Ethernet co-inventor finally bags a Turing Award, half a century later
Robert Metcalfe, one of the principal engineers behind ethernet, has finally been handed a Turing Award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), some five decades after his invention came to be. Fifty years seems like a long time, though the man appears to have been so busy accepting awards he wouldn't have had time to show up for a Turing Award.
In the bibliographic section of his Turing award announcement(opens in new tab), it goes through the many recognitions Metcalfe has seen for his work. These include «the National Medal of Technology, IEEE Medal of Honor, Marconi Prize, Japan Computer & Communications Prize, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, and IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. He is a Fellow of the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Inventors, Consumer Electronics, and Internet Halls of Fame», to name a few.
Bob's a little bit decorated, then.
After landing himself two Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT—one in electrical engineering, the other in industrial management—Metcalfe achieved an applied mathematics Masters at Harvard.
He originally pitched his PhD thesis to Harvard around improving networking, but it was dismissed as being not theoretical enough. So fell by the wayside his plan to connect the university's computers up to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet), the first operational packet switching network, and where Internet Protocol (IP addresses) originated. And while Harvard turned its nose up, MIT welcomed the innovation, recruiting him into Project Mac to carry out his connective dreams.
It was as he designed and built an Arpanet interface for a new PARC computer that he and co-inventor David Boggs brought the
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