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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

amturing.acm.org

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Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#131

Post by AlbertCory »

"Captain Bob" we called him, at 3Com.

In "The Big Bucks" I have two quotes from him, which he graciously allowed me to use as something he would have said (they're not very exciting). Normally I never have a real person appear and do anything; at most people speak of them in the third person.

In "Inventing the Future" I have the 1978 story about the lightning strike that took down the Ethernet between PARC and SDD. Bob had actually forgotten it, but he remembered the second lightning strike that helped sell Ethernet, because Ron Crane (RIP) had remembered the first one and engineered the Ethernet card to withstand them. As luck would have it, during a competition there actually was a lightning strike, and 3Com's survived it while the competitor's didn't.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#132

Post by williamDafoe »

theharrychen wrote: post #2

How did he not get this earlier?

ACM awards are dominated by the theory community. A lot of theoreticians with NO impact on the world have awards. Metcalfe was one of a dozen people who co-invented Ethernet and does not fit the historians "Great man" theory where history is decided by a few "Great Men" who went a different direction at a critical moment ... Ethernet's success is only 25% due to him.

For example, in 1979 at UIUC a grad student built 230kbps S-100 cards using rs232 chips and I wrote the Z-80 csma/cd drivers (as a high school student) so it was not rocket science.

So there was reluctance to give him an award for something he didn't pioneer all alone.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#134

Post by [deleted] »

oh_sigh wrote: post #102
lr4444lr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Metcalfe's law is about network impact or value, not about connections.

[deleted]

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#135

Post by not2b »

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…

Although he made it up, there's an argument that the value goes up more than linearly. But as the network grows, every node doesn't necessarily need to talk to every other node except in rare circumstances, or they can reach each other through an intermediate point. So maybe O(n log n) would be closer.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#136

Post by retrocryptid »

AlbertCory wrote: post #128
retrocryptid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have a soft spot in my heart for ARCNet. In the 80s it was cheaper than ethernet, but more reliable than token ring. And for the few places that prioritized determinism over throughput, it was indispensable. But ethernet kept improving speed and reliability while ARCnet retreated to shop-floor niche applications. Alas.

ARCNet is mentioned heavily in The Big Bucks . I have to admit that I knew very little about it before doing research for the book.

One more book on the stack... Now I have to read it to find out how ARCNet worms it's way into a novel about sili valley.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#137

Post by seehafer »

mbajkowski wrote: post #60
caseysoftware wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Had a very similar experience hanging out with him and his equally-brilliant wife Robyn in ATX between 2011-2012. Very approachable guy -- impressively so, given his stature in the industry -- but could be quick with the "what the hell are you talking about?" look.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#138

Post by AlbertCory »

retrocryptid wrote: post #136
AlbertCory wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARCNet is mentioned heavily in The Big Bucks . I have to admit that I knew very little about it before doing research for the book.

One more book on the stack... Now I have to read it to find out how ARCNet worms it's way into a novel about sili valley.

This part's not in the book: Gordon Peterson, the architect of ARCNet, was a major source for me. He talked to Bob back in the day.

Gordon's still bitter about it, and will gladly tell you why Ethernet is inferior.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#139

Post by knuckleheadsmif »

williamDafoe wrote: post #126
hoseja wrote: post #7

What's the killer feature that differentiates Ethernet from other phy protocols?

Original DIX Ethernet was standardized by my manager, David Redell of Xerox. It was the bare minimum to do the job, 6-byte station destination, 6-byte source address, 2-byte packet length, a 2-byte Ethertype field (the latter 2 were combined for networks with hardware framing), and 32-bit CRC. NO arc in the hardware. It leveraged the move to byte-based memories and small CPUs. It followed the end-to-end principle in…

I was in Xerox SDD in the early 80’s I have lots of memories dealing with the large coax taps which we in the ceiling.

I also remember setting up a Star demo at the NCC and someone forget coax cable terminators (or was short one terminator?) which was causing reflectance issues with the signal which was solved by cutting the cable to a precise length to get the demo working.

Re: Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award

#140

Post by AlbertCory »

zokier wrote: post #33
wistlo wrote: post #25

The archetypal "good enough" solution: Instead of preventing collisions, tolerating and managing them. I think of Ethernet often when assessing how close to perfection I need to get in my work.

It is also lesson of doing something now and rewriting it later. For example no modern ethernet network uses cd/csma anymore and it was pretty iconic part of original ethernet. Overall ethernet on physical layer has seen quite an evolution from coax and vampire taps, to twisted pair and hubs, to switched networks, and nowdays wireless, single-pair, optical, and virtual networks

You left out a step: ThinNet coax, without vampire taps!

That's what was at 3Com when I joined in 1985. I even have a section in The Big Bucks where I took down the entire company for a few seconds by disconnecting the coax. No one noticed.

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