Robert Metcalfe Biography

Melancton, Robert Bob Metcalfe is an American electrical engineer who co-invented Ethernet, created 3Com, and came up with Metcalfe's Law. He joined Polaris Venture Partners as a general partner in January 2006. He has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of Innovation at The University of Texas in Austin since January 2011. After Harvard declined to allow him to be in charge of linking the school to the brand-new ARPAnet while earning a Ph.D. in computer science, Metcalfe took a position with MIT's Project MAC. Metcalfe was in charge of part of the hardware that connected MIT's minicomputers to the ARPAnet at MIT's Project MAC. Metcalfe was so taken by ARPAnet that he decided to write his Ph.D. dissertation on it. The initial draught was rejected. While working at Xerox PARC, he was inspired to write a fresh dissertation after reading a paper about the University of Hawaii's ALOHA network. He found and rectified some of the problems in the AlohaNet model, and included his findings in a revised thesis that led to his Harvard Ph.D. in 1973. Metcalfe and David Boggs devised Ethernet, a standard for linking computers over short distances while working at Xerox PARC in 1973. The day Ethernet was born, according to Metcalfe, was May 22, 1973, when he distributed a document named Alto Ethernet, which included a crude graphic of how it would function. That is the first time Ethernet comes as a word, as is the concept of utilizing coax as ether, in which the participating stations, such as in AlohaNet or ARPAnet, would inject their data packets, travel at megabits per second, have collisions, retransmissions, and back-off, Metcalfe stated. According to Boggs, another date marks the beginning of Ethernet: November 11, 1973, the first day the system was operational.

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