Podcast appearances and mentions of bob metcalfe

On this episode of the Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different we have a conversation with Mike Maples Jr., co-founder of Floodgate, about his new book "Pattern Breakers." We explore the concept of Pattern Breakers, non-consensus thinking, and the breakthrough sequence for startups. Mike shares some insights on the role of language in defining new patterns and the significance of early adopters. The conversation provides valuable perspectives on the mindset and strategies essential for entrepreneurial breakthroughs and category design. You're listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let's go. Mike Maples Jr on Understanding Pattern Breakers Mike Maples Jr. introduces the concept of pattern breakers as individuals or companies that disrupt the status quo by proposing radically different futures. These entities don't just imagine a different future; they live in it, tinkering with new technologies and experiencing firsthand the opportunities to break the limits of current thinking, feeling, and acting. Mike also discusses non-consensus thinking, and how is crucial it is for pattern breakers. It involves challenging widely accepted norms and beliefs to create transformative value. He emphasizes that breakthrough startups often face resistance from the present and the status quo, making it essential for founders to be disagreeable in the right situations. The Breakthrough Sequence for Startups The first step in the breakthrough sequence is achieving insight breakthroughs. Founders need to immerse themselves in the future they envision, understanding new opportunities and creating new patterns. Mike uses examples of legendary founders like Marc Andreessen and Bob Metcalfe, who were visitors from the future, to illustrate this point. Once insight breakthroughs are achieved, the next step is to achieve product-market fit. This involves building what's missing for early adopters and lighthouse customers, who play a crucial role in shaping the direction of a startup. Founders must listen to these early believers and co-create the future with them. The final step in the breakthrough sequence is driving growth. This involves creating a movement and category design, gradually moving more people to the envisioned future. Mike highlights the importance of using differentiated language to escape the comparison trap and the conformity trap, leading people into a different future. The Role of Big Companies in Creating Breakthroughs Big companies can also create breakthroughs by harnessing inflections and insights to change the future. Mike discusses different approaches big companies can take, such as sustaining innovation, organic growth, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and partnering. However, he also acknowledges the challenges and biases that come with being a successful company. One effective strategy for big companies is backcasting, where leaders stand in the future and look back to the present, envisioning how they achieved a radically different future. This approach helps companies switch their mental scaffolding from being in the present and looking forward to being in the future and looking back to the present. To hear more from Mike Maples Jr on Pattern Breakers and creating breakthroughs for your company, download and listen to this episode. Bio Mike Maples Jr. is an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. He's co-founder of Silicon Valley based, early-stage VC Floodgate. And the host of the popular “Starting Greatness” podcast. Investments include Twitter, Lyft, Bazaarvoice, Sparefoot, Ayasdi, Xamarin, Doubledutch, Twitch.tv, Playdom, Chegg, Demandforce, Rappi, Smule, and Outreach. Link Connect with Mike Maples Jr.! Floodgate | Twitter | LinkedIn | Starting Greatness Podcast Check out Mike's new book, Pattern Breakers! Amazon Books | Porchlight Books | Starting Greatness | Patte...

PART TWO Featuring No time for dreams: a soldier's six-year journey through World War II.  By Robert W. Metcalfe, 4th Green Howards. PLUS: What someone's father found in the jungle AFTER the war. Who wrote to Bob Metcalfe upon publication of his book. Full show notes, photos and transcript at:https://www.fightingthroughpodcast.co.uk/94-Dunkirk-Special-Bob-Metcalf-Brit-Canadian-Green-Howard-WW2-history Reviews on main website:https://www.fightingthroughpodcast.co.uk/reviews/new/ Apple reviews: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/ww2-fighting-through-from-dunkirk-to-hamburg-war-diary/id624581457?mt=2 Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PaulCheall Follow me on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/FightingThroughPodcast YouTube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnlqRO9MdFBUrKM6ExEOzVQ?view_as=subscriber   Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/fightingthrough Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FightingThrough   Links to features in the show:   Thomas W Gray story - The Eighth Air Force Historical Society (official) Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/8THAFHS/permalink/6392716644111145/   WW2 Stories of Chaos and Courage Robert Gough https://www.facebook.com/groups/754427714964136/permalink/1401905480216353/?mibextid=zDhOQc Spitfire downed on Dunkirk beach https://www.facebook.com/groups/754427714964136/permalink/1298240560582846/?mibextid=zDhOQc Ramsgate life-boat - The France and Flanders Campaign  1940 Facebook https://www.facebook.com/861551180637519/posts/pfbid0MUyULj43uQvZ7CJjWhUJRUEd6P4xmbBKapXfv1d2hTvUzmcEAQYV1ZCeEa4Q7Xvql/ Thomas W Gray - The Eighth Air Force Historical Society (official) Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/8THAFHS/permalink/6392716644111145/ WW2 Stories of Chaos and Courage Robert Gough https://www.facebook.com/groups/754427714964136/permalink/1401905480216353/?mibextid=zDhOQc Recollections of Lieutenant JWR Cocke - Wilbur https://www.facebook.com/861551180637519/posts/pfbid023vpZUKbAJvcmkh2Y4HXQh25buYPeT4doKhBSzfnPus328rVKso3GuuQJvxuqZSpol/ More Dunkirk stories: https://www.facebook.com/groups/754427714964136/search/?q=dunkirk Seth Vader's grandfather's memoir: https://www.reddit.com/r/ww2/s/5OHnpaX7S9 John Moran of Scottish parentage but a Canadian wrote a book under the name Ian Moran called the Lone Piper.  https://www.amazon.com.au/Lone-Piper-Story-Millin-Lovats/dp/1706961251  

With the launch of the Apple Vision Pro headset, in this month's article on Link to Leaders, I explore failed predictions in technology and reflect on the importance of timing in the market, mentioning Bob Metcalfe's article from 1993, in which the father of Ethernet claimed that mobile computing would permanently fail. Why do most predictions made before paradigm shifts fail to be more accurate?

