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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

858 pointsby robbiet480about 2 years ago

34 comments

caseysoftwareabout 2 years ago
Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I&#x27;ve talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I&#x27;d chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I&#x27;d been dying to ask: How&#x27;d you come up with &quot;Metcalfe&#x27;s Law&quot;?<p>Metcalfe&#x27;s Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system.<p>When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said &quot;I made it up.&quot;<p>Me: .. what?<p>Him: I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more.<p>Me: .. what?<p>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.<p>It was mind blowing because so many other things were built on that &quot;law&quot; that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have proven out &quot;more nodes are more valuable&quot; but that&#x27;s where it started.<p>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&#x27;t been invented yet. I think I kept a copy of it..
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jacquesmabout 2 years 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.<p>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 &#x27;smoking thing&#x27;.<p>As the price came down (around the NE1000&#x2F;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&#x27;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.<p>So thank you Bob Metcalfe, I actually think this award is a bit late.<p>Anybody remember Don Becker?
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ArtRichardsabout 2 years ago
I think around 2011, they offered the first UT Longhorns Startup course, it was cool and hip and new, and they&#x27;d flown in mentors from SV and other places, so I figured, why not?<p>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?<p>Yeah...<p>Well, why are you here in the lobby?<p>Well, I was told to wait here, and its been a half hour nobody called me.<p>He gave me a look, direct in the eyes, and said, oh, really? And you&#x27;re just going to sit here and wait?<p>I was dumbfounded. Of course, it made sense, but it felt.. I didn&#x27;t want to piss off the organizers, right?&#x27;<p>&quot;Go in there, and get it!&quot; as he clawed the air like a tiger. Damn, he was right.<p>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...<p>Then the gentleman from the lobby came in and sat in front of me, with a big grin.<p>Hi?<p>Hi.<p>You&#x27;re a part of this?<p>Yes, my name&#x27;s Bob Metcalfe.<p>Cool, thanks for the pep talk. So, whats your story?<p>Well, I founded 3Com, and helped come up with Ethernet.<p>Oh... damn.. cool..<p>...And my life has never been the same since!<p>If you read this, thanks Bob.
xp84about 2 years ago
&gt; &quot;Metcalfe insists on calling Wi-Fi by its original name, Wireless Ethernet, for old times’ sake.&quot;<p>Okay, besides all his contributions, I&#x27;ve decided this guy is my favorite for that alone. Imagine if he was your (great?) uncle and you&#x27;re on a family vacation together. &quot;What&#x27;s the Wi-Fi password here, Bob?&quot;<p>Bob: &quot;What&#x27;s the what now?&quot;<p>You: &quot;Excuse me. What&#x27;s the Wireless Ethernet password?&quot;<p>Bob: &quot;Oh, it&#x27;s HotelGuest2023&quot;
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jpalomakiabout 2 years 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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1995blog.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;03&#x2F;prediction-of-the-year-1995-internet-will-soon-go-spectacularly-supernova&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1995blog.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;03&#x2F;prediction-of-the-year-1995-...</a>
wistloabout 2 years ago
The archetypal &quot;good enough&quot; solution:<p>Instead of preventing collisions, tolerating and managing them.<p>I think of Ethernet often when assessing how close to perfection I need to get in my work.
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Sporktacularabout 2 years ago
Ethernet was always inefficient, with a crazy amount of unused legacy space reserved in an unnecessarily large header. CSMA&#x2F;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&#x2F;commercial applications driving economies of scale. It&#x27;s the VHS of datacomms.<p>It&#x27;s evolved, thankfully, but it remains an ugly, inefficient standard that only has life because of its legacy. And it&#x27;s been increasingly jimmied into professional, carrier applications for which it was never intended and where far superior, though more expensive solutions already existed.<p>That&#x27;s not to say its creators don&#x27;t deserve credit. It did its job well enough for its early days. But that&#x27;s why this award comes too late. Because now Ethernet is the bloated, inelegant dinosaur we&#x27;ve built an ecosystem around, but to admire it is to forget the competitors it drove to extinction along the way.
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citrin_ruabout 2 years ago
I would recommend to watch a talk by Bob Metcalfe given in 1978: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Fj7r3vYAjGY">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Fj7r3vYAjGY</a> for so impactful technology this video has surprisingly few views on youtube.
AlbertCoryabout 2 years ago
&quot;Captain Bob&quot; we called him, at 3Com.<p>In &quot;The Big Bucks&quot; I have two quotes from him, which he graciously allowed me to use as something he <i>would</i> have said (they&#x27;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.<p>In &quot;Inventing the Future&quot; 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 <i>second</i> 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 <i>was</i> a lightning strike, and 3Com&#x27;s survived it while the competitor&#x27;s didn&#x27;t.
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madmax108about 2 years ago
Congrats Bob!<p>If anyone&#x27;s interested in the history of the early internet, I recently read the book &quot;Where Wizards Stay Up Late&quot; 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).<p>Honestly, it&#x27;s nice to see technology like ethernet, which is both &quot;as simple as it should be but no simpler&quot;, and has also stood the test of time get recognized and rewarded!
