Today in 1977, Bob Metcalfe, David Boggs, Charles Thacker, and Butler Lampson received a patent for the Ethernet, titled “Multipoint Data Communication System with Collision Detection.”
On January 18, 1993, Metcalfe published an InfoWorld column titled “Will there be any LANs in 2013?” He wrote: “Ethernet and IBM Token Ring are going to dominate at the desktop through 2013. First, they will be sped up by a factor of 10: Ethernet will climb to 100 megabits per second, and IBM Token Ring will reach 128 megabits per second.”
In 2013, Token Ring was basically non-existent and the Ethernet ran at 100 gigabits per second. The Ethernet Alliance's 2022 technology roadmap expects speeds of 800 Gbit/s and 1.6 Tbit/s to become an IEEE standard between about 2023 and 2025.
To quote Metcalfe again, from Internet Collapses: “It’s relatively easy to predict the future. It’s harder to make precise predictions. And it’s hardest to get the timing right.”