Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"?
Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system.
When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said "I made it up."
Me: .. what?
Him: I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more.
Me: .. what?
Him: If I could convince someone to buy 4 instead of 2, that was great. So I told them buying more made each of them more valuable.
It was mind blowing because so many other things were built on that "law" that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have proven out "more nodes are more valuable" but that's where it started.
He also tells a story about declining a job with Steve Jobs to start 3Com and Steve later coming to his wedding. He also shared a scan of his original pitch deck for 3Com which was a set of transparencies because Powerpoint hadn't been invented yet. I think I kept a copy of it..
Btw, when I say "an active member of the Austin startup community" - I mean that seriously.
Not only did he teach a class on startups at the University of Texas but regularly came to a coffee meetup for years, attended Startup Weekend demo time, came to Techstars Demo Day, and was generally present. I even got to do the Twilio 5 Minute Demo for one of his classes (circa 2012).
It was always cool to have someone who shaped our industry just hanging out and chatting with people.
I respect Metcalfe a lot, but halfway through undergraduate discrete math it was pretty obvious to most people in the class even before seeing a formal proof that a fully connected graph has O(n^2) edges. I just figured that people wowed by "Metcalfe's Law" were business types who didn't any formal theory into computing.
HN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing.
If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple the whole thing
Although he made it up, there's an argument that the value goes up more than linearly. But as the network grows, every node doesn't necessarily need to talk to every other node except in rare circumstances, or they can reach each other through an intermediate point. So maybe O(n log n) would be closer.
He may have "made it up" to improve sales, but from a certain viewpoint it's correct. If decide to measure the "value" of a network based on the number of node connections, then the number of connections for n nodes is n(n-1)/2 = 0.5n^2 - 0.5n which is O(n^2).
Of course, the value of something is hard to measure. Typically you measure value as "benefits - costs", and try to convert everything to a currency. E.g., see: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-benefitanalysis.as... . But there are often many unknowns, as well as intangible benefits and costs. That make that process - which seems rigorous at first - a lot harder to do in reality.
So while he may have "made it up" on the spot, he had a deep understanding of networking, and I'm sure he knew that the number of connections is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. So I suspect his intuition grabbed a quick way to estimate value, using what he knew about connection growth. Sure, it's nowhere near as rigorous as "benefits - costs", but that is hard to really measure, and many decisions simply need adequate enough information to make a reasonable decision. In which case, he both "made it up" and made a claim that you can justify mathematically.
And yet it's trivially true. Value accrues with connectivity, which is
number of the edges in a fully connected graph being n(n-1)/2, which
as n grows larger approximates to n^2. I would be surprised he said he
"made it up", other than as a joke about elementary computer science.
Well deserved. I remember dealing with a whole raft of other networking technologies and Ethernet stood head-and-shoulders above anything else available at the time.
One thing that is not well appreciated today is how power efficient Ethernet was, even on launch in the coax era. Other network technologies (Token Ring as embodied by IBMs network cards, for instance) consumed power like there was no tomorrow. Leading to someone quipping renaming it to 'smoking thing'.
As the price came down (around the NE1000/2000 and 3C509 era) it suddenly was everywhere and economies of scale wiped out the competition until WiFi came along. But even today - and as I'm writing this on my ethernet connected laptop - I prefer wired networks to wireless ones. They seem more reliable to me and throughput is constant rather than spotty, which weighs heavier to me than convenience.
So thank you Bob Metcalfe, I actually think this award is a bit late.
I had no idea that Token Ring was inefficient with power, but it certainly had a bunch of other problems. Biggest (at least on PCs) was its inability to recover from a cable being unplugged without resetting a bunch of the system, and the type-1 token ring cables win the award for being the most needlessly bulky,[1] even if the connectors had a plug-into-each-other party trick.
I still have a soft spot in my heart for ARCNet. In the 80s it was cheaper than ethernet, but more reliable than token ring. And for the few places that prioritized determinism over throughput, it was indispensable.
But ethernet kept improving speed and reliability while ARCnet retreated to shop-floor niche applications.
