Computing networking inventor, Bob Metcalfe has been awarded the industry’s most prestigious prize for inventing the Ethernet on Wednesday.
Ethernet, half a century later, remains the foundation of the internet.
Ethernet is the industry standard for connecting everything from servers in data centres to telecommunications networks.
The Association for Computing Machinery bestowed its 2022 Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing, on Metcalfe, 76, for the “invention, standardization, and commercialization” of Ethernet.
It is backed by Alphabet Inc’s Google and comes with a $1 million prize.
When Metcalfe, who went on to co-found computing network equipment maker 3Com, was asked to connect the office printer, he invented Ethernet.
He worked at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s, which invented the personal computer as well as the laser printer.
Metcalfe devised a networking strategy that excelled at connecting them in a way that could expand smoothly as the number of computers in the network increased – paving the way for the internet.
Metcalfe received his bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 and his doctorate in computer science from Harvard in 1973.