Pioneering the connection of computing devices, engineer Bob Metcalfe received the most prestigious award in computing on March 22 for inventing Ethernet technology, a foundational technology for the Internet that remains crucial even half a century after its inception.
Engineer Bob Metcalfe. (Photo: Getty)
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recognized 76-year-old engineer Metcalfe for his role in inventing, standardizing, and commercializing Ethernet connection technology and awarded him the 2022 Turing Award, an honor considered the Nobel Prize in computing. The award recipient also receives $1 million, thanks to support from Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet.
Ethernet serves as the standard connection for everything from servers within data centers to telecommunications networks. The technology emerged when Metcalfe was tasked with connecting an office printer. In the early 1970s, he worked at the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox, where personal computers and laser printers were also invented. Metcalfe proposed a superior method for connecting devices in a way that could easily scale as the number of computers on the network increased, paving the way for the Internet as we know it today.
Metcalfe graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University in 1973. He believes there is still much research to be done in computer connectivity, especially in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). According to him, earlier generations of AI “died young” due to a lack of data. This is no longer an issue, thanks to over 1 billion users generating data through Internet usage; however, the current challenge is to better connect the computers that are processing this data.