This is the untold history of how the internet almost didn't happen. It's an ode to fathers and daughters. And it's a tale about the origins of the man-computer symbiosis that's still profoundly relevant to our society today. Host Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan, an editor-at-large at Inc., is a James Beard Award-winning journalist who has worked for NBC News as well as three of the nation's largest newspapers, and who created the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Rotten. Dare-Bryan's connection to the story is deeply personal—her father, Joseph Haughney, was one of the internet's founding fathers. By looking to the past, Computer Freaks dives into modern debates: Could we have prevented online harm from the start? What is the balance between free speech and online content moderation? How much human work should be delegated to technology and A.I.? And what direction should this growing labyrinthine network of computers take? Computer Freaks tells the dramatic, untold history of the internet straight from the mouths of its pioneering inventors: Len Kleinrock, Robert Kahn, Charley Kline, Steve Crocker, Vinton Cerf, and Bob Metcalfe, among many others. Exclusive interviews uncover hidden stories found nowhere else about the Arpanet, online harm, hacking, authentication, cybersecurity, Ethernet, TCP IP, packet switching, queuing theory, and the early contributions of women in tech.

In today's episode, we're trying something different!   Usually, y'all know I have one guest and I ask them a whole bunch of questions.    BUT today, I have THREE guests. And I asked each of them to give me the advice they wish they could tell their 20-year-old self.   In today's episode, you'll hear from:   - Bing Gordon: Former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts  - Paul Orfalea: Founder of Kinkos… which sold for over $2.6 BILLION dollars!! - And Bob Metcalfe: Who invented the ethernet cable… which was the original internet.   ALL of these guys have two things in common: They're AT LEAST 70-years-old and they're all multi-millionaires… or billionaires!   Who better to get advice from in your 20s!? If you've ever wanted to learn about what 70 year-olds would tell their 20-year-old selves, you'll love this episode.   In this conversation, you'll enjoy 3 BIG things: - What Bing Gordon DIDN'T do in his 20s that would have made his life a whole lot easier - The advice Paul Orfalea's mom gave him when HE was in his 20s - And the ONE skill Bob Metcalfe wishes he learned sooner… that you can learn NOW.   Enjoy those 3 things… plus a bunch more ear nuggets along the way.   If today's episode inspires you to start your own business but you don't know where to start — join my Monthly1K course!! I just reopened it and you can join it now for just $10 bucks. Yep, it's not a subscription. You just buy it once and I walk you step by step through how to create a one thousand dollar per month business. Head over to OkDork.com/Monthly1K to sign up. And check out TidyCal, our scheduling tool. New Mutual Availability beta feature out now! ✉️ Signup for my weekly newsletter (I reply to emails): https://okdork.com/email-newsletter/  

Apple's Friday Night Baseball returns; Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe wins the Turing Award

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Bob Metcalfe joins Stephen at the 20th annual Wolfram Summer School. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

Bob Metcalfe co-invented the Ethernet in 1973 while working at Xerox. He didn't get rich from helping to invent the Ethernet though. Bob actually got rich by starting his own computer networking company called 3Com Corporation, where he sold Ethernet and many other products. After the success of 3Com, which became a multi-billion dollar company, he tried many other careers. He was a journalist, a VC, and a professor. And now, he is looking for his next gig. https://okdork.com/podcast/245 Use this link to get 10% off at checkout on AppSumo: https://appsumo.com/?coupon=noah10&code=noah10

