ChatGPT warned me in opposition to asking legendary engineer Bob Metcalfe about his 1996 prediction that the web would collapse. This got here after I sought the chatbot’s steerage on what inquiries to ask the person who this week acquired the ACM Turing Award, the $1 million prize dubbed the Nobel of computing. The AI oracle prompt I stick with quizzing him on his well-known accomplishments—inventing Ethernet, beginning the 3Com Company, codifying the worth of networks, and educating college students in Texas about innovation, which he did till he retired final 12 months “to pursue a sixth profession.”
However ChatGPT thought it was a horrible thought to carry up Metcalfe’s daring prognostication, simply because the community he’d helped pioneer was taking off, that the quantity of bits zipping across the web would trigger the mom of all crashes. OpenAI’s black field instructed me that since Metcalfe’s guess had flopped in a really public method, I’d be risking the honoree’s pique if I raised it, and from then on he’d be too aggravated to share his finest ideas. The interview can be a catastrophe.
Oh-kay, I assumed. After which I clicked on the Zoom hyperlink.
The prizewinner who greeted me appeared terrific at 76, hardly modified from the man I final noticed perhaps 30 years in the past when he was working tech conferences and internet hosting nice events at his mansion in Boston’s Again Bay. (He spoke to me from his dwelling in Austin, the place he had moved for his educating gig.)
For somebody known for his bluster, he appeared genuinely humbled to hitch the Turing membership, although you would possibly say it took them lengthy sufficient. It was nearly 50 years in the past to the day that Metcalfe wrote a memo to his bosses at Xerox Palo Alto Analysis Middle proposing a approach to join the lab’s revolutionary private computer systems to its groundbreaking laser printer, and to at least one one other. Impressed by an obscure Hawaiian system known as AlohaNet, he discovered a approach to dynamically deal with high-speed information in a community with out having the bits conflict or forcing reconfiguration every time a brand new consumer confirmed up. He dubbed it Ethernet. (He developed it with a co-inventor, David Boggs.)
Metcalfe’s thought not solely solved the issue at PARC, however wound up scaling into an important know-how for everybody. Over 5 billion folks use the web. Did he have that in thoughts when he concocted these first networks? “No, though it would be handy for me to say so,” he says. “PARC was a really a lot ‘construct your personal instruments’ form of place. However on reflection, what we had been doing was serving to the web transition from the networking of dumb terminals to the networking of non-public computer systems.”
In 1979, Metcalfe founded 3Com to assist commercialize Ethernet, after he’d persuaded Xerox to make the networking know-how an open customary. All through the Eighties he relentlessly promoted the usual; by then he’d made a superb statement that defined the expansion of not simply the web, but in addition the numerous companies constructed on prime of it: that the worth of a community is proportional to the sq. of the variety of customers. In different phrases, every time a brand new consumer joins a community it grows extra highly effective.
In 1985, the economist George Gilder named the concept Metcalfe’s law. It’s in all probability essentially the most celebrated equation of its form since Gordon Moore’s observation about laptop chips. Metcalfe says his motivation was not science however commerce. “It was a gross sales device,” he says. “Folks had been constructing small networks and never discovering them helpful. So I ginned up a slide on an Alto that confirmed that the price of a community goes up linearly with the variety of nodes, however the variety of doable connections goes up because the sq.. Our salesforce took this 35-millimeter slide and instructed folks the rationale they weren’t helpful is that they weren’t large enough. The treatment, in fact, was shopping for extra of our networks.”
