“Tickled pink” is Bob Metcalfe’s reaction to his hottest accolade – the Association for Computing Machinery’s A. M. Turing Award for inventing and commercializing Ethernet. The award was announced today and will be offered at a ceremony June 10 in San Francisco.

With his trademark sense of humor, Metcalfe says, “It’s a huge shock and a delight. I have obtained other awards in the past so I’m acquainted with the notion that I have a new obligation to behave myself and stay up to the standard of the award and be a role design based mostly on that.”

The award carries a $1 million prize. “My spouse implies I devote it on her,” Metcalfe quipped, ahead of adding that he has not labored out the specifics but will in all probability pour most of it into his loved ones basis (just after he fills up his boat with diesel gas).

He says the award signifies significant recognition for the purpose of networking, which occupies a “little corner” of the broader field of computer science.

Ethernet turns 50 decades previous on Could 22, and Metcalfe says he remembers that day in 1973 incredibly plainly. “I was sitting in Setting up 34 (at Xerox PARC), at a Selectric typewriter, typing a summary of my views on how networks should really work, and then I really hard-drew the diagrams. I wrote the memo on the Orator ball on the Selectric, which was sans serif mainly because I favored that font.”

David Boggs, the co-creator of Ethernet, died final calendar year and Metcalfe has fond reminiscences of their partnership. “He and I had been the Bobbsey Twins. We were wonderfully complementary I getting the additional articulate of the two and he staying the a lot more detailed oriented. Alongside one another we constructed this issue, and I pass up him. He was a superior mate.”

Ethernet at 50

Soon after co-inventing and working to standardize Ethernet, Metcalfe commercialized the know-how at 3Com, the business that he founded in 1979.

“Ethernet is the foundational technologies of the online, which supports extra than five billion buyers and permits a lot of contemporary lifestyle,” suggests Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow and SVP of Google Investigate and AI. “Today, with an estimated seven billion ports close to the world, Ethernet is so ubiquitous that we acquire it for granted. It’s effortless to neglect that our interconnected earth would not be the same if not for Bob Metcalfe’s invention and his enduring eyesight that each and every pc necessary to be networked.”

Primary Ethernet ran at 2.94mbps. These days, Gigabit Ethernet deployments are common and 400Gig Ethernet is gradually gaining momentum amid hyperscalers, telcos, and other companies that have to have ultra-higher-pace backbones. In the lab and on the roadmap are 800Gbps Ethernet and even 1.6Tbps Ethernet. Metcalfe says there’s no restrict to how quick Ethernet can go – the upcoming frontier is 1.6T/bit Ethernet on a single Lambda.

Scorching on geothermal electricity

Metcalfe has worn numerous hats through his job: inventor, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, tutorial, and pundit. For the duration of the 1990s, he was publisher of InfoWorld (a Foundry publication) and wrote a well known column.

The 76-calendar year-outdated states that using on new problems is what has stored him engaged and determined: “I figured out that the pleasurable portion is at the steepest element of the finding out curve.” Now, Metcalfe is a exploration affiliate in computational engineering at the Laptop or computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT.

His aim is on modeling geothermic wells. Metcalfe suggests eothermal energy has the prospective to “save the entire world.” He says, “If we can great drilling and make it affordable, we can have entry to an infinite offer of entirely cleanse power.”

Metcalfe claims he produced an curiosity in geothermal power when he was at the College of Texas, where by he was Professor of Innovation at the Cockrell College of Engineering, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the McCombs School of Business enterprise, and Murchison Fellow of Cost-free Organization at The College of Texas at Austin.

He was associated in a two-yr job with the Deptartment of Vitality to use startups to speed up adoption of the technology and acquired hooked on the strategy of modeling geothermic wells.

“That demanded that I know thermodynamics. I by no means took any thermodynamics when I was in university so now I’m researching thermodynamics.” He adds, “After I understand thermodynamics, I have to discover linear algebra.”

That would make Metcalfe the poster boy for lifelong learning. “There’s no other way to be,” he claims.

Optimistic about the long run

From his vantage level as a person of the early pioneers of the computing/web period, Metcalfe states he’s optimistic about the upcoming. He describes himself as “awestruck” with the developments in artificial intelligence and suggests the world wide web performs a important position in producing sure that sufficient knowledge is readily available for AI-based mostly modeling techniques.