One of my first jobs out of college was ripping Banyan VINES out of a company and replacing it with LAN Manager. Banyan VINES was a network operating system for Unix systems. It came along in 1984. This was a time when minicomputers running Unix were running at most every University and when Unix offered far more features that the alternatives. Sharing files was as old as the Internet. Telnet was created in 1969. FTP came along in 1971. SMB in 1983. Networking computers together had evolved from just the ARPANET to local protocols like ALOHAnet, which inspired Bob Metcalfe to start work on the PARC Universal Packet protocol with David Boggs, which evolved into the Xerox Network Systems, or XNS, suite of networking protocols that were developed to network the Xerox Alto. Along the way the two of them co-invented Ethernet. But there were developments happening in various locations in silos. For example, TCP was more of an ARPANET then NSFNET project so wasn't used for computers on their own networks to communicate yet. Data General was founded in 1968 when Edson de Castro, the project manager for the PDP-8 at Digital Equipment Corporation, grew frustrated that the PDP wasn't evolving fast enough. He, Henry Burkhardt, and Richard Sogge of Digital would be joined by Herbert Richman, who did sales for Fairchild Semiconductor. They were proud of the PDP-8. It was a beautiful machine. But they wanted to go even further. And they didn't feel like they could do so at Digital. A few computers later, Within a year, they shipped the next generation machine, which they called the Nova. They released more computers but then came the explosion of computers that was the personal computing market. Microcomputers showed up in offices around the world and on multiple desks. And it didn't take long before people started wondering if it wouldn't be faster to run a cable between computers than it was to save a file to a floppy and get on an elevator. By the 1970s, Data General had been writing software for customers, mostly for the rising tide of UNIX System V implementations. But just giving customers a TCP/IP stack or an application that could open a socket over an X.25 network, which was later replaced with Frame Relay networks run by phone systems and for legacy support on those X.25 was streamed over TCP/IP. Some of the people from those projects at Data General saw an opportunity to build a company that focused on a common need, moving files back and forth between the microcomputers that were also being connected to these networks. David Mahoney was a manager at Data General who saw what customers were asking for. And he saw an increasing under of those microcomputers needed a few common services to connect to. So he left to form Banyan Systems in 1983, bringing Anand Jagannathan and Larry Floryan with him. They built Banyan VINES (Virtual Integrated NEtwork Service) in 1984, releasing version 1. Their client software could run on DOS and connect to X.25, Token Ring (which IBM introduced in 1984), or the Ethernet networks Bob Metcalfe from Xerox and then 3Com was a proponent of. After all, much of their work resembled the Xerox Network Systems protocols, which Metcalfe had helped develop. They used a 32-bit address. They developed an Address Resolution Protocol (or ARP) and Routing Table Protocol (RTP) that used tables on a server. And they created a file services application, print services application, and directory service they called StreetTalk. To help, they brought in Jim Allchin, who eventually did much of the heavy lifting. It was similar enough to TCP/IP, but different. Yet as TCP/IP became the standard, they added that at a cost. The whole thing came in at $17,000 and ran on less bandwidth than other services, and so they won a few contracts with the US State Deparment, US Marine Corps, and other government agencies. Many embassies used 300 baud phone lines with older modems and the new VINES service allowed them to do file sharing, print sharing, and even instant messaging throughout the late 80s and early 90s. The Marine Corp used it during the Gulf War and in an early form of a buying tornado, they went public in 1992, raising $28 million through NASDAQ. They grew to 410 employees and peaked at around $75 million in sales, spread across 7000 customers. They'd grown through word of mouth and other companies with strong marketing and sales arms were waiting in the wings. Novel was founded in 1983 in Utah and they developed the IPX network protocol. Netware would eventually become one of the most dominant network operating systems for Windows 3 and then Windows 95 computers. Yet, with incumbents like Banyan VINES and Novel Netware, this is another one of those times when Microsoft saw an opening for something better and just willed it into existence. And the story is similar to that of dozens of other companies including Novell, Lotus, VisiCalc, Netscape, Digital Research, and the list goes on and on and on. This kept happening because of a number of reasons. The field of computing had been comprised of former academics, many of whom weren't aggressive in business. Microsoft ended up owning the operating system and so had selling power when it came to cornering adjacent markets because they could provide the cleanest possible user experience. People seemed to underestimate Microsoft until it was too late. Inertia. Oh, and Microsoft could outspend on top talent and offer them the biggest impact for their work. Whatever the motivators, Microsoft won in nearly every nook and cranny in the IT field that they pursued for decades. The damaging part for Banyan was when they teamed up with IBM to ship LAN Manager, which ultimately shipped under the name of each company. Microsoft ended up recruiting Jim Allchin away and with network interface cards falling below $1,000 it became clear that the local area network was really just in its infancy. He inherited LAN Manager and then NT from Dave Cutler and the next thing we knew, Windows NT Server was born, complete with file services, print services, and a domain, which wasn't a fully qualified domain name until the release of Active Directory. Microsoft added Windsock in 1993 and released their own protocols. They supported protocols like IPX/SPX and DECnet but slowly moved customers to their own protocols. Banyan released the last version of Banyan VINES, 7.0, in 1997. StreetTalk eventually became an NT to LDAP bridge before being cancelled in the end. The dot com bubble was firmly here, though, so all was not lost. They changed their name in 1999 to ePresence, shifting their focus to identity management and security, officially pulling out of the VINES market. But the dot com bubble burst, so they were acquired in 2003 by Unisys. There were other companies in different networking niches along the way. Phil Karn wrote KA9Q NOS to connect CP/M and then DOS to TCP/IP in 1985. He wrote it on a Xerox 820, but by then Xerox was putting Zilog chips in computers and running CP/M, seemingly with little of the flair the Alto could have had. But with KA9Q NOS any of the personal computers on the market could get on the Internet and that software helped host many a commercial dialup connection and would go on to be used for years in small embedded devices that needed IP connectivity. Those turned out to be markets overtaken by Banyan who was overtaken by Novel, who was overtaken by Microsoft when they added WinSock. There are a few things to take away from this journey. The first is that when IBM and Microsoft team up to develop a competing product, it's time to pivot when there's plenty of money left in the bank. The second is that there was an era of closed systems that was short lived when vendors wanted to increasingly embrace open standards. Open standards like TCP/IP. We also want to keep our most talented team in place. Jim Allchin was responsible for those initial Windows Server implementations. Then SQL Server. He was the kind of person who's a game changer on a team. We also don't want to pivot to the new hotness because it's the new hotness. Customers pay vendors to solve problems. Putting an e in front of the name of a company seemed really cool in 1998. But surveying customers and thinking more deeply about problems they face - that's where magic can happen. Provided we have the right talent to make it happen.

Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 while working at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California. Over the decades to follow, Metcalfe became an internet pioneer by commercializing Ethernet as the local area network (LAN) standard of the internet. In 2011, Metcalfe and his wife, Robyn, moved to Austin where they both became professors at The University of Texas at Austin. Metcalfe served as Professor of Innovation in the Cockrell School of Engineering for ten years before retiring from UT Austin in December of 2021. Along the way, Dr. Metcalfe has helped countless campus and local Austin organizations help make Austin a better Silicon Valley.Beta Business is hosted by Nick Spiller, produced by Arturo Rolón, and owned by Beta Business LLC. Follow us @betayourbusiness on IG.Song Licenses:Track: Sad LO-FI, Piano Beat [LOFI Music] by MokkaMusic / Early Morning https://youtu.be/5UXbFdfFQ-EMusic provided by "MokkaMusic" channel and https://inaudio.org

You might not know exactly what it is off the top of your head, but you've surely heard of Metcalfe's Law. Where did it come from? What does it mean? And why does it matter?That's what you'll learn on this episode of Web Masters when Aaron talks with Bob Metcalfe, the law's namesake. Bob explain's the law's critical insight on how multimedia networks operate and scale and offers some unique perspective on the implications of network growth.In addition to his insights about Metcalfe's law, Bob also talks about his work inventing ethernet, the backbone of local area networks, and how he founded the multi-billion-dollar 3Com corporation. In other words, a lot of what all of us do on the Internet every day is thanks to the work of Bob Metcalfe.For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

