ACM TURING AWARD HONORS BOB METCALFE FOR ETHERNET

Technology Developed 50 Years Ago Remains the Dominant Way of Connecting Computers and Billions of Other Devices to Each Other and the Internet 

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Bob Metcalfe as recipient of the 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet.

Metcalfe is an Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at The University of Texas at Austin and a Research Affiliate in Computational Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc. The Award is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundations of computing.

Invention of The Ethernet

In 1973, while a computer scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Metcalfe circulated a now-famous memo describing a “broadcast communication network” for connecting some of the first personal computers, PARC’s Altos, within a building. The first Ethernet ran at 2.94 megabits per second, which was about 10,000 times faster than the terminal networks it would replace.

Although Metcalfe’s original design proposed implementing this network over coaxial cable, the memo envisioned “communication over an ether,” making the design adaptable to future innovations in media technology including legacy telephone twisted pair, optical fiber, radio (Wi-Fi), and even power networks, to replace the coaxial cable as the “ether.” That memo laid th