A History of Silicon Valley
This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"
Biographies
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| Editor
| Correspondence
(Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi)
Bob Metcalfe
Bob Metcalfe (New York, 1946) studied at the electrical engineering MIT,
business management at the Sloan School,
and computer science at Harvard, where he worked
on Project MAC and graduated in 1973. A year earlier he had already joined Xerox PARC in
Palo Alto, where he had just invented the local-area networking technology
Ethernet.
The first Ethernet was finally operational in 1976.
Metcalfe also enunciated his law: the value of a network of devices increases exponentially with the number of connected devices. This was popularly translated
in terms of users: the value of a network increases exponentially with the
number of the people that it connects.
In 1976 Metcalfe joined the Xerox division that was working on the Xerox Star workstation.
In 1979 Metcalfe left Xerox PARC to found 3Com (Computers, Communication and
Compatibility) in his Palo Alto apartment (but the first offices were in
Santa Clara). The idea was to provide
personal computer manufacturers with Ethernet adaptor cards so that businesses
could connect all the small computers in one local-area network.
He left 3Com in 1990 and started writing about technology.
In 1995 he predicted the Internet would collapse within one year.
In 2001 he joined the venture-capitalist firm Polaris Venture.
History of Silicon Valley
| Biographies
| History pages
| Editor
| Correspondence
|