The Internet is not a simple story to tell. In fact, every sentence here is worthy of an episode if not a few.  Many would claim the Internet began back in 1969 when the first node of the ARPAnet went online. That was the year we got the first color pictures of earthen from Apollo 10 and the year Nixon announced the US was leaving Vietnam. It was also the year of Stonewall, the moon landing, the Manson murders, and Woodstock. A lot was about to change. But maybe the story of the Internet starts before that, when the basic research to network computers began as a means of networking nuclear missile sites with fault-tolerant connections in the event of, well, nuclear war. Or the Internet began when a T3 backbone was built to host all the datas. Or the Internet began with the telegraph, when the first data was sent over electronic current. Or maybe the Internet began when the Chinese used fires to send messages across the Great Wall of China. Or maybe the Internet began when drums sent messages over long distances in ancient Africa, like early forms of packets flowing over Wi-Fi-esque sound waves.  We need to make complex stories simpler in order to teach them, so if the first node of the ARPAnet in 1969 is where this journey should end, feel free to stop here. To dig in a little deeper, though, that ARPAnet was just one of many networks that would merge into an interconnected network of networks. We had dialup providers like CompuServe, America Online, and even The WELL. We had regional timesharing networks like the DTSS out of Dartmouth University and PLATO out of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. We had corporate time sharing networks and systems. Each competed or coexisted or took time from others or pushed more people to others through their evolutions. Many used their own custom protocols for connectivity. But most were walled gardens, unable to communicate with the others.  So if the story is more complicated than that the ARPAnet was the ancestor to the Internet, why is that the story we hear? Let's start that journey with a memo that we did an episode on called “Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network” sent by JCR Licklider in 1963 and can be considered the allspark that lit the bonfire called The ARPANet. Which isn't exactly the Internet but isn't not. In that memo, Lick proposed a network of computers available to research scientists of the early 60s. Scientists from computing centers that would evolve into supercomputing centers and then a network open to the world, even our phones, televisions, and watches. It took a few years, but eventually ARPA brought in Larry Roberts, and by late 1968 ARPA awarded an RFQ to build a network to a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) who would build Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. The IMPS were computers that connected a number of sites and routed traffic. The first IMP, which might be thought of more as a network interface card today, went online at UCLA in 1969 with additional sites coming on frequently over the next few years. That system would become ARPANET. The first node of ARPAnet went online at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA for short). It grew as leased lines and more IMPs became more available. As they grew, the early computer scientists realized that each site had different computers running various and random stacks of applications and different operating systems. So we needed to standardize certain aspects connectivity between different computers.  Given that UCLA was the first site to come online, Steve Crocker from there began organizing notes about protocols and how systems connected with one another in what they called RFCs, or Request for Comments. That series of notes was then managed by a team that included Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler from Stanford once Doug Engelbart's project on the “Augmentation of Human Intellect” at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) became the second node to go online. SRI developed a Network Information Center, where Feinler maintained a list of host names (which evolved into the hosts file) and a list of address mappings which would later evolve into the functions of Internic which would be turned over to the US Department of Commerce when the number of devices connected to the Internet exploded. Feinler and Jon Postel from UCLA would maintain those though, until his death 28 years later and those RFCs include everything from opening terminal connections into machines to file sharing to addressing and now any place where the networking needs to become a standard.  The development of many of those early protocols that made computers useful over a network were also being funded by ARPA. They funded a number of projects to build tools that enabled the sharing of data, like file sharing and some advancements were loosely connected by people just doing things to make them useful and so by 1971 we also had email. But all those protocols needed to flow over a common form of connectivity that was scalable. Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Donald Davies were independently investigating packet switching and Roberts brought Kleinrock into the project as he was at UCLA. Bob Kahn entered the picture in 1972. He would team up with Vint Cerf from Stanford who came up with encapsulation and so they would define the protocol that underlies the Internet, TCP/IP. By 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote RFC 675 where they coined the term internet as shorthand for internetwork. The number of RFCs was exploding as was the number of nodes. The University of California Santa Barbara then the University of Utah to connect Ivan Sutherland's work. The network was national when BBN connected to it in 1970. Now there were 13 IMPs and by 1971, 18, then 29 in 72 and 40 in 73. Once the need arose, Kleinrock would go on to work with Farouk Kamoun to develop the hierarchical routing theories in the late 70s. By 1976, ARPA became DARPA. The network grew to 213 hosts in 1981 and by 1982, TCP/IP became the standard for the US DOD and in 1983, ARPANET moved fully over to TCP/IP. And so TCP/IP, or Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol is the most dominant networking protocol on the planet. It was written to help improve performance on the ARPAnet with the ingenious idea to encapsulate traffic. But in the 80s, it was just for researchers still. That is, until NSFNet was launched by the National Science Foundation in 1986.  And it was international, with the University College of London connecting in 1971, which would go on to inspire a British research network called JANET that built their own set of protocols called the Colored Book protocols. And the Norwegian Seismic Array connected over satellite in 1973. So networks were forming all over the place, often just time sharing networks where people dialed into a single computer. Another networking project going on at the time that was also getting funding from ARPA as well as the Air Force was PLATO. Out of the University of Illinois, was meant for teaching and began on a mainframe in 1960. But by the time ARPAnet was growing PLATO was on version IV and running on a CDC Cyber. The time sharing system hosted a number of courses, as they referred to programs. These included actual courseware, games, convent with audio and video, message boards, instant messaging, custom touch screen plasma displays, and the ability to dial into the system over lines, making the system another early network. In fact, there were multiple CDC Cybers that could communicate with one another. And many on ARPAnet also used PLATO, cross pollinating non-defense backed academia with a number of academic institutions.  The defense backing couldn't last forever. The Mansfield Amendment in 1973 banned general research by defense agencies. This meant that ARPA funding started to dry up and the scientists working on those projects needed a new place to fund their playtime. Bob Taylor split to go work at Xerox, where he was able to pick the best of the scientists he'd helped fund at ARPA. He helped bring in people from Stanford Research Institute, where they had been working on the oNLineSystem, or NLS and people like Bob Metcalfe who brought us Ethernet and better collusion detection. Metcalfe would go on to found 3Com a great switch and network interface company during the rise of the Internet. But there were plenty of people who could see the productivity gains from ARPAnet and didn't want it to disappear. And the National Science Foundation (NSF) was flush with cash. And the ARPA crew was increasingly aware of non-defense oriented use of the system. So the NSF started up a little project called CSNET in 1981 so the growing number of supercomputers could be shared between all the research universities. It was free for universities that could get connected and from 1985 to 1993 NSFNET, surged from 2,000 users to 2,000,000 users. Paul Mockapetris made the Internet easier than when it was an academic-only network by developing the Domain Name System, or DNS, in 1983. That's how we can call up remote computers by names rather than IP addresses. And of course DNS was yet another of the protocols in Postel at UCLAs list of protocol standards, which by 1986 after the selection of TCP/IP for NSFnet, would become the standardization body known as the IETF, or Internet Engineering Task Force for short. Maintaining a set of protocols that all vendors needed to work with was one of the best growth hacks ever. No vendor could have kept up with demand with a 1,000x growth in such a small number of years. NSFNet started with six nodes in 1985, connected by LSI-11 Fuzzball routers and quickly outgrew that backbone. They put it out to bid and Merit Network won out in a partnership between MCI, the State of Michigan, and IBM. Merit had begun before the first ARPAnet connections went online as a collaborative effort by Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and the University of Michigan. They'd been connecting their own machines since 1971 and had implemented TCP/IP and bridged to ARPANET. The money was getting bigger, they got $39 million from NSF to build what would emerge as the commercial Internet.  