Today in 1973, “arriving at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center on May 22, 1973,” wrote Bob Metcalfe in Internet Collapses, “I turned on my IBM Selectric, pulled out a wad of Ko-Rec-Type, snapped on an Orator ball, and banged out the memo inventing Ethernet.”
In July 1976, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs published their "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks," in the Communications of the ACM. In December 1977, Metcalfe, Boggs, Charles Thacker, and Butler Lampson received U.S. patent 4,063,220 on Ethernet for a "Multipoint Data Communication System with Collision Detection." In 1983, Ethernet was standardized as IEEE 802.3.
In an industry that has seen technologies come and go in rapid succession, the staying power of the Ethernet is remarkable. It has endured because it has served as the foundation of the computer industry’s shift from augmenting computation to augmenting communications. Local Area Networks (LAN) marked the transition from the computer as a stand-alone device, whether a mainframe, a mini computer, or a desktop computer, to the computer as a communication device, as a facilitator of people-to-people interactions.
When Ethernet first came out, our sales proposition was PFMTS—Print, File, Mail, Terminal, Stubs.
You may remember the IBM PC XT that came out in 1982. It had a 10-megabyte disk on it. No one could imagine what you’d do with 10 megabytes on your disk. So the idea that you might want to buy one PC with a 10-megabyte disk on it, and then share it over the LAN with cheaper diskless PCs, had traction. The same thinking applied to laser printers that were new and expensive. So share the printer, share the disk.
I like to think about it as shifting gears. The second gear was LAN e-mail. The big e-mail carriers of the time, like AOL and MCI, didn’t consider it e-mail, because my e-mails never left the building. But already in the early days of the Internet, we observed heavy e-mail traffic between Internet nodes within the same building. We called it “incestuous traffic”; it was surprising, even embarrassing, because Internet e-mail was originally conceived for long-distance communications.
T stood for terminal. There were all these minicomputers and mainframes still around in those days. You couldn’t throw them out, and all of them had dumb terminals. People would have a dumb terminal on their desk, and then they would have a PC on their desk. That didn’t make any sense. So you’d just write software that allowed your PC to be a dumb terminal so you could access the minicomputer or the mainframe.
Stubs were the APIs for accessing the underlying networking functionality, opening connections, closing connections, etc. This is the serendipity idea again. One such new idea came from Novell, which used the stubs to share access—not to a file, but to a database. This led to the first use of multi-user accounting systems that ran on top of the LAN. That’s how NetWare got its foothold and eventually blew past 3Com’s operating system.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently announced that Bob Metcalfe is the recipient of the 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet.
Connecting people with a computer network and a network of networks not only increased the amount of data generated but also led to numerous new ways of getting value out of it, unleashing many new enterprise applications and a new passion for “data mining.” It eventually led to the next phase in the evolution of the industry, the next quantitative and qualitative leap in the amount of data created and transmitted, the invention of the World Wide Web. This, in turn, has led to the current revival and success of “artificial intelligence,” the new phase in the evolution of augmenting computation and communications.