I never knew Don Becker, but I knew Dave Boggs who died just last year. (The Turing Award committee should do a better job including more people, even the dead. Leaving Ralph Merkle off the public key award was petty.)
Sure, years ago. But today Ethernet is just as scammy as everyone else, we've been stuck at 1 Gbps on consumer grade hardware for more than 15 years. There are claims (unverified ofc) about their executives boasting about their stupid margins. 1 Gb switch is like 10-20 euros meanwhile 2.5 Gbps is like over 100...
I think around 2011, they offered the first UT Longhorns Startup course, it was cool and hip and new, and they'd flown in mentors from SV and other places, so I figured, why not?
So, after applying, I had shown up at a hotel near campus. While waiting in the lobby, playing with their unsecured wifi, a rather distinguished looking gentleman came up to me, and asked, Hey are you here for the Startup Course interviews?
Yeah...
Well, why are you here in the lobby?
Well, I was told to wait here, and its been a half hour nobody called me.
He gave me a look, direct in the eyes, and said, oh, really? And you're just going to sit here and wait?
I was dumbfounded. Of course, it made sense, but it felt.. I didn't want to piss off the organizers, right?'
"Go in there, and get it!" as he clawed the air like a tiger. Damn, he was right.
So i ambled in, looked around, found a seat near the guy organizing (Josh Baer, another awesome guy) introduced myself and sat at a table by myself, just waiting for an in...
Then the gentleman from the lobby came in and sat in front of me, with a big grin.
Hi?
Hi.
You're a part of this?
Yes, my name's Bob Metcalfe.
Cool, thanks for the pep talk. So, whats your story?
Well, I founded 3Com, and helped come up with Ethernet.
> "Metcalfe insists on calling Wi-Fi by its original name, Wireless Ethernet, for old times’ sake."
Okay, besides all his contributions, I've decided this guy is my favorite for that alone. Imagine if he was your (great?) uncle and you're on a family vacation together. "What's the Wi-Fi password here, Bob?"
Bob: "What's the what now?"
You: "Excuse me. What's the Wireless Ethernet password?"
In this Infoworld column back in 1995 Bob predicted Internet would collapse in 1996 due to security breaches, capacity overloads, and demand for video online. He also promised to eat the article if this did not happen. And kept his promise.
It is also lesson of doing something now and rewriting it later. For example no modern ethernet network uses cd/csma anymore and it was pretty iconic part of original ethernet. Overall ethernet on physical layer has seen quite an evolution from coax and vampire taps, to twisted pair and hubs, to switched networks, and nowdays wireless, single-pair, optical, and virtual networks
Ethernet was always inefficient, with a crazy amount of unused legacy space reserved in an unnecessarily large header. CSMA/CD for contention was one of the ugliest medium access solutions imaginable. The coax implementation needing termination plugs was also ugly. Its advantage was cost, having had no license fees, making it suited to consumer/commercial applications driving economies of scale. It's the VHS of datacomms.
It's evolved, thankfully, but it remains an ugly, inefficient standard that only has life because of its legacy. And it's been increasingly jimmied into professional, carrier applications for which it was never intended and where far superior, though more expensive solutions already existed.
That's not to say its creators don't deserve credit. It did its job well enough for its early days. But that's why this award comes too late. Because now Ethernet is the bloated, inelegant dinosaur we've built an ecosystem around, but to admire it is to forget the competitors it drove to extinction along the way.
It was a lot less ugly than whatever else passed for networking standards at the physical level in those days.
Arcnet, Twinax, Token Ring and so on, I've probably used them all, and at scale. Compared to Ethernet they all sucked, besides being proprietary they were slow, prone to breaking in very complex to troubleshoot ways (though ethernet had its own interesting failure modes in practice it was far more reliable), and some used tons of power which made them unusable for quite a few applications. On top of that it was way cheaper and carried broad support from different vendors, which enabled competition and helped to improve it and keep prices low.
Ethernet evolved in backward compatible way for more than 30 years. If we would design a new standard from scratch to fit the same use cases we in theory can learn from the experience and improve things but at the same it would be hard to resist a temptation to make it future-proof by adding a lot of things just in case and this new standard likely will be even more wasteful. And having opportunity doesn't mean it will be used. I often see new design make mistakes avoided in older designs because people have limited time to learn and body of knowledge is too large to always successfully learn from the past.
