40 ms·

Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

858 points by robbiet480 4y ago

theharrychen 4y ago
How did he not get this earlier?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Exactly. He really should have.
- tobylane 4y ago
  There’s a lot of inventions to award people for. Some of the other recipients look overdue by the time it came to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award
  - OJFord 4y ago
    It coming to Metcalfe for Ethernet 7 years after to Berners-Lee for the WWW is amusing though.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Indeed, the one would not have existed without the other.
    - js8 4y ago
      Perhaps they are giving it by OSI layers.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        That's very funny :)
- williamDafoe 4y ago
  ACM awards are dominated by the theory community. A lot of theoreticians with NO impact on the world have awards. Metcalfe was one of a dozen people who co-invented Ethernet and does not fit the historians "Great man" theory where history is decided by a few "Great Men" who went a different direction at a critical moment ... Ethernet's success is only 25% due to him. For example, in 1979 at UIUC a grad student built 230kbps S-100 cards using rs232 chips and I wrote the Z-80 csma/cd drivers (as a high school student) so it was not rocket science. So there was reluctance to give him an award for something he didn't pioneer all alone.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Well-deserved!
jacquesm 4y ago
Well deserved. I remember dealing with a whole raft of other networking technologies and Ethernet stood head-and-shoulders above anything else available at the time. One thing that is not well appreciated today is how power efficient Ethernet was, even on launch in the coax era. Other network technologies (Token Ring as embodied by IBMs network cards, for instance) consumed power like there was no tomorrow. Leading to someone quipping renaming it to 'smoking thing'. As the price came down (around the NE1000/2000 and 3C509 era) it suddenly was everywhere and economies of scale wiped out the competition until WiFi came along. But even today - and as I'm writing this on my ethernet connected laptop - I prefer wired networks to wireless ones. They seem more reliable to me and throughput is constant rather than spotty, which weighs heavier to me than convenience. So thank you Bob Metcalfe, I actually think this award is a bit late. Anybody remember Don Becker?
- eointierney 4y ago
  Never met Don Becker but as it was the Beowulf project that got me interested in GNU/Linux he is synonymous with ethernet drivers
- robin_reala 4y ago
  I had no idea that Token Ring was inefficient with power, but it certainly had a bunch of other problems. Biggest (at least on PCs) was its inability to recover from a cable being unplugged without resetting a bunch of the system, and the type-1 token ring cables win the award for being the most needlessly bulky,[1] even if the connectors had a plug-into-each-other party trick. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_fasteners#/media/File:IBM_hermaphroditic_connector.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_faste...
- lunfard000 4y ago
  Sure, years ago. But today Ethernet is just as scammy as everyone else, we've been stuck at 1 Gbps on consumer grade hardware for more than 15 years. There are claims (unverified ofc) about their executives boasting about their stupid margins. 1 Gb switch is like 10-20 euros meanwhile 2.5 Gbps is like over 100...
agomez314 4y ago
How is he only getting this award now?
- williamDafoe 4y ago
  ACM Turing award committee has its head up it's ass? Seriously 25% of winners have NO impact on the field ... Metcalfe was controversial because Alohanet from university of Hawaii pioneered the idea and Metcalfe was seen as writing a nice proof in CACM of the 1/e capacity breakdown theorem and popularizing an already extant technology. He did not build it alone Chuck Thacker probably built most of it but didn't have a PhD! Oh the horror! He should not have gotten it now - either give it sooner or not at all - and he should not be the only one getting it!
hoseja 4y ago
What's the killer feature that differentiates Ethernet from other phy protocols?
- roganp 4y ago
  Packet collision detection vs. collision avoidance
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The fact that it allowed for all kinds of topologies, and that it served as a bus (shared medium, hence the name 'Ether') rather than a point-to-point link is what I think made the biggest difference. Of course now that we all use switched links they are point-to-point again but an ethernet 'hub' gave you the same effect as a bus with all devices seeing all of the traffic. This made efficient broadcast protocols possible and also allowed for a historical - but interesting - trick: the screw-on taps that you could place on a single coaxial cable running down a department giving instant access without pulling another cable. Zero network configuration required, just get the tap in place and assign a new address. DHCP later took care of that need as well. This was fraught with problems, for instance a single transceiver going haywire could make a whole segment unusable and good luck finding the culprit. But compared to the competition it absolutely rocked.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    for years i was carrying around an ethernet splitter that would allow me to connect two devices into one ethernet port. i last used it some 10 years ago in a place without wifi
    - asimpletune 4y ago
      Yeah, it’s a very cool trick that surprises a lot of people when they learn that only half the wires are used.
pedrovhb 4y ago
Ah, the best and most readily available source of makeshift jumper wires. Truly an amazing contribution even in ways it wasn't quite designed to be :)
lispython 4y ago
A veritable hero of our times boasts a mere 688 followers on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/RobertMMetcalfe https://twitter.com/RobertMMetcalfe (as of the dispatch of this message).
- jack_riminton 4y ago
  I there must be another internet law which states that the best twitter accounts have around this number
- OJFord 4y ago
