In June 1972, Bob Metcalfe, a 26-year-old engineer fresh out of graduate school, joined a new research lab in Palo Alto, California, which set out to build something few people could even imagine: a computer. staff.
After another engineer quit the job, Dr. Metcalfe was asked to create technology that could connect desktop machines in an office and send information between them. The result was Ethernet, a computer networking technology that would one day become an industry standard. For decades, it has connected PCs to servers, printers, and the Internet in corporate offices and homes around the world.
For his work on Ethernet, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computer professionals, announced Wednesday that 76-year-old Dr. Metcalfe would receive this year’s Turing Award. Awarded since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize for computing, the Turing Prize comes with a prize of $1 million.
When Dr. Metcalfe arrived at the Palo Alto Research Center, a division of Xerox nicknamed PARC, the first thing he did was connect the lab to the Arpanet, the wide area network that later became the modern Internet. Arpanet transmitted information between some 20 academic and corporate labs across the country.
But when PARC researchers designed their personal computer, called the Alto, they realized they needed network technology that could connect personal computers and other devices within an office, not over long distances.
A graduate student, Charles Simonyi, began building a local area network that he called Signet, short for Simonyi’s Infinitely Glorious Network. But he was soon transferred to a different project. So Mr. Simonyi built a text editor, which gave rise to modern word processors like Microsoft Word. And Dr. Metcalfe started working on a new network.
One afternoon in 1973, he was in the basement of the PARC laboratory, fiddling with a long cable. As he struggled to send electrical pulses down the cable, another researcher offered to help him.
The researcher was David Boggs, a doctoral student at nearby Stanford University who had recently joined the lab as an intern. Together, Dr. Metcalfe and Dr. Boggs, who passed away last year, designed what they would eventually call Ethernet.
“He was the perfect partner for me,” Dr. Metcalfe said of Dr. Boggs after his death. “I was more of a concept artist, and he was an engineer building the hardware in the back room.” Dr. Metcalfe called himself and his collaborator “the Bobbsey twins” of computer networks.
Borrowing ideas from a University of Hawaii radio-based network, ALOHAnet, Dr. Metcalfe and Dr. Boggs designed Ethernet as a technology that could work both wired and wireless. But the first network they built inside the PARC offices required cables.
“We wanted to make it wireless,” Dr. Metcalfe said in an interview. “But we couldn’t have zero cables. It would have been too slow and too expensive.”
Over the next two decades, several technologies developed for the Alto project would become familiar parts of personal computing, including the graphical user interface and the laser printer, as well as Ethernet and the word processor. In the 1980s and 1990s, after Ethernet was codified as an industry standard, it became the primary protocol for building networks in corporate offices.
The technology was also used in homes. And in the late 1990s, it served as the foundation for Wi-Fi, the wireless networking standard used in both offices and homes around the world.
“Almost everything you do online goes over Ethernet at some point,” Marc Weber, curator and director of the Internet history program at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, said in an interview. “You use it all the time.”
In 1979, Dr. Metcalfe founded a company, 3Com, that commercialized Ethernet, while Dr. Boggs remained at PARC as a researcher. Later, Dr. Boggs founded his own Ethernet company, LAN Media. Both companies were eventually sold to larger teams.
The Ethernet protocol changed in countless ways over the decades. Little of what Dr. Metcalfe and Dr. Boggs designed at PARC in the 1970s is still part of the technology. But the name, Ethernet, remains. In an industry with a long history of boring names, Ethernet has stood out for its recall.
In the 19th century, “ether” was believed to be an all-pervading medium that transmitted light waves throughout the universe. This theory was refuted at the beginning of the last century, for which the two PARC researchers took the name of their project.
“The word became free,” Dr. Metcalfe said, “so we borrowed it.”
