Robert Metcalfe named his invention 'Ethernet' after the luminiferous ether, a concept from 19th-century physics.
As heard by us
A clear origin story for Ethernet's path from lab hardware to shared standard.
Ethernet comes across as the story of Robert Metcalfe, a stubborn engineer who kept dragging a networking idea toward something usable. The piece moves from Brooklyn, MIT, and Harvard to Project MAC, then into the hardware work that connected MIT's minicomputers to the ARPANET…
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Want the backstory of how Ethernet became a standard and why that mattered?
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