  If he was tweeting anecdotes, or still working (seems he might be?) and tweeting about it it'd probably be a lot more - but it's mostly US basketball (and other sports/personal stuff) by the looks of it, so however veritable a hero it's just not interesting to the same audience (or at least, for the same reason, of course some of us will be basketball fans) - and probably if you're big into 'basketball Twitter' he's ~'nobody'.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  It's more a personal account that's 1 year old which opens with a tweet on cancel culture followed by his political leanings, cryptocurrency posts, and an overwhelming amount of basketball stats. It does have the occasional post about his involvement in geothermal energy though but beyond that following the account isn't going to get you any content he's known and respected for.
Sporktacular 4y ago
Ethernet was always inefficient, with a crazy amount of unused legacy space reserved in an unnecessarily large header. CSMA/CD for contention was one of the ugliest medium access solutions imaginable. The coax implementation needing termination plugs was also ugly. Its advantage was cost, having had no license fees, making it suited to consumer/commercial applications driving economies of scale. It's the VHS of datacomms. It's evolved, thankfully, but it remains an ugly, inefficient standard that only has life because of its legacy. And it's been increasingly jimmied into professional, carrier applications for which it was never intended and where far superior, though more expensive solutions already existed. That's not to say its creators don't deserve credit. It did its job well enough for its early days. But that's why this award comes too late. Because now Ethernet is the bloated, inelegant dinosaur we've built an ecosystem around, but to admire it is to forget the competitors it drove to extinction along the way.
- nine_k 4y ago
  What are some superior competing standards, and could they be implemented in a royalty-free way?
  - WeylandYutani 4y ago
    If they went extinct they were not superior.
    - asah 4y ago
      the best tech doesn't always win, and in fact the "best" tech is typically promoted by people who focus more on the tech and less on go-to-market and competitive strategy. And thus, the "best" tech often loses to the tech that (for example) is better packaged or promoted. Python is a nice example: inelegant language with many deep flaws, but easy syntax and "batteries included" won the day.
    - eddieroger 4y ago
      Betamax was superior to VHS, and it went the way of the dinosaur. Sometimes better means more expensive, and that's not always the popular choice. It wasn't the better survivor, but it was the better format. First to market, higher res, smaller tape, longer life, still lost. But don't take my word for it. https://kodakdigitizing.com/blogs/news/what-is-the-difference-between-betamax-and-vhs https://kodakdigitizing.com/blogs/news/what-is-the-differenc...
caseysoftware 4y ago
Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said "I made it up." Me: .. what? Him: I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more. Me: .. what? Him: If I could convince someone to buy 4 instead of 2, that was great. So I told them buying more made each of them more valuable. It was mind blowing because so many other things were built on that "law" that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have proven out "more nodes are more valuable" but that's where it started. He also tells a story about declining a job with Steve Jobs to start 3Com and Steve later coming to his wedding. He also shared a scan of his original pitch deck for 3Com which was a set of transparencies because Powerpoint hadn't been invented yet. I think I kept a copy of it..
- caseysoftware 4y ago
  Btw, when I say "an active member of the Austin startup community" - I mean that seriously. Not only did he teach a class on startups at the University of Texas but regularly came to a coffee meetup for years, attended Startup Weekend demo time, came to Techstars Demo Day, and was generally present. I even got to do the Twilio 5 Minute Demo for one of his classes (circa 2012). It was always cool to have someone who shaped our industry just hanging out and chatting with people.
  - mbajkowski 4y ago
    Absolutely correct. Chatted with him several times circa 2015 to 2016 when working out of Capital Factory in Austin. He was present for all sorts of event such as mentor hours, startup pitches, etc. Funnily enough, he would give you a very stern look if he thought you were taking him for a ride. Have not been there recently as as much as I would like, but I imagine he is still around to be found.
    - 4y ago
wistlo 4y ago
The archetypal "good enough" solution: Instead of preventing collisions, tolerating and managing them. I think of Ethernet often when assessing how close to perfection I need to get in my work.
- zokier 4y ago
  It is also lesson of doing something now and rewriting it later. For example no modern ethernet network uses cd/csma anymore and it was pretty iconic part of original ethernet. Overall ethernet on physical layer has seen quite an evolution from coax and vampire taps, to twisted pair and hubs, to switched networks, and nowdays wireless, single-pair, optical, and virtual networks
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I remember when hubs were still common; I don't know if any have been made for decades. Even bargain basement switches are switched now, and often even have spanning tree and other 'previously enterprise' features.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      Hubs max out at 100Mbps. Everybody today is using Gigabit, so they're effectively extinct. Even at 100Mbps hubs were on the way out. They were pretty hacky. The hardware had two different hubs internally and joined them together with a bit of logic, but that logic was somewhat failure prone and it was common to have 10/100 hubs where the 10 clients couldn't talk with the 100 clients and vice versa. Autodetection was at best a roll of the dice so most people wired down their port settings instead. Everybody hated them and switches got cheap real fast so they didn't last very long. The only thing they were good for was network diagnostics.
      - EricE 4y ago
        > The only thing they were good for was network diagnostics. Indeed - I still have a couple that I used for packet sniffing. Thankfully managed switches or switches smart enough to support port mirroring are inexpensive and thus fairly ubiquitous now.
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