They launched in 1987 with 13 sites over 14 lines. By 1988 they'd gone nationwide going from a 56k backbone to a T1 and then 14 T1s. But the growth was too fast for even that. They re-engineered and by 1990 planned to add T3 lines running in parallel with the T1s for a time. By 1991 there were 16 backbones with traffic and users growing by an astounding 20% per month.  Vint Cerf ended up at MCI where he helped lobby for the privatization of the internet and helped found the Internet Society in 1988. The lobby worked and led to the the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act in 1992. Before that, use of NSFNET was supposed to be for research and now it could expand to non-research and education uses. This allowed NSF to bring on even more nodes. And so by 1993 it was clear that this was growing beyond what a governmental institution whose charge was science could justify as “research” for any longer.  By 1994, Vent Cerf was designing the architecture and building the teams that would build the commercial internet backbone at MCI. And so NSFNET began the process of unloading the backbone and helped the world develop the commercial Internet by sprinkling a little money and know-how throughout the telecommunications industry, which was about to explode. NSFNET went offline in 1995 but by then there were networks in England, South Korea, Japan, Africa, and CERN was connected to NSFNET over TCP/IP. And Cisco was selling routers that would fuel an explosion internationally. There was a war of standards and yet over time we settled on TCP/IP as THE standard.  And those were just some of the nets. The Internet is really not just NSFNET or ARPANET but a combination of a lot of nets. At the time there were a lot of time sharing computers that people could dial into and following the release of the Altair, there was a rapidly growing personal computer market with modems becoming more and more approachable towards the end of the 1970s. You see, we talked about these larger networks but not hardware.  The first modulator demodulator, or modem, was the Bell 101 dataset, which had been invented all the way back in 1958, loosely based on a previous model developed to manage SAGE computers. But the transfer rate, or baud, had stopped being improved upon at 300 for almost 20 years and not much had changed. That is, until Hayes Hayes Microcomputer Products released a modem designed to run on the Altair 8800 S-100 bus in 1978. Personal computers could talk to one another.  And one of those Altair owners was Ward Christensen met Randy Suess at the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange and the two of them had this weird idea. Have a computer host a bulletin board on one of their computers. People could dial into it and discuss their Altair computers when it snowed too much to meet in person for their club. They started writing a little code and before you know it we had a tool they called Computerized Bulletin Board System software, or CBBS. The software and more importantly, the idea of a BBS spread like wildfire right along with the Atari, TRS-80, Commodores and Apple computers that were igniting the personal computing revolution. The number of nodes grew and as people started playing games, the speed of those modems jumped up with the v.32 standard hitting 9600 baud in 84, and over 25k in the early 90s. By the early 1980s, we got Fidonet, which was a network of Bulletin Board Systems and by the early 90s we had 25,000 BBS's. And other nets had been on the rise. And these were commercial ventures. The largest of those dial-up providers was America Online, or AOL. AOL began in 1985 and like most of the other dial-up providers of the day were there to connect people to a computer they hosted, like a timesharing system, and give access to fun things. Games, news, stocks, movie reviews, chatting with your friends, etc. There was also CompuServe, The Well, PSINet, Netcom, Usenet, Alternate, and many others. Some started to communicate with one another with the rise of the Metropolitan Area Exchanges who got an NSF grant to establish switched ethernet exchanges and the Commercial Internet Exchange in 1991, established by PSINet, UUNet, and CERFnet out of California.  Those slowly moved over to the Internet and even AOL got connected to the Internet in 1989 and thus the dial-up providers went from effectively being timesharing systems to Internet Service Providers as more and more people expanded their horizons away from the walled garden of the time sharing world and towards the Internet. The number of BBS systems started to wind down. All these IP addresses couldn't be managed easily and so IANA evolved out of being managed by contracts from research universities to DARPA and then to IANA as a part of ICANN and eventually the development of Regional Internet Registries so AFRINIC could serve Africa, ARIN could serve Antarctica, Canada, the Caribbean, and the US, APNIC could serve South, East, and Southeast Asia as well as Oceania LACNIC could serve Latin America and RIPE NCC could serve Europe, Central Asia, and West Asia. By the 90s the Cold War was winding down (temporarily at least) so they even added Russia to RIPE NCC. And so using tools like WinSOCK any old person could get on the Internet by dialing up. Modems for dial-ups transitioned to DSL and cable modems. We got the emergence of fiber with regional centers and even national FiOS connections. And because of all the hard work of all of these people and the money dumped into it by the various governments and research agencies, life is pretty darn good.  When we think of the Internet today we think of this interconnected web of endpoints and content that is all available. Much of that was made possible by the development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in in 1991 at CERN, and Mosaic came out of the National Center for Supercomputing applications, or NCSA at the University of Illinois, quickly becoming the browser everyone wanted to use until Mark Andreeson left to form Netscape. Netscape's IPO is probably one of the most pivotal moments where investors from around the world realized that all of this research and tech was built on standards and while there were some patents, the standards were freely useable by anyone.  Those standards let to an explosion of companies like Yahoo! from a couple of Stanford grad students and Amazon, started by a young hedge fund Vice President named Jeff Bezos who noticed all the money pouring into these companies and went off to do his own thing in 1994. The companies that arose to create and commercialize content and ideas to bring every industry online was ferocious.  And there were the researchers still writing the standards and even commercial interests helping with that. And there were open source contributors who helped make some of those standards easier to implement by regular old humans. And tools for those who build tools. And from there the Internet became what we think of today. Quicker and quicker connections and more and more productivity gains, a better quality of life, better telemetry into all aspects of our lives and with the miniaturization of devices to support wearables that even extends to our bodies. Yet still sitting on the same fundamental building blocks as before. The IANA functions to manage IP addressing has moved to the private sector as have many an onramp to the Internet. Especially as internet access has become more ubiquitous and we are entering into the era of 5g connectivity.  And it continues to evolve as we pivot due to new needs and threats a globally connected world represent. IPv6, various secure DNS options, options for spam and phishing, and dealing with the equality gaps  surfaced by our new online world. We have disinformation so sometimes we might wonder what's real and what isn't. After all, any old person can create a web site that looks legit and put whatever they want on it. Who's to say what reality is other than what we want it to be. This was pretty much what Morpheus was offering with his choices of pills in the Matrix. But underneath it all, there's history. And it's a history as complicated as unraveling the meaning of an increasingly digital world. And it is wonderful and frightening and lovely and dangerous and true and false and destroying the world and saving the world all at the same time.  This episode is pretty simplistic and many of the aspects we cover have entire episodes of the podcast dedicated to them. From the history of Amazon to Bob Taylor to AOL to the IETF to DNS and even Network Time Protocol. It's a story that leaves people out necessarily; otherwise scope creep would go all the way back to to include Volta and the constant electrical current humanity received with the battery. But hey, we also have an episode on that! And many an advance has plenty of books and scholarly works dedicated to it - all the way back to the first known computer (in the form of clockwork), the Antikythera Device out of Ancient Greece. Heck even Louis Gerschner deserves a mention for selling IBM's stake in all this to focus on things that kept the company going, not moonshots.  But I'd like to dedicate this episode to everyone not mentioned due to trying to tell a story of emergent networks. Just because they were growing fast and our modern infrastructure was becoming more and more deterministic doesn't mean that whether it was writing a text editor or helping fund or pushing paper or writing specs or selling network services or getting zapped while trying to figure out how to move current that there aren't so, so, so many people that are a part of this story. Each with their own story to be told. As we round the corner into the third season of the podcast we'll start having more guests. If you have a story and would like to join us use the email button on thehistoryofcomputing.net to drop us a line. We'd love to chat!

