At the age of 61, Robert "Bob" Metcalfe has led a storied career, but he isn't resting on his laurels just yet.
The engineer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-columnist/publisher-turned-venture capitalist insists his greatest achievement is yet to come. That said, the man who helped invent Ethernet, the most widely used packet-switched technology in the world, was honoured for his work on that invention this past weekend as he was inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio.
The Brooklyn native graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 with bachelor degrees in electrical engineering and management. In 1973, he earned a doctorate from Harvard in computer science, writing his dissertation on packet switching.
He then left the East Coast for Silicon Valley, where he landed a job at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. And it was there, in 1973, that he and Stanford University graduate student Dave Boggs described the concept of Ethernet in an attempt to connect computers to a new laser printer that was being developed.
Then in 1979, Metcalfe founded 3Com, a company that later went public and peaked with a market capitalisation in the billions. Metcalfe left 3Com in 1990 and began his third career as publisher of IDG's InfoWorld publishing company and an industry pundit. For eight years, he wrote a weekly column that, at its height, was read by a million readers, Metcalfe claims. It was during this period when Metcalfe made several bold predictions, some of which never came to fruition and still haunt him today.
The patent system will always be broken. It's a very good thing, and it's worth fixing. But it will always be broken
Bob Metcalfe
In 2001, he left the world of media and became a venture capitalist at the Boston firm Polaris Ventures, where he currently works today.
Along the way, Metcalfe has racked up several awards and honours, including the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1980 and the Alexander Graham Bell Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1988. In 1995, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003, he won the Marconi International Fellowship and received the National Medal of Technology from President Bush "for leadership in the invention, standardisation, and commercialisation of Ethernet".
From his office in Boston, Metcalfe talked last week about the invention that has made him so famous. He also shared his views on what's troubling the US patent system and the internet at large. He even took some time to poke fun at himself for some of those infamously bold predictions.
Q: You're being inducted this week into the Invent Now Hall of Fame for inventing Ethernet, which, in the 34 years since it's been invented, has become the de facto standard in local area networks and generated billions of dollars in revenue. Did you expect it to be such a huge success?
A: Of course not; it was invented in a memo I wrote on 22 May, 1973. Dave Boggs and I were asked to build it by our colleagues in order to network the world's first personal computers. Our mindset then had more to do with building our own tools.
I believe others shared the four patents you developed describing Ethernet. Who were they and why do you seem to get all the credit?
I got more credit than I deserved, that is for sure. Success has many fathers. And failure is an orphan. So I look to the predecessors of Ethernet, like the Arpanet packet-switched network, from which Ethernet got packet switching, and the Aloha packet radio network, from which Ethernet got randomised retransmissions. Those were the predecessors, and I am quick to acknowledge that frequently.
Then there was Dave Boggs. He was a grad student at Stanford. And I was the new member of the research staff at Xerox's Research PARC. I recruited him to help me. So he and I would be the co-inventors, if I were to choose. But the Ethernet patents have four inventors on them: myself, Boggs, Butler Lamson and Chuck Thacker. Butler and Chuck now both work at Microsoft. Dave Boggs is a consultant in Silicon Valley. And I am here at Polaris. I was the principal inventor, so my name appeared first on the patent.
Speaking of patents, a lot of people say the US patent system has become out of control. What do you think?
The patent system will always be broken. It's a very good thing, and it's worth fixing. But it will always be broken because…