Reading the original ethernet paper was one of my favorite moments in college. Just a brilliantly pragmatic design (especially handling packet collisions with randomized retransmissions). Made me appreciate how important it is for something to be simple and pragmatic, rather than over-engineered to perfection.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I think in part what you are witnessing there is the power of a single well informed individual over a committee, which is how the competition was doing it.
dale_glass 4y ago
Now if we could only break away from the frame size limit and have working jumbo frames without a lot of pain. Having millions of packets per second is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Even 10G is still challenging, not to speak of 100G.
japanuspus 4y ago
Quanta magazine article on subj.: https://www.quantamagazine.org/bob-metcalfe-ethernet-pioneer-wins-turing-award-20230322/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/bob-metcalfe-ethernet-pioneer... (This link is also on front page right now, but not getting any comments).
drewg123 4y ago
Back when I was doing a lot of ethernet driver work, I joked to colleagues about what I'd do if I had a time machine. Go back and kill Hitler? no. Go back and stop John Wilkes Booth from shooting Lincoln? No. I'd go back and convince Bob Metcalfe to make ethernet headers 16 bytes rather than 14 to avoid all sorts of annoying alignment issues
- gooroo 4y ago
  Yeah those alignment issues surely have killed more jews than that Hitler guy. /s
  - PenguinCoder 4y ago
    > *joked* to colleagues
  - drewg123 4y ago
    Lol. No, its more like everybody will line up take care of those more important things when they get access to a time machine, but when I get access to a time machine, I want to take care of my pet peeve :)
    - toast0 4y ago
      While you're back there, convince people to do IP truncation rather than fragmentation. Truncation would probably be a lot more useful at lower cost than fragmentation, and maybe path MTU problems wouldn't still be an issue. *grumble*grumble*
jonstewart 4y ago
I’ve got his book Packet Communication, and the acknowledgements ends with “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
- eimrine 4y ago
  Is this supposed to be an Eastern Egg? I have found the book to look for the context of the statement but I have not found anything interesting after the acknowledgements.
  - jonstewart 4y ago
    It’s just a common saying, especially after WWII. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum
lambda_dn 4y ago
Wifi/5G guys next? Much more important invention in my opinion
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Give it 30 years. And the one wouldn't be there without the other.
  - peterfirefly 4y ago
    WiFi would definitely be here now with or without Ethernet.
    - throw0101b 4y ago
      Wireless (packet/frame) networks were around before Ethernet: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
      - peterfirefly 4y ago
        And Metcalfe was inspired by ALOHA, which he readily admits.
- xbar 4y ago
  From 1990, the 802.11 standards body was gyrating on radio-based 802.11 ideas. That body would not even have existed without Ethernet.
  - throw0101b 4y ago
    And Ethernet may not have existed without work of the ALOHAnet: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet Ideas feed ideas, giants/shoulders, etc.
- rasz 4y ago
  Wifi would have to go to Steve Jobs :-) Lucent was sitting on 802.11 (WaveLAN) for ten years selling super expensive products targeting niche markets and it took Apple to move things forward. More in “Oral History of Arthur “Art” Astrin”, wifi pioneer: https://youtu.be/Tj5NNxVwNwQ https://youtu.be/Tj5NNxVwNwQ
madmax108 4y ago
Congrats Bob! If anyone's interested in the history of the early internet, I recently read the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner and it is a very interesting read about how we went from ARPA to WWW, including a lot of the warts you associate with large scale projects like ARPANet grew into (and the book features Metcalfe quite extensively when talking about Ethernet and ALOHAnet). Honestly, it's nice to see technology like ethernet, which is both "as simple as it should be but no simpler", and has also stood the test of time get recognized and rewarded!
citrin_ru 4y ago
I would recommend to watch a talk by Bob Metcalfe given in 1978: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj7r3vYAjGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj7r3vYAjGY for so impactful technology this video has surprisingly few views on youtube.
throw0101b 4y ago
Somewhat related: The choice of 48 bits for the hardware/station address seems to have been a pretty good choice: it's been 40+ years and we still have no run out. I'm curious to know if anyone has done the math on when Ethernet address exhaustion will occur. While the Ethernet frame has been tweaked with over the decades, addressing has been steady. Curious to know if any transition will ever been needed and how would that work. In hindsight, IP's (initial) 32 bit address was too small, though for a network that was (primarily) created for research purposes, but ended up escaping 'into the wild' and accidentally becoming production, it was probably a reasonable choice: who expected >4 billion hosts on an academic/research-only network?
- williamDafoe 4y ago
  It was Xerox & Yogen Dalal's choice, not Bob's choice! Xerox blew it with 8-bit station addresses in PuP (PARC Universal Protocol) and wanted to give each station a UID to break ties in database transactions, hence the 48-bits. XNS actually had 3-byte station and 3-byte network size to fit in 6-byte MAC addresses! Metcalfe is not a software engineer and wouldn't have these insights ...
