Thursday, August 1, 2013

Ethernet Turns 40

One of the Austin technology community's own has a big anniversary this week: Bob Metcalfe, Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise in The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering. But, it's not his own birthday, it's the birthday of his original creation, Ethernet. According to the IEEE, it's the 40th anniversary of the creation of Ethernet, and the IEEE standards group that helped bring it to market, the IEEE 802.3 Working Group. Metcalfe--who went on to found 3Com and bring Ethernet to the commercial market--joined UT Austin in 2011 to lead the school's innovation initiatives at the University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering. Metcalfe is well known as the inventor of the Ethernet local area networking standard, which he invented while at the Computer Science Laboratory of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.