Maybe you've struggled with needing to seem in charge or on top of a challenging situation, even when you're unsure of what to do. If so, you've likely heard the siren song that tempts you to be a know-it-all. But Matt Mullenweg shows us how the learn-it-all is most likely to achieve greatness. Check out Mike’s interview with Bob Metcalfe (of Metcalfe’s Law) where he also discusses leadership lessons.

Our third episode is an especially exciting one, we had the opportunity to hang out with Dr. Bob Metcalfe. Dr. Metcalfe is credited with inventing and commercializing Ethernet, which forever changed how computers communicated with each other. Dr. Metcalfe then went on to start multiple companies, and in 2005, Metcalfe received the United States National Medal of Technology. Metcalfe is now Professor of Innovation here at UT, helping the next generation make an impact.

Hosts Brandon and Derick have the honor of interviewing Bill Krause and hearing some fascinating stories about the early days of Silicon Valley, including the origins of HP's first computer division, and how Bill (along with previous podcast guest Bob Metcalfe) took Ethernet from zero to one million ports ahead of their already-ambitious timeline.Bill is a tech luminary, having served as the CEO and President, and then Board Chairman, of 3Com, growing the business from a VC-backed startup to a publicly traded $1B company with global operations. Prior to 3Com, Bill was the GM of HP's first personal computer division, and grew that business exponentially as well. He's currently a board partner with Andreessen Horowitz as well as Chairman of the Board at Veritas, and he also serves on the boards of CommScope, SmartCar, and Forward Networks. Bill is a noted philanthropist; he and his wife Gay Krause have funded many national and local programs focusing on education, leadership, and ethics. Tune in and join us to hear Bill's amazing stories, his lessons learned, and his profound advice to young entrepreneurs.