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Some quick napkin math on the current MAC vendors database: 46 bits of a MAC address are reserved for universally administered unicast (i.e. a globally unique MAC assigned to identify a device). So far we have assigned ~570 billion addresses via 24/28/36 bit range assignments for the same purpose which represents a little under 1% of the space. So nothing urgent, though if we stuck with Ethernet as much as we use it today then in <100 years I wouldn't be surprised if we were "out". At the same time there are also 46 bits of locally administered unicast addresses and, unlike IP, Ethernet addresses only care about the local network (and this isn't a "because we've co-opted them to to save space just like NAT broke IP protocols" rather the design intent of Ethernet). Even if you had 10 billion LANs with 100 devices each and they all used this random non-unique assignment there would only be a ~50% chance there one or more devices would have a collision. The only real advantage I've ever been able to find of programming in unique MAC addresses vs random MAC addresses you can look up what company the MAC was assigned to. It may seem like there is a risk random assignment can be done poorly (e.g. not very randomly) but honestly the same risk exist with assigned ranges as seen by network vendors cheaping out and re-using their MAC blocks (which is significantly more likely to conflict than if they just used random locally administered addresses in the first place).
williamDafoe 4y ago
This just shows what a huge joke the Turing Award process is! He should have gotten this award by 2000 or never at all! But the committee was too busy giving out awards for writing sexy sounding papers about stoplight verification and zero knowledge proofs to honor someone who disrupteded the whole field!
jpalomaki 4y ago
In this Infoworld column back in 1995 Bob predicted Internet would collapse in 1996 due to security breaches, capacity overloads, and demand for video online. He also promised to eat the article if this did not happen. And kept his promise. https://1995blog.com/2015/12/03/prediction-of-the-year-1995-internet-will-soon-go-spectacularly-supernova/ https://1995blog.com/2015/12/03/prediction-of-the-year-1995-...
AlbertCory 4y ago
"Captain Bob" we called him, at 3Com. In "The Big Bucks" I have two quotes from him, which he graciously allowed me to use as something he would have said (they're not very exciting). Normally I never have a real person appear and do anything; at most people speak of them in the third person. In "Inventing the Future" I have the 1978 story about the lightning strike that took down the Ethernet between PARC and SDD. Bob had actually forgotten it, but he remembered the second lightning strike that helped sell Ethernet, because Ron Crane (RIP) had remembered the first one and engineered the Ethernet card to withstand them. As luck would have it, during a competition there actually was a lightning strike, and 3Com's survived it while the competitor's didn't.
- stringfood 4y ago
  [dead]
cc101 4y ago
He is also the arrogant ignorant engineer who bought and ruined Infoworld.
ArtRichards 4y ago
I think around 2011, they offered the first UT Longhorns Startup course, it was cool and hip and new, and they'd flown in mentors from SV and other places, so I figured, why not? So, after applying, I had shown up at a hotel near campus. While waiting in the lobby, playing with their unsecured wifi, a rather distinguished looking gentleman came up to me, and asked, Hey are you here for the Startup Course interviews? Yeah... Well, why are you here in the lobby? Well, I was told to wait here, and its been a half hour nobody called me. He gave me a look, direct in the eyes, and said, oh, really? And you're just going to sit here and wait? I was dumbfounded. Of course, it made sense, but it felt.. I didn't want to piss off the organizers, right?' "Go in there, and get it!" as he clawed the air like a tiger. Damn, he was right. So i ambled in, looked around, found a seat near the guy organizing (Josh Baer, another awesome guy) introduced myself and sat at a table by myself, just waiting for an in... Then the gentleman from the lobby came in and sat in front of me, with a big grin. Hi? Hi. You're a part of this? Yes, my name's Bob Metcalfe. Cool, thanks for the pep talk. So, whats your story? Well, I founded 3Com, and helped come up with Ethernet. Oh... damn.. cool.. ...And my life has never been the same since! If you read this, thanks Bob.
mukundesh 4y ago
I read the ethernet paper(https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360253 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360253) in college - one of the few instances where the paper did a better job of explaining the concept that the textbook.
higeorge13 4y ago
I feel extremely to have attended one of his keynotes in one network conference once and for the quick opportunity to greet him. Well deserved.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Oh yeah, Cap'n Bob: "Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" (Infoworld, June 21, 1999) ... Why do I think Linux won't kill Windows? Two reasons. The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology. The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism. Richard Stallman's Marx rants about the evils of the profit motive and multinational corporations. Linus Torvalds' Lenin laughs about world domination.... <https://web.archive.org/web/19991216220752/http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayArchive.pl?/99/25/o14-25.146.htm https://web.archive.org/web/19991216220752/http://www.infowo...> Though in time he moderated his views ... slightly: <https://web.archive.org/web/20070622115025/http://www.linux.com/articles/61664 https://web.archive.org/web/20070622115025/http://www.linux....>
leephillips 4y ago
I hear the Matcalfe has been spending some time recently at the MIT Julia lab working on climate issues.
xp84 4y ago
> "Metcalfe insists on calling Wi-Fi by its original name, Wireless Ethernet, for old times’ sake." Okay, besides all his contributions, I've decided this guy is my favorite for that alone. Imagine if he was your (great?) uncle and you're on a family vacation together. "What's the Wi-Fi password here, Bob?" Bob: "What's the what now?" You: "Excuse me. What's the Wireless Ethernet password?" Bob: "Oh, it's HotelGuest2023"
- bundie 4y ago
  Okay that's funny
cduzz 4y ago
This is like when I heard Roger Penrose won a Nobel Prize in 2020 and I thought for a second "wait is this his second? What? You mean he hadn't been awarded one until now? Who was in line ahead of him and for what?"
amelius 4y ago
If only USB was half as reliable as Ethernet ... The anti-Turing award goes to the inventors of USB.
northlondoner 4y ago
Well deserved. Impact is immense. Of course, Xerox PARC alumni.
1970-01-01 4y ago
Around 2002 he had the wild idea about Ethernet for intra-bus and peripheral communication. Nobody in the room thought it was a good idea. Glad he was smart enough to abandon that idea and stick with networking. I didn't want my mouse and keyboard getting an IP address.
BitsBlobs 4y ago
GOAT