Also hardware is not like software where you can rewrite a site using a JS framework of the day every few years. Compatibility is really important.
You could not be more wrong! Efficiency and overhead are measured as a percent of frame size and 128-byte packets (X.25) or 48-byte frames (Atm) are abortions. 1500 bytes at the outset and the overhead is < 1% and < 0.2% with jumbograms (8kB). Every 802.11 standard is a superset of Ethernet and that makes DIX Ethernet the most scalable network protocol of all time!
I would recommend to watch a talk by Bob Metcalfe given in 1978: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj7r3vYAjGY
for so impactful technology this video has surprisingly few views on youtube.
In "The Big Bucks" I have two quotes from him, which he graciously allowed me to use as something he would have said (they're not very exciting). Normally I never have a real person appear and do anything; at most people speak of them in the third person.
In "Inventing the Future" I have the 1978 story about the lightning strike that took down the Ethernet between PARC and SDD. Bob had actually forgotten it, but he remembered the second lightning strike that helped sell Ethernet, because Ron Crane (RIP) had remembered the first one and engineered the Ethernet card to withstand them. As luck would have it, during a competition there actually was a lightning strike, and 3Com's survived it while the competitor's didn't.
If anyone's interested in the history of the early internet, I recently read the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner and it is a very interesting read about how we went from ARPA to WWW, including a lot of the warts you associate with large scale projects like ARPANet grew into (and the book features Metcalfe quite extensively when talking about Ethernet and ALOHAnet).
Honestly, it's nice to see technology like ethernet, which is both "as simple as it should be but no simpler", and has also stood the test of time get recognized and rewarded!
A veritable hero of our times boasts a mere 688 followers on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/RobertMMetcalfe (as of the dispatch of this message).
This is like when I heard Roger Penrose won a Nobel Prize in 2020 and I thought for a second "wait is this his second? What? You mean he hadn't been awarded one until now? Who was in line ahead of him and for what?"
Reading the original ethernet paper was one of my favorite moments in college. Just a brilliantly pragmatic design (especially handling packet collisions with randomized retransmissions).
Made me appreciate how important it is for something to be simple and pragmatic, rather than over-engineered to perfection.
The choice of 48 bits for the hardware/station address seems to have been a pretty good choice: it's been 40+ years and we still have no run out. I'm curious to know if anyone has done the math on when Ethernet address exhaustion will occur.
While the Ethernet frame has been tweaked with over the decades, addressing has been steady. Curious to know if any transition will ever been needed and how would that work.
In hindsight, IP's (initial) 32 bit address was too small, though for a network that was (primarily) created for research purposes, but ended up escaping 'into the wild' and accidentally becoming production, it was probably a reasonable choice: who expected >4 billion hosts on an academic/research-only network?
"Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" (Infoworld, June 21, 1999)
... Why do I think Linux won't kill Windows? Two reasons. The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology.
The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism. Richard Stallman's Marx rants about the evils of the profit motive and multinational corporations. Linus Torvalds' Lenin laughs about world domination....
[+] [-] caseysoftware|3 years ago|reply
Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system.
When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said "I made it up."
Me: .. what?
Him: I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more.
Me: .. what?
Him: If I could convince someone to buy 4 instead of 2, that was great. So I told them buying more made each of them more valuable.
It was mind blowing because so many other things were built on that "law" that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have proven out "more nodes are more valuable" but that's where it started.
He also tells a story about declining a job with Steve Jobs to start 3Com and Steve later coming to his wedding. He also shared a scan of his original pitch deck for 3Com which was a set of transparencies because Powerpoint hadn't been invented yet. I think I kept a copy of it..
[+] [-] caseysoftware|3 years ago|reply
Not only did he teach a class on startups at the University of Texas but regularly came to a coffee meetup for years, attended Startup Weekend demo time, came to Techstars Demo Day, and was generally present. I even got to do the Twilio 5 Minute Demo for one of his classes (circa 2012).