Robert Taylor was one of the true pioneers in computer science. In many ways, he is the string (or glue) that connected the US governments era of supporting computer science through ARPA to innovations that came out of Xerox PARC and then to the work done at Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center. Those are three critical aspects of the history of computing and while Taylor didn't write any of the innovative code or develop any of the tools that came out of those three research environments, he saw people and projects worth funding and made sure the brilliant scientists got what they needed to get things done. The 31 years in computing that his stops represented were some of the most formative years for the young computing industry and his ability to inspire the advances that began with Vannevar Bush's 1945 article called “As We May Think” then ended with the explosion of the Internet across personal computers.  Bob Taylor inherited a world where computing was waking up to large crusty but finally fully digitized mainframes stuck to its eyes in the morning and went to bed the year Corel bought WordPerfect because PCs needed applications, the year the Pentium 200 MHz was released, the year Palm Pilot and eBay were founded, the year AOL started to show articles from the New York Times, the year IBM opened a we web shopping mall and the year the Internet reached 36 million people. Excite and Yahoo went public. Sometimes big, sometimes small, all of these can be traced back to Bob Taylor - kinda' how we can trace all actors to Kevin Bacon. But more like if Kevin Bacon found talent and helped them get started, by paying them during the early years of their careers…  How did Taylor end up as the glue for the young and budding computing research industry? Going from tween to teenager during World War II, he went to Southern Methodist University in 1948, when he was 16. He jumped into the US Naval Reserves during the Korean War and then got his masters in psychology at the University of Texas at Austin using the GI Bill. Many of those pioneers in computing in the 60s went to school on the GI Bill. It was a big deal across every aspect of American life at the time - paving the way to home ownership, college educations, and new careers in the trades. From there, he bounced around, taking classes in whatever interested him, before taking a job at Martin Marietta, helping design the MGM-31 Pershing and ended up at NASA where he discovered the emerging computer industry.  Taylor was working on projects for the Apollo program when he met JCR Licklider, known as the Johnny Appleseed of computing. Lick, as his friends called him, had written an article called Man-Computer Symbiosis in 1960 and had laid out a plan for computing that influenced many. One such person, was Taylor. And so it was in 1962 he began and in 1965 that he succeeded in recruiting Taylor away from NASA to take his place running ARPAs Information Processing Techniques Office, or IPTO.  Taylor had funded Douglas Engelbart's research on computer interactivity at Stanford Research Institute while at NASA. He continued to do so when he got to ARPA and that project resulted in the invention of the computer mouse and the Mother of All Demos, one of the most inspirational moments and a turning point in the history of computing.  They also funded a project to develop an operating system called Multics. This would be a two million dollar project run by General Electric, MIT, and Bell Labs. Run through Project MAC at MIT there were just too many cooks in the kitchen. Later, some of those Bell Labs cats would just do their own thing. Ken Thompson had worked on Multics and took the best and worst into account when he wrote the first lines of Unix and the B programming language, then one of the most important languages of all time, C.  Interactive graphical computing and operating systems were great but IPTO, and so Bob Taylor and team, would fund straight out of the pentagon, the ability for one computer to process information on another computer. Which is to say they wanted to network computers. It took a few years, but eventually they brought in Larry Roberts, and by late 1968 they'd awarded an RFQ to build a network to a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) who would build Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. The IMPS would connect a number of sites and route traffic and the first one went online at UCLA in 1969 with additional sites coming on frequently over the next few years. That system would become ARPANET, the commonly accepted precursor to the Internet.  There was another networking project going on at the time that was also getting funding from ARPA as well as the Air Force, PLATO out of the University of Illinois. PLATO was meant for teaching and had begun in 1960, but by then they were on version IV, running on a CDC Cyber and the time sharing system hosted a number of courses, as they referred to programs. These included actual courseware, games, convent with audio and video, message boards, instant messaging, custom touch screen plasma displays, and the ability to dial into the system over lines, making the system another early network.  Then things get weird. Taylor is sent to Vietnam as a civilian, although his rank equivalent would be a brigadier general. He helped develop the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. Battlefield operations and reporting were entering the computing era. Only problem is, while Taylor was a war veteran and had been deep in the defense research industry for his entire career, Vietnam was an incredibly unpopular war and seeing it first hand and getting pulled into the theater of war, had him ready to leave. This combined with interpersonal problems with Larry Roberts who was running the ARPA project by then over Taylor being his boss even without a PhD or direct research experience. And so Taylor joined a project ARPA had funded at the University of Utah and left ARPA.  There, he worked with Ivan Sutherland, who wrote Sketchpad and is known as the Father of Computer Graphics, until he got another offer. This time, from Xerox to go to their new Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. One rising star in the computer research world was pretty against the idea of a centralized mainframe driven time sharing system. This was Alan Kay. In many ways, Kay was like Lick. And unlike the time sharing projects of the day, the Licklider and Kay inspiration was for dedicated cycles on processors. This meant personal computers.  The Mansfield Amendment in 1973 banned general research by defense agencies. This meant that ARPA funding started to dry up and the scientists working on those projects needed a new place to fund their playtime. Taylor was able to pick the best of the scientists he'd helped fund at ARPA. He helped bring in people from Stanford Research Institute, where they had been working on the oNLineSystem, or NLS.  This new Computer Science Laboratory landed people like Charles Thacker, David Boggs, Butler Lampson, and Bob Sproul and would develop the Xerox Alto, the inspiration for the Macintosh. The Alto though contributed the very ideas of overlapping windows, icons, menus, cut and paste, word processing. In fact, Charles Simonyi from PARC would work on Bravo before moving to Microsoft to spearhead Microsoft Word. Bob Metcalfe on that team was instrumental in developing Ethernet so workstations could communicate with ARPANET all over the growing campus-connected environments. Metcalfe would leave to form 3COM.  SuperPaint would be developed there and Alvy Ray Smith would go on to co-found Pixar, continuing the work begun by Richard Shoup.  They developed the Laser Printer, some of the ideas that ended up in TCP/IP, and the their research into page layout languages would end up with Chuck Geschke, John Warnock and others founding Adobe.  Kay would bring us the philosophy behind the DynaBook which decades later would effectively become the iPad. He would also develop Smalltalk with Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg, ushering in the era of object oriented programming.  They would do pioneering work on VLSI semiconductors, ubiquitous computing, and anything else to prepare the world to mass produce the technologies that ARPA had been spearheading for all those years. Xerox famously did not mass produce those technologies. And nor could they have cornered the market on all of them. The coming waves were far too big for one company alone.  And so it was that PARC, unable to bring the future to the masses fast enough to impact earnings per share, got a new director in 1983 and William Spencer was yet another of three bosses that Taylor clashed with. Some resented that he didn't have a PhD in a world where everyone else did. Others resented the close relationship he maintained with the teams. Either way, Taylor left PARC in 1983 and many of the scientists left with him.  It's both a curse and a blessing to learn more and more about our heroes. Taylor was one of the finest minds in the history of computing. His tenure at PARC certainly saw the a lot of innovation and one of the most innovative teams to have ever been assembled. But as many of us that have been put into a position of leadership, it's easy to get caught up in the politics. I am ashamed every time I look back and see examples of building political capital at the expense of a project or letting an interpersonal problem get in the way of the greater good for a team. But also, we're all human and the people that I've interviewed seem to match the accounts I've read in other books.  And so Taylor's final stop was Digital Equipment Corporation where he was hired to form their Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. They brought us the AltaVista search engine, the Firefly computer, Modula-3 and a few other advances. Taylor retired in 1996 and DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998 and when they were acquired by HP the SRC would get merged with other labs at HP.  From ARPA to Xerox to Digital, Bob Taylor certainly left his mark on computing. He had a knack of seeing the forest through the trees and inspired engineering feats the world is still wrestling with how to bring to fruition. Raw, pure science. He died in 2017. He worked with some of the most brilliant people in the world at ARPA. He inspired passion, and sometimes drama in what Stanford's Donald Knuth called “the greatest by far team of computer scientists assembled in one organization.”  In his final email to his friends and former coworkers, he said “You did what they said could not be done, you created things that they could not see or imagine.” The Internet, the Personal Computer, the tech that would go on to become Microsoft Office, object oriented programming, laser printers, tablets, ubiquitous computing devices. So, he isn't exactly understating what they accomplished in a false sense of humility. I guess you can't do that often if you're going to inspire the way he did.  So feel free to abandon the pretense as well, and go inspire some innovation. Heck, who knows where the next wave will come from. But if we aren't working on it, it certainly won't come. Thank you so much and have a lovely, lovely day. We are so lucky to have you join us on yet another episode. 

