One of the founders of the
telecommunications company
3Com, and the inventor of
Ethernet. According to 3Com, Metcalfe came up with the basic principles behind
ethernet while attending
college at
Harvard, and wrote his ideas into his
dissertation, which was then rejected. Years later, while working in the research division of
Xerox, his group was assigned the project of linking his
research center's computers. After refining his ideas,
Ethernet was born.
Three years after the birth of
Ethernet, Metcalfe left
Xerox to help start
3Com. Since then,
3Com has been largly responsible for making
ethernet nearly
ubiquitous in most networking systems today.