ROBERT METCALFE CHRONICLE
In the charming
neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, American engineer, computer scientist,
inventor, and entrepreneur Robert Metcalfe was born on April 7, 1946. His
mother was a secretary at Bay Shore High School and his father was a gyroscope
specialist. At age 10, Robert knew he would have to study engineering at MIT.
In 1972, Metcalfe joined the Computer Science Laboratory at
the Xerox Research Center (PARC) in Palo Alto, California, to work on personal
computer developments. In 1973, Metcalfe and Boggs developed Ethernet, a local
area networking technology.
Robert Metcalfe left Xerox in 1979 and founded 3Com
Corporation, with the support of DEC, Intel and Xerox. The object of the
company was to promote local area networks with personal computers and
especially Ethernet, which has become an international standard.
In 2003 he received the Marconi Prize for the invention of
Ethernet and for the formulation of the law of his name. Metcalfe's law states
that the effect of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square
of the number of users connected in the system. He is equally proud of
Metcalfe's Law, named after his friend George Gilder. The maxim, designed to
convince the world to adopt his standard Ethernet.
In addition to his numerous achievements, Bob Metcalfe is
best known for his 1995 prediction. In it, he claimed that the internet would
suffer a catastrophic collapse in the coming years.