It was always cool to have someone who shaped our industry just hanging out and chatting with people.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] passwordoops|3 years ago|reply
If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple the whole thing
[+] [-] jacquesm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btilly|3 years ago|reply
https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf has the details.
[+] [-] chasd00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not2b|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwheeler|3 years ago|reply
Of course, the value of something is hard to measure. Typically you measure value as "benefits - costs", and try to convert everything to a currency. E.g., see: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-benefitanalysis.as... . But there are often many unknowns, as well as intangible benefits and costs. That make that process - which seems rigorous at first - a lot harder to do in reality.
So while he may have "made it up" on the spot, he had a deep understanding of networking, and I'm sure he knew that the number of connections is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. So I suspect his intuition grabbed a quick way to estimate value, using what he knew about connection growth. Sure, it's nowhere near as rigorous as "benefits - costs", but that is hard to really measure, and many decisions simply need adequate enough information to make a reasonable decision. In which case, he both "made it up" and made a claim that you can justify mathematically.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pabs3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksajadi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|3 years ago|reply
One thing that is not well appreciated today is how power efficient Ethernet was, even on launch in the coax era. Other network technologies (Token Ring as embodied by IBMs network cards, for instance) consumed power like there was no tomorrow. Leading to someone quipping renaming it to 'smoking thing'.
As the price came down (around the NE1000/2000 and 3C509 era) it suddenly was everywhere and economies of scale wiped out the competition until WiFi came along. But even today - and as I'm writing this on my ethernet connected laptop - I prefer wired networks to wireless ones. They seem more reliable to me and throughput is constant rather than spotty, which weighs heavier to me than convenience.
So thank you Bob Metcalfe, I actually think this award is a bit late.
Anybody remember Don Becker?
[+] [-] robin_reala|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_faste...
[+] [-] retrocryptid|3 years ago|reply
But ethernet kept improving speed and reliability while ARCnet retreated to shop-floor niche applications.
Alas.
[+] [-] eointierney|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xhkkffbf|3 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/technology/david-boggs-de...
[+] [-] rejectfinite|3 years ago|reply
They ARE more reliable.
I much rather use ethernet than wifi on desktops and laptop.
Now with video meetings, high quality webcams, mics and gaming, latency and bandwith is king.
WiFi is usually FAST but it is not as STABLE.
[+] [-] oaiey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lunfard000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArtRichards|3 years ago|reply
So, after applying, I had shown up at a hotel near campus. While waiting in the lobby, playing with their unsecured wifi, a rather distinguished looking gentleman came up to me, and asked, Hey are you here for the Startup Course interviews?
Yeah...
Well, why are you here in the lobby?
Well, I was told to wait here, and its been a half hour nobody called me.
He gave me a look, direct in the eyes, and said, oh, really? And you're just going to sit here and wait?
I was dumbfounded. Of course, it made sense, but it felt.. I didn't want to piss off the organizers, right?'
"Go in there, and get it!" as he clawed the air like a tiger. Damn, he was right.
So i ambled in, looked around, found a seat near the guy organizing (Josh Baer, another awesome guy) introduced myself and sat at a table by myself, just waiting for an in...
Then the gentleman from the lobby came in and sat in front of me, with a big grin.
Hi?
Hi.
You're a part of this?
Yes, my name's Bob Metcalfe.
Cool, thanks for the pep talk. So, whats your story?
Well, I founded 3Com, and helped come up with Ethernet.
Oh... damn.. cool..
...And my life has never been the same since!
If you read this, thanks Bob.
[+] [-] xp84|3 years ago|reply
Okay, besides all his contributions, I've decided this guy is my favorite for that alone. Imagine if he was your (great?) uncle and you're on a family vacation together. "What's the Wi-Fi password here, Bob?"
Bob: "What's the what now?"
You: "Excuse me. What's the Wireless Ethernet password?"
Bob: "Oh, it's HotelGuest2023"
[+] [-] bundie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpalomaki|3 years ago|reply
https://1995blog.com/2015/12/03/prediction-of-the-year-1995-...
[+] [-] wistlo|3 years ago|reply
Instead of preventing collisions, tolerating and managing them.