858 points by robbiet480 4y ago

theharrychen 4y ago

How did he not get this earlier?

jacquesm 4y ago
Exactly. He really should have.
tobylane 4y ago
There’s a lot of inventions to award people for. Some of the other recipients look overdue by the time it came to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award
- OJFord 4y ago
  It coming to Metcalfe for Ethernet 7 years after to Berners-Lee for the WWW is amusing though.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Indeed, the one would not have existed without the other.
  - js8 4y ago
    Perhaps they are giving it by OSI layers.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      That's very funny :)
williamDafoe 4y ago
ACM awards are dominated by the theory community. A lot of theoreticians with NO impact on the world have awards. Metcalfe was one of a dozen people who co-invented Ethernet and does not fit the historians "Great man" theory where history is decided by a few "Great Men" who went a different direction at a critical moment ... Ethernet's success is only 25% due to him. For example, in 1979 at UIUC a grad student built 230kbps S-100 cards using rs232 chips and I wrote the Z-80 csma/cd drivers (as a high school student) so it was not rocket science. So there was reluctance to give him an award for something he didn't pioneer all alone.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

Well-deserved!

jacquesm 4y ago

Well deserved. I remember dealing with a whole raft of other networking technologies and Ethernet stood head-and-shoulders above anything else available at the time. One thing that is not well appreciated today is how power efficient Ethernet was, even on launch in the coax era. Other network technologies (Token Ring as embodied by IBMs network cards, for instance) consumed power like there was no tomorrow. Leading to someone quipping renaming it to 'smoking thing'. As the price came down (around the NE1000/2000 and 3C509 era) it suddenly was everywhere and economies of scale wiped out the competition until WiFi came along. But even today - and as I'm writing this on my ethernet connected laptop - I prefer wired networks to wireless ones. They seem more reliable to me and throughput is constant rather than spotty, which weighs heavier to me than convenience. So thank you Bob Metcalfe, I actually think this award is a bit late. Anybody remember Don Becker?

eointierney 4y ago
Never met Don Becker but as it was the Beowulf project that got me interested in GNU/Linux he is synonymous with ethernet drivers
robin_reala 4y ago
I had no idea that Token Ring was inefficient with power, but it certainly had a bunch of other problems. Biggest (at least on PCs) was its inability to recover from a cable being unplugged without resetting a bunch of the system, and the type-1 token ring cables win the award for being the most needlessly bulky,[1] even if the connectors had a plug-into-each-other party trick. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_fasteners#/media/File:IBM_hermaphroditic_connector.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_faste...
lunfard000 4y ago
Sure, years ago. But today Ethernet is just as scammy as everyone else, we've been stuck at 1 Gbps on consumer grade hardware for more than 15 years. There are claims (unverified ofc) about their executives boasting about their stupid margins. 1 Gb switch is like 10-20 euros meanwhile 2.5 Gbps is like over 100...

agomez314 4y ago

How is he only getting this award now?

williamDafoe 4y ago
ACM Turing award committee has its head up it's ass? Seriously 25% of winners have NO impact on the field ... Metcalfe was controversial because Alohanet from university of Hawaii pioneered the idea and Metcalfe was seen as writing a nice proof in CACM of the 1/e capacity breakdown theorem and popularizing an already extant technology. He did not build it alone Chuck Thacker probably built most of it but didn't have a PhD! Oh the horror! He should not have gotten it now - either give it sooner or not at all - and he should not be the only one getting it!

hoseja 4y ago

What's the killer feature that differentiates Ethernet from other phy protocols?

roganp 4y ago
Packet collision detection vs. collision avoidance
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 4y ago
The fact that it allowed for all kinds of topologies, and that it served as a bus (shared medium, hence the name 'Ether') rather than a point-to-point link is what I think made the biggest difference. Of course now that we all use switched links they are point-to-point again but an ethernet 'hub' gave you the same effect as a bus with all devices seeing all of the traffic. This made efficient broadcast protocols possible and also allowed for a historical - but interesting - trick: the screw-on taps that you could place on a single coaxial cable running down a department giving instant access without pulling another cable. Zero network configuration required, just get the tap in place and assign a new address. DHCP later took care of that need as well. This was fraught with problems, for instance a single transceiver going haywire could make a whole segment unusable and good luck finding the culprit. But compared to the competition it absolutely rocked.
- em-bee 4y ago
  for years i was carrying around an ethernet splitter that would allow me to connect two devices into one ethernet port. i last used it some 10 years ago in a place without wifi
  - asimpletune 4y ago
    Yeah, it’s a very cool trick that surprises a lot of people when they learn that only half the wires are used.

pedrovhb 4y ago

Ah, the best and most readily available source of makeshift jumper wires. Truly an amazing contribution even in ways it wasn't quite designed to be :)

lispython 4y ago

A veritable hero of our times boasts a mere 688 followers on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/RobertMMetcalfe https://twitter.com/RobertMMetcalfe (as of the dispatch of this message).

jack_riminton 4y ago
I there must be another internet law which states that the best twitter accounts have around this number
OJFord 4y ago
If he was tweeting anecdotes, or still working (seems he might be?) and tweeting about it it'd probably be a lot more - but it's mostly US basketball (and other sports/personal stuff) by the looks of it, so however veritable a hero it's just not interesting to the same audience (or at least, for the same reason, of course some of us will be basketball fans) - and probably if you're big into 'basketball Twitter' he's ~'nobody'.
zamadatix 4y ago
It's more a personal account that's 1 year old which opens with a tweet on cancel culture followed by his political leanings, cryptocurrency posts, and an overwhelming amount of basketball stats. It does have the occasional post about his involvement in geothermal energy though but beyond that following the account isn't going to get you any content he's known and respected for.

