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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

amturing.acm.org

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Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#51

Post by chasd00 »

caseysoftware wrote: post #24

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I f…

I remember trying to get NICs to work in Linux and the best advice was usually “just try the 3c509 driver”.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#52

Post by dale_glass »

Now if we could only break away from the frame size limit and have working jumbo frames without a lot of pain.

Having millions of packets per second is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Even 10G is still challenging, not to speak of 100G.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#53

Post by ksajadi »

caseysoftware wrote: post #24

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I f…

Love the story, man!

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#54

Post by mkovach »

jacquesm wrote: post #32
Sporktacular wrote: post #22

Ethernet was always inefficient, with a crazy amount of unused legacy space reserved in an unnecessarily large header. CSMA/CD for contention was one of the ugliest medium access solutions imaginable. The coax implementation needing termination plugs was also ugly. Its advantage was cost, having had no license fees, making it suited to consumer/commercial applications driving economies of scale. It's the VHS of datac…

It was a lot less ugly than whatever else passed for networking standards at the physical level in those days. Arcnet, Twinax, Token Ring and so on, I've probably used them all, and at scale. Compared to Ethernet they all sucked, besides being proprietary they were slow, prone to breaking in very complex to troubleshoot ways (though ethernet had its own interesting failure modes in practice it was far more reliable),…

Oh good heavens. Arcnet! When I first learned about writing Linux device drivers, it was trying to get a decent driver for some Arcnet cards that the company I worked at as using in some client installations. Can't remember exactly why we never completed it (well, yea I do. Ethernet worked better, a lot better) but since we never "released the product" they never let us send in the driver we did write to the kernel mailing list. That was in the kernel 1.x days.

Now, I feel old. Time for a nap.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#56

Post by lr4444lr »

caseysoftware wrote: post #24

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I f…

I respect Metcalfe a lot, but halfway through undergraduate discrete math it was pretty obvious to most people in the class even before seeing a formal proof that a fully connected graph has O(n^2) edges. I just figured that people wowed by "Metcalfe's Law" were business types who didn't any formal theory into computing.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#57

Post by OJFord »

lispython wrote: post #17

A veritable hero of our times boasts a mere 688 followers on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/RobertMMetcalfe (as of the dispatch of this message).

If he was tweeting anecdotes, or still working (seems he might be?) and tweeting about it it'd probably be a lot more - but it's mostly US basketball (and other sports/personal stuff) by the looks of it, so however veritable a hero it's just not interesting to the same audience (or at least, for the same reason, of course some of us will be basketball fans) - and probably if you're big into 'basketball Twitter' he's ~'nobody'.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#58

Post by drewg123 »

Back when I was doing a lot of ethernet driver work, I joked to colleagues about what I'd do if I had a time machine. Go back and kill Hitler? no. Go back and stop John Wilkes Booth from shooting Lincoln? No. I'd go back and convince Bob Metcalfe to make ethernet headers 16 bytes rather than 14 to avoid all sorts of annoying alignment issues

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#60

Post by mbajkowski »

caseysoftware wrote: post #38
caseysoftware wrote: post #24

Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I f…

Btw, when I say "an active member of the Austin startup community" - I mean that seriously. Not only did he teach a class on startups at the University of Texas but regularly came to a coffee meetup for years, attended Startup Weekend demo time, came to Techstars Demo Day, and was generally present. I even got to do the Twilio 5 Minute Demo for one of his classes (circa 2012). It was always cool to have someone who s…

Absolutely correct. Chatted with him several times circa 2015 to 2016 when working out of Capital Factory in Austin. He was present for all sorts of event such as mentor hours, startup pitches, etc. Funnily enough, he would give you a very stern look if he thought you were taking him for a ride. Have not been there recently as as much as I would like, but I imagine he is still around to be found.
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