CHRONICLE

 

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.