i. Taking a little time to review some writing from earlier this year… One especially memorable for me. For it was a welcome opportunity to interview networking pioneer Bob Metcalfe as he was named recipient for the 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award for the co-invention, standardization and commercialization of Ethernet.
I won’t reconjure the full story but something I didn’t run in the final draft is something I’d like to share here. It’s a bit about his youth and early interest in technology. I find the pre-histories can be very telling, or just simply interesting. In the run-up to the typical story, the origin questions aren’t a fit. But let’s go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear.
Like ham radios, model trainsets were a path to engineering in Metcalfe’s youth in the 1950s. The model railroad arose in Metcalfe response to my origin question. But in a roundabout, and perhaps surprising way. A trainset was gifted and then built as a father-son bonding experience , and then was atomized – its relays, lights and toggle switches removed from casings and repurposed into something else entirely. As Metcalfe tells it:
My father was a gyroscope technician. And we built a railroad set on a four by eight piece of plywood that we painted green, and then I took the pieces of the control system for the railroad and I built what my eighth-grade teacher called a computer. It could add any number between one, two and three to any other number between one, two and three, and show the result by turning on a light between two and six. So those were the beginnings of my computer days. I never went back to the model railroad. Eventually I started programming computers.
It would be an overstatement to suggest this was the spark that launched Metcalfe’s life-long study in communications technologies and applications. But it has a place in his memory, and it discloses one of the engineer’s methods on the road to invention – what G. Polya described as ‘decomposing and recombining’ important operations in the mind. Decomposed elements are combined in a new manner. Such possibly can send a lad or lass to a science fair exhibition, and on to the institute. It’s likely essential to most problem solving.
ii. Some more. Now, in the popular mind Ethernet has taken a decided backseat to Internet, as I noted in the VentureBeat piece. Still, Metcalfe rightly boasted that Ethernet deserves a lot of credit for proving incredibly resilient and potent. As he has said:
Ethernet was media-independent from the beginning. In retrospect, that was an important insight because Ethernet has been on every medium since.
That’s’ borne out today when you look at the ChatGPT cauldron. The AI asks for GPUs, but to scale them you have to connect them. Right now, Nvidia holds the winning hand with Infiniband. But its not alone. An Ethernet update running under the banner RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet, pronounced “Rocky”) is out there punching today, taking some – but not all – parts of the latest data center mission — to move LLM vectors around in generative ML models.
Is it faster than Nvidia’s favored Infiniband? No. Is it a brewing de jure standard? Yes.
Worth recalling: De jure Ethernet coming out of the work of Metcalfe, co-inventor David Boggs, and others helped advance networked PCs. Another force was government-influenced second-sourcing of key semiconductors. Not exactly the fashion of the moment, but things change.
Some background on Me and Ethernet: When I was in grad school I did my thesis on Local Area Networks – it was a last minute arbitrary selection done at the suggestion of my wonderful classmate Richard Mack. I did the work of the technology assessment under the direction of my tech guru, brilliant beyond words Prof. Kirt Olsen. Cut my teeth! Catching time over more than a year, while working full-time night job at BU Mugar Library, I came up with the estimate that in five years LANs would be a $1B industry. I couldn’t believe it – but it happened. What an honor it was for me to interview Bob Metcalfe, the most pivotal and compelling individual figure in those developments! He has a great spirit still today, with enthusiasm and curiosity. Why I mention curiosity: He was a publisher and pundit in his time, too, you know – and asked me how what formerly was called the trade press was doing these days. – Jack Vaughan
Note: “How to Solve It” Cover by George Giusti/Typography by Edward Gorey – Book PDF Download
Also shown: Bob Metcalfe on a Zoom call with VentureBeat contributor Jack Vaughan.