dale_glassabout 2 years ago
Now if we could only break away from the frame size limit and have working jumbo frames without a lot of pain.<p>Having millions of packets per second is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Even 10G is still challenging, not to speak of 100G.
lispythonabout 2 years ago
A veritable hero of our times boasts a mere 688 followers on his Twitter account: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;RobertMMetcalfe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;RobertMMetcalfe</a> (as of the dispatch of this message).
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cduzzabout 2 years ago
This is like when I heard Roger Penrose won a Nobel Prize in 2020 and I thought for a second &quot;wait is this his second? What? You mean he hadn&#x27;t been awarded one until now? Who was in line ahead of him and for what?&quot;
Ozzie_osmanabout 2 years 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).<p>Made me appreciate how important it is for something to be simple and pragmatic, rather than over-engineered to perfection.
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japanuspusabout 2 years ago
Quanta magazine article on subj.:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;bob-metcalfe-ethernet-pioneer-wins-turing-award-20230322&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;bob-metcalfe-ethernet-pioneer...</a><p>(This link is also on front page right now, but not getting any comments).
throw0101babout 2 years ago
Somewhat related:<p>The choice of 48 bits for the hardware&#x2F;station address seems to have been a pretty good choice: it&#x27;s been 40+ years and we still have no run out. I&#x27;m curious to know if anyone has done the math on when Ethernet address exhaustion will occur.<p>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.<p>In hindsight, IP&#x27;s (initial) 32 bit address was too small, though for a network that was (primarily) created for research purposes, but ended up escaping &#x27;into the wild&#x27; and accidentally becoming production, it was probably a reasonable choice: who expected &gt;4 billion hosts on an academic&#x2F;research-only network?
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jonstewartabout 2 years ago
I’ve got his book Packet Communication, and the acknowledgements ends with “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
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pedrovhbabout 2 years ago
Ah, the best and most readily available source of makeshift jumper wires. Truly an amazing contribution even in ways it wasn&#x27;t quite designed to be :)
dredmorbiusabout 2 years ago
Oh yeah, Cap&#x27;n Bob:<p>&quot;Linux&#x27;s &#x27;60s technology, open-sores ideology won&#x27;t beat W2K, but what will?&quot; (Infoworld, June 21, 1999)<p><i>... Why do I think Linux won&#x27;t kill Windows? Two reasons. The Open Source Movement&#x27;s ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology.</i><p><i>The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism. Richard Stallman&#x27;s Marx rants about the evils of the profit motive and multinational corporations. Linus Torvalds&#x27; Lenin laughs about world domination....</i><p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19991216220752&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoworld.com&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;displayArchive.pl?&#x2F;99&#x2F;25&#x2F;o14-25.146.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19991216220752&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infowo...</a>&gt;<p>Though in time he moderated his views ... slightly:<p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20070622115025&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linux.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;61664" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20070622115025&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linux....</a>&gt;
agomez314about 2 years ago
How is he only getting this award now?
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cc101about 2 years ago
He is also the arrogant ignorant engineer who bought and ruined Infoworld.
mukundeshabout 2 years ago
I read the ethernet paper(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;360248.360253" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;360248.360253</a>) in college - one of the few instances where the paper did a better job of explaining the concept that the textbook.
leephillipsabout 2 years ago
I hear the Matcalfe has been spending some time recently at the MIT Julia lab working on climate issues.
hosejaabout 2 years ago
What&#x27;s the killer feature that differentiates Ethernet from other phy protocols?
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drewg123about 2 years ago
Back when I was doing a lot of ethernet driver work, I joked to colleagues about what I&#x27;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&#x27;d go back and convince Bob Metcalfe to make ethernet headers 16 bytes rather than 14 to avoid all sorts of annoying alignment issues
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northlondonerabout 2 years ago
Well deserved. Impact is immense. Of course, Xerox PARC alumni.
higeorge13about 2 years ago
I feel extremely to have attended one of his keynotes in one network conference once and for the quick opportunity to greet him.<p>Well deserved.
ameliusabout 2 years ago
If only USB was half as reliable as Ethernet ...<p>The anti-Turing award goes to the inventors of USB.
1970-01-01about 2 years 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&#x27;t want my mouse and keyboard getting an IP address.
lambda_dnabout 2 years ago
Wifi&#x2F;5G guys next? Much more important invention in my opinion
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ChrisMarshallNYabout 2 years ago
Well-deserved!
theharrychenabout 2 years ago
How did he not get this earlier?
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BitsBlobsabout 2 years ago
GOAT
williamDafoeabout 2 years 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!