Sporktacular 4y ago

Ethernet was always inefficient, with a crazy amount of unused legacy space reserved in an unnecessarily large header. CSMA/CD for contention was one of the ugliest medium access solutions imaginable. The coax implementation needing termination plugs was also ugly. Its advantage was cost, having had no license fees, making it suited to consumer/commercial applications driving economies of scale. It's the VHS of datacomms. It's evolved, thankfully, but it remains an ugly, inefficient standard that only has life because of its legacy. And it's been increasingly jimmied into professional, carrier applications for which it was never intended and where far superior, though more expensive solutions already existed. That's not to say its creators don't deserve credit. It did its job well enough for its early days. But that's why this award comes too late. Because now Ethernet is the bloated, inelegant dinosaur we've built an ecosystem around, but to admire it is to forget the competitors it drove to extinction along the way.

nine_k 4y ago
What are some superior competing standards, and could they be implemented in a royalty-free way?
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  If they went extinct they were not superior.
  - asah 4y ago
    the best tech doesn't always win, and in fact the "best" tech is typically promoted by people who focus more on the tech and less on go-to-market and competitive strategy. And thus, the "best" tech often loses to the tech that (for example) is better packaged or promoted. Python is a nice example: inelegant language with many deep flaws, but easy syntax and "batteries included" won the day.
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    Betamax was superior to VHS, and it went the way of the dinosaur. Sometimes better means more expensive, and that's not always the popular choice. It wasn't the better survivor, but it was the better format. First to market, higher res, smaller tape, longer life, still lost. But don't take my word for it. https://kodakdigitizing.com/blogs/news/what-is-the-difference-between-betamax-and-vhs https://kodakdigitizing.com/blogs/news/what-is-the-differenc...

caseysoftware 4y ago

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said "I made it up." Me: .. what? Him: I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more. Me: .. what? Him: If I could convince someone to buy 4 instead of 2, that was great. So I told them buying more made each of them more valuable. It was mind blowing because so many other things were built on that "law" that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have proven out "more nodes are more valuable" but that's where it started. He also tells a story about declining a job with Steve Jobs to start 3Com and Steve later coming to his wedding. He also shared a scan of his original pitch deck for 3Com which was a set of transparencies because Powerpoint hadn't been invented yet. I think I kept a copy of it..

caseysoftware 4y ago
Btw, when I say "an active member of the Austin startup community" - I mean that seriously. Not only did he teach a class on startups at the University of Texas but regularly came to a coffee meetup for years, attended Startup Weekend demo time, came to Techstars Demo Day, and was generally present. I even got to do the Twilio 5 Minute Demo for one of his classes (circa 2012). It was always cool to have someone who shaped our industry just hanging out and chatting with people.
- mbajkowski 4y ago
  Absolutely correct. Chatted with him several times circa 2015 to 2016 when working out of Capital Factory in Austin. He was present for all sorts of event such as mentor hours, startup pitches, etc. Funnily enough, he would give you a very stern look if he thought you were taking him for a ride. Have not been there recently as as much as I would like, but I imagine he is still around to be found.
  - 4y ago

wistlo 4y ago

The archetypal "good enough" solution: Instead of preventing collisions, tolerating and managing them. I think of Ethernet often when assessing how close to perfection I need to get in my work.

zokier 4y ago
It is also lesson of doing something now and rewriting it later. For example no modern ethernet network uses cd/csma anymore and it was pretty iconic part of original ethernet. Overall ethernet on physical layer has seen quite an evolution from coax and vampire taps, to twisted pair and hubs, to switched networks, and nowdays wireless, single-pair, optical, and virtual networks
- bombcar 4y ago
  I remember when hubs were still common; I don't know if any have been made for decades. Even bargain basement switches are switched now, and often even have spanning tree and other 'previously enterprise' features.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    Hubs max out at 100Mbps. Everybody today is using Gigabit, so they're effectively extinct. Even at 100Mbps hubs were on the way out. They were pretty hacky. The hardware had two different hubs internally and joined them together with a bit of logic, but that logic was somewhat failure prone and it was common to have 10/100 hubs where the 10 clients couldn't talk with the 100 clients and vice versa. Autodetection was at best a roll of the dice so most people wired down their port settings instead. Everybody hated them and switches got cheap real fast so they didn't last very long. The only thing they were good for was network diagnostics.
    - EricE 4y ago
      > The only thing they were good for was network diagnostics. Indeed - I still have a couple that I used for packet sniffing. Thankfully managed switches or switches smart enough to support port mirroring are inexpensive and thus fairly ubiquitous now.

