
Computers talk to each other via networking, most commonly over a wired ethernet connection. Tom explains how that started and why it was such a breakthrough.
Featuring Tom Merritt.
MP3
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Episode transcript:
To describe Robert Metcalfe’s life might sound stereotypical for an American who grew up in the 1950s. He was born in 1946 in Brooklyn. His Mom was a homemaker and his dad was a test technician working in gyroscopes. He graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1964 and got bachelors in electrical engineering and industrial management from MIT in 1969. He got his Masters in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1970 and was cruising to a Harvard Ph.D. in computer science. A true American success story.
Until he wanted to connect to the brand new ARPANet node at Harvard. Metcalfe didn’t take no for an answer. He made his own fate. He used his contacts at MIT and got a job at the school’s Project MAC, which would eventually become the Computer Science and Artificial INtelligence Lab. He worked on the hardware that linked MIT’s minicomputers to the ARPANet.
It seemed like that was his thing. He proposed APRPANet as a topic for his thesis, but Harvard rejected it. While he tried to figure out how to revise the thesis, he got a job out in California at Xerox PARC. While there he read about the ingenious way scientists in Hawaii had figured out how to connect computers between the islands. It was called ALOHANet. He helped them fix some of the bugs in their connections and folded that into his thesis. This time Harvard accepted it.
It definitely seemed like connecting computers was his thing. And if you’ve ever plugged an ethernet cable in to get the internet, you’re glad it was.
Let’s help you know a little more, about ethernet.
Continue reading “About Ethernet”
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