Bob Metcalfe Receives Computer Industry’s Highest Honor for Ethernet Creation
AUSTIN, Texas — Bob Metcalfe, professor emeritus in the Chandra Household Department of Electrical and Pc Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, was named the recipient of the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for the invention, standardization and commercialization of Ethernet.
The ACM A.M. Turing Award, generally called the “Nobel Prize of computing,” involves a $1 million prize, with fiscal support supplied by Google. The award is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundations of computing.
“It is risky to acknowledge an award for producing Ethernet, which turns 50 on May 22, 2023,” Metcalfe reported. “Over Ethernet’s 50 a long time, hundreds of people today have earned some claim of inventorship. Sign up for me in declaring to these individuals, ‘Thank you.’”
Prior to retiring from UT Austin in 2021, Metcalfe led innovation initiatives in the Cockrell Faculty of Engineering and throughout campus for a ten years. He is the founding director of the Texas Innovation Heart, which launched in 2011 to support faculty associates and learners deliver their scientific and engineering discoveries to industry. He envisioned encouraging Austin turn out to be a superior version of Silicon Valley.
“Bob has manufactured a number of vital contributions to the tech business. His invention of Ethernet revolutionized how everybody interacts with computers and each and every other,” explained Roger Bonnecaze, dean of the Cockrell Faculty of Engineering. “This prestigious award is really properly-deserved certainly!”
Through his time at UT, Metcalfe was a fixture as a speaker and adviser for entrepreneurial groups and activities throughout campus. He was a important portion of Longhorn Startup, a fall study course that provides pupils an option to listen to from business owners and then pitch their possess jobs. And he established a startup studio and salons in the Cockrell School to help professors and learners sharpen their startup suggestions.
In 1973, while a pc scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Study Center (PARC), Metcalfe circulated a now-well-known memo describing a “broadcast conversation network” for connecting some of the first individual personal computers, PARC’s Altos, in just a developing. The initially Ethernet ran at 2.94 megabits for every 2nd, which was about 10,000 instances as rapidly as the terminal networks it would swap.
Whilst Metcalfe’s initial style and design proposed employing this network around coaxial cable, the memo envisioned “communication more than an ether,” making the style and design adaptable to future improvements in media technological innovation together with legacy telephone twisted pair, optical fiber, radio (Wi-Fi), and even electrical power networks, to switch the coaxial cable as the “ether.” That memo laid the groundwork for what we now know nowadays as Ethernet.
Metcalfe’s Ethernet structure integrated insights from his experience with ALOHAnet, a pioneering computer networking system made at the University of Hawaii. Metcalfe recruited David Boggs, a co-inventor of Ethernet, to aid establish a 100-node PARC Ethernet. That initial Ethernet was then replicated inside of Xerox to proliferate a company world wide web.
In their seminal 1976 Communications of the ACM report, “Ethernet: Dispersed Packet Switching for Regional Computer Networks,” Metcalfe and Boggs described the design and style of Ethernet. Metcalfe then led a crew that formulated the 10 Mbps Ethernet to kind the basis of subsequent specifications.
“Ethernet was the plumbing up grade the world-wide-web necessary in the 1970s,” Metcalfe explained. “Ethernet enabled the transition from Arpanet, a community of time-shared pcs servicing dumb terminals, to an internetwork of particular desktops, their servers, and routers.”
These days, Ethernet is the major conduit of wired community communications close to the globe, handling data charges from 10 Mbps to 400 Gbps, with 800 Gbps and 1.6 Tbps technologies emerging. Ethernet has also become an tremendous market place, with earnings from Ethernet switches by yourself exceeding $30 billion in 2021, in accordance to the Global Info Company. Study much more about Metcalfe and his perform on Ethernet.