Ozzie_osman 4y ago

Reading the original ethernet paper was one of my favorite moments in college. Just a brilliantly pragmatic design (especially handling packet collisions with randomized retransmissions). Made me appreciate how important it is for something to be simple and pragmatic, rather than over-engineered to perfection.

jacquesm 4y ago
I think in part what you are witnessing there is the power of a single well informed individual over a committee, which is how the competition was doing it.

dale_glass 4y ago

Now if we could only break away from the frame size limit and have working jumbo frames without a lot of pain. Having millions of packets per second is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Even 10G is still challenging, not to speak of 100G.

japanuspus 4y ago

Quanta magazine article on subj.: https://www.quantamagazine.org/bob-metcalfe-ethernet-pioneer-wins-turing-award-20230322/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/bob-metcalfe-ethernet-pioneer... (This link is also on front page right now, but not getting any comments).

drewg123 4y ago

Back when I was doing a lot of ethernet driver work, I joked to colleagues about what I'd do if I had a time machine. Go back and kill Hitler? no. Go back and stop John Wilkes Booth from shooting Lincoln? No. I'd go back and convince Bob Metcalfe to make ethernet headers 16 bytes rather than 14 to avoid all sorts of annoying alignment issues

gooroo 4y ago
Yeah those alignment issues surely have killed more jews than that Hitler guy. /s
- PenguinCoder 4y ago
  > *joked* to colleagues
- drewg123 4y ago
  Lol. No, its more like everybody will line up take care of those more important things when they get access to a time machine, but when I get access to a time machine, I want to take care of my pet peeve :)
  - toast0 4y ago
    While you're back there, convince people to do IP truncation rather than fragmentation. Truncation would probably be a lot more useful at lower cost than fragmentation, and maybe path MTU problems wouldn't still be an issue. *grumble*grumble*

jonstewart 4y ago

I’ve got his book Packet Communication, and the acknowledgements ends with “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

eimrine 4y ago
Is this supposed to be an Eastern Egg? I have found the book to look for the context of the statement but I have not found anything interesting after the acknowledgements.
- jonstewart 4y ago
  It’s just a common saying, especially after WWII. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum

lambda_dn 4y ago

Wifi/5G guys next? Much more important invention in my opinion

jacquesm 4y ago
Give it 30 years. And the one wouldn't be there without the other.
- peterfirefly 4y ago
  WiFi would definitely be here now with or without Ethernet.
  - throw0101b 4y ago
    Wireless (packet/frame) networks were around before Ethernet: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
    - peterfirefly 4y ago
      And Metcalfe was inspired by ALOHA, which he readily admits.
xbar 4y ago
From 1990, the 802.11 standards body was gyrating on radio-based 802.11 ideas. That body would not even have existed without Ethernet.
- throw0101b 4y ago
  And Ethernet may not have existed without work of the ALOHAnet: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet Ideas feed ideas, giants/shoulders, etc.
rasz 4y ago
Wifi would have to go to Steve Jobs :-) Lucent was sitting on 802.11 (WaveLAN) for ten years selling super expensive products targeting niche markets and it took Apple to move things forward. More in “Oral History of Arthur “Art” Astrin”, wifi pioneer: https://youtu.be/Tj5NNxVwNwQ https://youtu.be/Tj5NNxVwNwQ

madmax108 4y ago

Congrats Bob! If anyone's interested in the history of the early internet, I recently read the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner and it is a very interesting read about how we went from ARPA to WWW, including a lot of the warts you associate with large scale projects like ARPANet grew into (and the book features Metcalfe quite extensively when talking about Ethernet and ALOHAnet). Honestly, it's nice to see technology like ethernet, which is both "as simple as it should be but no simpler", and has also stood the test of time get recognized and rewarded!

citrin_ru 4y ago

I would recommend to watch a talk by Bob Metcalfe given in 1978: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj7r3vYAjGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj7r3vYAjGY for so impactful technology this video has surprisingly few views on youtube.

throw0101b 4y ago

Somewhat related: The choice of 48 bits for the hardware/station address seems to have been a pretty good choice: it's been 40+ years and we still have no run out. I'm curious to know if anyone has done the math on when Ethernet address exhaustion will occur. While the Ethernet frame has been tweaked with over the decades, addressing has been steady. Curious to know if any transition will ever been needed and how would that work. In hindsight, IP's (initial) 32 bit address was too small, though for a network that was (primarily) created for research purposes, but ended up escaping 'into the wild' and accidentally becoming production, it was probably a reasonable choice: who expected >4 billion hosts on an academic/research-only network?

williamDafoe 4y ago
It was Xerox & Yogen Dalal's choice, not Bob's choice! Xerox blew it with 8-bit station addresses in PuP (PARC Universal Protocol) and wanted to give each station a UID to break ties in database transactions, hence the 48-bits. XNS actually had 3-byte station and 3-byte network size to fit in 6-byte MAC addresses! Metcalfe is not a software engineer and wouldn't have these insights ...
zamadatix 4y ago
Some quick napkin math on the current MAC vendors database: 46 bits of a MAC address are reserved for universally administered unicast (i.e. a globally unique MAC assigned to identify a device). So far we have assigned ~570 billion addresses via 24/28/36 bit range assignments for the same purpose which represents a little under 1% of the space. So nothing urgent, though if we stuck with Ethernet as much as we use it today then in <100 years I wouldn't be surprised if we were "out". At the same time there are also 46 bits of locally administered unicast addresses and, unlike IP, Ethernet addresses only care about the local network (and this isn't a "because we've co-opted them to to save space just like NAT broke IP protocols" rather the design intent of Ethernet). Even if you had 10 billion LANs with 100 devices each and they all used this random non-unique assignment there would only be a ~50% chance there one or more devices would have a collision. The only real advantage I've ever been able to find of programming in unique MAC addresses vs random MAC addresses you can look up what company the MAC was assigned to. It may seem like there is a risk random assignment can be done poorly (e.g. not very randomly) but honestly the same risk exist with assigned ranges as seen by network vendors cheaping out and re-using their MAC blocks (which is significantly more likely to conflict than if they just used random locally administered addresses in the first place).

