In 1973, a twenty-six-year-old engineer named Robert Metcalfe sat at a typewriter inside Xerox PARC—arguably the most productive research lab in computing history—and tapped out a memo that would forever change how machines communicate. Tasked with finding a way for PARC’s revolutionary graphical workstations to share a single, expensive laser printer, Metcalfe proposed a resilient data broadcast system running over thick coaxial cables snaking through the ceiling. He named his invention Ethernet, a poetic nod to a debunked nineteenth-century physics theory about an invisible medium carrying light through empty space.

While Xerox executives struggled to commercialize the miracles emerging from their California lab, Metcalfe eventually left to found 3Com, bringing his networking standard to the rest of the world. Over the next fifty years, Ethernet rapidly evolved from bulky metal transceivers clamped onto thick yellow cables into the gigabit and terabit bedrock of the global internet. Today, even as we perceive our digital lives as entirely wireless, every Wi-Fi router eventually connects back to a physical wire that still quietly routes packets using the exact same language Metcalfe sketched out half a century ago.

Read the original article: https://medium.com/@dia_91230/2-94-megabits-per-second-the-1973-memo-that-wired-the-world-62435f142eef

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