006 he has been a principal member of the venture capital company Polaris Venture Partners.

Biography

Since he was little, he had an avid interest in technology, which led him to develop the most popular network standard in the world, Ethernet, and to the invention of Wi-Fi. He also founded the company 3Com and formulated Metcalfe's Law.

Metcalfe received his undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), graduating in 1969 with Bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Business Administration (the latter from MIT's Sloan School of Management). Just a year later, he earned an M.A. in Applied Mathematics from the prestigious Harvard University, finishing his studies in 1973 with a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a thesis on packet switching written while working on the MIT MAC Project.

While completing his doctorate, 1972 Metcalfe began working for Xerox at the Palo Alto Development Center (Xerox PARC), where he met David R. Boggs. Metcalfe and Boggs invented what became known as Ethernet, the local area technology used today to connect millions of computers around the world.

Scheme of a valid ethernet network

In 1979, Metcalfe left Xerox to found 3Com in Santa Clara, California. From 3Com, Metcalfe worked to promote connectivity between PCs using Ethernet technology. Despite failing to get IBM involved, Metcalfe got support from DEC, Xerox, and Intel, and managed to establish Ethernet as the most popular standard in LAN network connectivity.

In 1980 he received the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for his work developing local area networks, specifically Ethernet.

In 1990, he left 3Com after a dispute with the board of directors. During that time, he managed to make his company one of the companies that appear on the Fortune 500 list and a benchmark in the area of connectivity.

To this day, Metcalfe is still present in the computer market, both through his essays and talks, most notably for Pop!Tech, a technology executive conference he co-founded in 1997.

It can also be said that in 1993 he began a new financial adventure as a principal member of the company Polaris Venture Partners.

In November 2010, Metcalfe was selected to lead innovation initiatives at the University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering. He began naming him in January 2011.

Metcalfe was a keynote speaker at the 2016 Congress of Future Science and Technology Leaders and in 2019 presented the Bernard Price Memorial Lecture in South Africa.

Some of the first ethernet connectors, signed by Metcalfe.

Awards and recognitions

In 1996, Metcalfe received the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Medal of Honor for his "exemplary and sustained leadership in the development, standardization and commercialization of Ethernet".

In 1997, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for the development of Ethernet.

Metcalfe received the National Medal of Technology from President Bush at the White House in a ceremony on March 14, 2003, "for leading the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet", having been a selector for this tribute in 2003

In May 2007, Metcalfe, along with 17 others, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio for their work with Ethernet technology.

In October 2008, Metcalfe received the Computer History Museum's Fellow Award "for his seminal contributions to the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet".

Failed Predictions

Aside from his many accomplishments, Bob Metcalfe is also known for his numerous failed predictions.

The most famous was in 1995. In it, Metcalfe stated that the Internet would suffer a catastrophic collapse in the next few years. After this he promised to eat his words if this were not so. Well, during his speech in 1997 at the Sixth International Conference on the World Wide Web, he took a note from the news column where his prediction was, and after mixing it with a liquid, he decided to eat it directly. This happened after he tried to eat your words in a big cake. But his audience protested and it was they who ate the exquisite cake.

During an event where he spoke about predictions at the Eighth International Conference on the World Wide Web, in 1999, a participant asked: What's the bet? Metcalfe replied that this time he was not betting as he was not willing to eat another column.

Metcalfe was a strong critic of open source software, and Linux in particular, predicting that the latter would be swept away after Microsoft released Windows 2000:

The ideology of the open-source movement is a utopia [... that] reminds me of communism. [...] Linux [is like] an organic software cultivated in utopia by spiritists [...] When they bring organic fruit to the market, an extra is paid for small apples with open sores - the Open Plague Movement. When [Windows 2000] arrives, goodbye Linux.

He later retracted it somewhat, saying in a column two weeks later:

I am ashamed of myself for not resisting the temptation of throwing low blows in my column... I shouldn't have fueled the fire by joking about the Open Code initiative.

He predicted that wireless networks would die out by the mid-1990s:

After the wireless mobile bubble bursts this year, we will re-set fibers... the bathrooms remain predominantly of pipes. More or less for the same reason, computers will remain wired.

In 2006 he predicted that Windows and Linux would not be able to handle video:

Bob Metcalfe recently granted a television interview in which he stated that the current operating systems (Windows and Linux) are outdated cacharros that will not be able to properly manage the arrival of the "video internet" and suggests that it is necessary to develop new operating systems to be imposed in a few years.

Posts

• "Packet Communication", MIT Project MAC Technical Report MAC TR-114, December 1973 (A reprinted version of Harvard Dissertation Metcalfe). (in English)
• "Zen and the Art of Selling", Technology Review, May/June 1992