williamDafoe 4y ago

This just shows what a huge joke the Turing Award process is! He should have gotten this award by 2000 or never at all! But the committee was too busy giving out awards for writing sexy sounding papers about stoplight verification and zero knowledge proofs to honor someone who disrupteded the whole field!

jpalomaki 4y ago

In this Infoworld column back in 1995 Bob predicted Internet would collapse in 1996 due to security breaches, capacity overloads, and demand for video online. He also promised to eat the article if this did not happen. And kept his promise. https://1995blog.com/2015/12/03/prediction-of-the-year-1995-internet-will-soon-go-spectacularly-supernova/ https://1995blog.com/2015/12/03/prediction-of-the-year-1995-...

AlbertCory 4y ago

"Captain Bob" we called him, at 3Com. In "The Big Bucks" I have two quotes from him, which he graciously allowed me to use as something he would have said (they're not very exciting). Normally I never have a real person appear and do anything; at most people speak of them in the third person. In "Inventing the Future" I have the 1978 story about the lightning strike that took down the Ethernet between PARC and SDD. Bob had actually forgotten it, but he remembered the second lightning strike that helped sell Ethernet, because Ron Crane (RIP) had remembered the first one and engineered the Ethernet card to withstand them. As luck would have it, during a competition there actually was a lightning strike, and 3Com's survived it while the competitor's didn't.

stringfood 4y ago
[dead]

cc101 4y ago

He is also the arrogant ignorant engineer who bought and ruined Infoworld.

ArtRichards 4y ago

I think around 2011, they offered the first UT Longhorns Startup course, it was cool and hip and new, and they'd flown in mentors from SV and other places, so I figured, why not? So, after applying, I had shown up at a hotel near campus. While waiting in the lobby, playing with their unsecured wifi, a rather distinguished looking gentleman came up to me, and asked, Hey are you here for the Startup Course interviews? Yeah... Well, why are you here in the lobby? Well, I was told to wait here, and its been a half hour nobody called me. He gave me a look, direct in the eyes, and said, oh, really? And you're just going to sit here and wait? I was dumbfounded. Of course, it made sense, but it felt.. I didn't want to piss off the organizers, right?' "Go in there, and get it!" as he clawed the air like a tiger. Damn, he was right. So i ambled in, looked around, found a seat near the guy organizing (Josh Baer, another awesome guy) introduced myself and sat at a table by myself, just waiting for an in... Then the gentleman from the lobby came in and sat in front of me, with a big grin. Hi? Hi. You're a part of this? Yes, my name's Bob Metcalfe. Cool, thanks for the pep talk. So, whats your story? Well, I founded 3Com, and helped come up with Ethernet. Oh... damn.. cool.. ...And my life has never been the same since! If you read this, thanks Bob.

mukundesh 4y ago

I read the ethernet paper(https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360253 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360253) in college - one of the few instances where the paper did a better job of explaining the concept that the textbook.

higeorge13 4y ago

I feel extremely to have attended one of his keynotes in one network conference once and for the quick opportunity to greet him. Well deserved.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Oh yeah, Cap'n Bob: "Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" (Infoworld, June 21, 1999) ... Why do I think Linux won't kill Windows? Two reasons. The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology. The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism. Richard Stallman's Marx rants about the evils of the profit motive and multinational corporations. Linus Torvalds' Lenin laughs about world domination.... <https://web.archive.org/web/19991216220752/http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayArchive.pl?/99/25/o14-25.146.htm https://web.archive.org/web/19991216220752/http://www.infowo...> Though in time he moderated his views ... slightly: <https://web.archive.org/web/20070622115025/http://www.linux.com/articles/61664 https://web.archive.org/web/20070622115025/http://www.linux....>

leephillips 4y ago

I hear the Matcalfe has been spending some time recently at the MIT Julia lab working on climate issues.

xp84 4y ago

> "Metcalfe insists on calling Wi-Fi by its original name, Wireless Ethernet, for old times’ sake." Okay, besides all his contributions, I've decided this guy is my favorite for that alone. Imagine if he was your (great?) uncle and you're on a family vacation together. "What's the Wi-Fi password here, Bob?" Bob: "What's the what now?" You: "Excuse me. What's the Wireless Ethernet password?" Bob: "Oh, it's HotelGuest2023"

bundie 4y ago
Okay that's funny

cduzz 4y ago

This is like when I heard Roger Penrose won a Nobel Prize in 2020 and I thought for a second "wait is this his second? What? You mean he hadn't been awarded one until now? Who was in line ahead of him and for what?"

amelius 4y ago

If only USB was half as reliable as Ethernet ... The anti-Turing award goes to the inventors of USB.

northlondoner 4y ago

Well deserved. Impact is immense. Of course, Xerox PARC alumni.

1970-01-01 4y ago

Around 2002 he had the wild idea about Ethernet for intra-bus and peripheral communication. Nobody in the room thought it was a good idea. Glad he was smart enough to abandon that idea and stick with networking. I didn't want my mouse and keyboard getting an IP address.

BitsBlobs 4y ago

GOAT