I think of Ethernet often when assessing how close to perfection I need to get in my work.
[+] [-] zokier|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sporktacular|3 years ago|reply
It's evolved, thankfully, but it remains an ugly, inefficient standard that only has life because of its legacy. And it's been increasingly jimmied into professional, carrier applications for which it was never intended and where far superior, though more expensive solutions already existed.
That's not to say its creators don't deserve credit. It did its job well enough for its early days. But that's why this award comes too late. Because now Ethernet is the bloated, inelegant dinosaur we've built an ecosystem around, but to admire it is to forget the competitors it drove to extinction along the way.
[+] [-] jacquesm|3 years ago|reply
Arcnet, Twinax, Token Ring and so on, I've probably used them all, and at scale. Compared to Ethernet they all sucked, besides being proprietary they were slow, prone to breaking in very complex to troubleshoot ways (though ethernet had its own interesting failure modes in practice it was far more reliable), and some used tons of power which made them unusable for quite a few applications. On top of that it was way cheaper and carried broad support from different vendors, which enabled competition and helped to improve it and keep prices low.
[+] [-] citrin_ru|3 years ago|reply
Also hardware is not like software where you can rewrite a site using a JS framework of the day every few years. Compatibility is really important.
[+] [-] williamDafoe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethbr0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarmo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citrin_ru|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|3 years ago|reply
In "The Big Bucks" I have two quotes from him, which he graciously allowed me to use as something he would have said (they're not very exciting). Normally I never have a real person appear and do anything; at most people speak of them in the third person.
In "Inventing the Future" I have the 1978 story about the lightning strike that took down the Ethernet between PARC and SDD. Bob had actually forgotten it, but he remembered the second lightning strike that helped sell Ethernet, because Ron Crane (RIP) had remembered the first one and engineered the Ethernet card to withstand them. As luck would have it, during a competition there actually was a lightning strike, and 3Com's survived it while the competitor's didn't.
[+] [-] stringfood|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] madmax108|3 years ago|reply
If anyone's interested in the history of the early internet, I recently read the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner and it is a very interesting read about how we went from ARPA to WWW, including a lot of the warts you associate with large scale projects like ARPANet grew into (and the book features Metcalfe quite extensively when talking about Ethernet and ALOHAnet).
Honestly, it's nice to see technology like ethernet, which is both "as simple as it should be but no simpler", and has also stood the test of time get recognized and rewarded!
[+] [-] dale_glass|3 years ago|reply
Having millions of packets per second is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Even 10G is still challenging, not to speak of 100G.
[+] [-] lispython|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jack_riminton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cduzz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ozzie_osman|3 years ago|reply
Made me appreciate how important it is for something to be simple and pragmatic, rather than over-engineered to perfection.
[+] [-] japanuspus|3 years ago|reply
https://www.quantamagazine.org/bob-metcalfe-ethernet-pioneer...
(This link is also on front page right now, but not getting any comments).
[+] [-] throw0101b|3 years ago|reply
The choice of 48 bits for the hardware/station address seems to have been a pretty good choice: it's been 40+ years and we still have no run out. I'm curious to know if anyone has done the math on when Ethernet address exhaustion will occur.
While the Ethernet frame has been tweaked with over the decades, addressing has been steady. Curious to know if any transition will ever been needed and how would that work.
In hindsight, IP's (initial) 32 bit address was too small, though for a network that was (primarily) created for research purposes, but ended up escaping 'into the wild' and accidentally becoming production, it was probably a reasonable choice: who expected >4 billion hosts on an academic/research-only network?
[+] [-] jonstewart|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedrovhb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
"Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" (Infoworld, June 21, 1999)
... Why do I think Linux won't kill Windows? Two reasons. The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology.
The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism. Richard Stallman's Marx rants about the evils of the profit motive and multinational corporations. Linus Torvalds' Lenin laughs about world domination....
<https://web.archive.org/web/19991216220752/http://www.infowo...>
Though in time he moderated his views ... slightly:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20070622115025/http://www.linux....>
[+] [-] agomez314|3 years ago|reply