Podcast co-hosts Derick and Brandon explore the early days of Silicon Valley with Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet technology.

A deeper dive with Bob Metcalfe on the lasting impact of Ethernet and the World Wide Web. What’s in store for the world next?

This is a working example of the stuff that you read about in books. The retro network from the 1970s and 1980s. See how these networks actually worked with this fully working demonstration of 10base5, 10base2 and 10baseT. I am accessing the Internet from Windows 3.11 and Windows 98 computers connected via transceivers to a 10base5 network. These cables are also known as thicknet and thinnet. Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in the 1970s and it has changed the world. This is the birth of ethernet - 10base5. Then came 10base2 and then 10base t. You should know a bit of the history of networking if you are studying for your CompTIA network+ or Cisco CCNA certifications. You may even be a CCNP and have not seen these ethernet networks in your lifetime. Learn about transceivers, vampire taps and the other old technologies used in past Ethernet networks. This is a classic example of retro computing using a true retro network from years ago. This is before the days of lan parties when retro gaming was big using retro games such as doom. See how the original Ethernet actually worked with Terminators, Vampire Taps, Network Interface Cards (NICs) drop cables, Attachment Unit Interfaces (AUI), Medium Attachment Units (MAU), transceivers, BNC connectors, Thicknet 10base5 cabling, 10base2 cabling and more! Robert Bob Metcalfe developed Ethernet in the 1970s. This is a working version of that 10base5 network. Menu: Overview: 0:00 10Base5 cabling and transceivers : 0:34 Thicknet vs Thinnet: 1:55 Terminators: 3:04 10Base2 Transceivers: 3:18 10BaseT Transceivers: 3:38 Why is it called 10Base5: 4:10 Why is it called 10Base2: 4:52 Why is it called 10Base-T: 5:38 Network Diagrams and Drop Cables: 7:02 NICs: 8:22 10Base5 Network Diagram: 10:00 10Base2 Network Diagram: 10:47 10BaseT Network Diagram: 11:33 Demonstration and testing: 13:03 Ping google.com across 10Base5 Network: 14:30 Firefox connection to Google.com: 15:15 Ethereal (Wireshark): 15:40 PcAnywhere controlling Windows 3.11: 19:01 Breaking the network: 20:17 Good Links: 10base5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 10base2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 Ethernet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet Coax Cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable 10base5 10base2 10base t retro network Thicknet Thinnet Cheapernet Vampire tap networking Retro PC Windows 3.11 Bob Metcalfe #10base5 #thicknet #ccna

Bob Metcalfe has traveled in many orbits, but most recently he has been a professor at the University of Texas....so it seemed only appropriate to honor the unstoppable power of Metcalfe's Law in this lesson of greatness. Mess with it at your peril :)

Bob Metcalfe has lived in the future since the late 1950s. And lucky for the rest of us, he has brought us along for the ride. In this interview, Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate talks to him about the origins of networked computing as well as the birth of "Metcalfe's Law."

Today we're going to look at the history of the Palm.  It might be hard to remember at this point, but once upon a time, we didn't all have mobile devices connected to the Internet. There was no Facebook and Grubhub. But in the 80s, computer scientists were starting to think about what ubiquitous computing would look like. We got the Psion and the HP Jaguar (which ran on DOS). But these seemed much more like really small laptops. And with tiny keyboards.  General Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 but missed the mark. Other devices were continuing to hit the market, some running PenPoint from Go Corporation - but none really worked out. But former Intel, GRiD, and then Tandy employee Jeff Hawkins envisioned a personal digital assistant and created Palm Computing to create one in 1992. He had been interested in pen-based computing and worked with pattern recognition for handwriting at UC Berkeley. He asked Ed Colligan of Radius and Donna Dubinsky of Claris to join him. She would become CEO. They worked with Casio and Tandy to release the Casio Zoomer in 1993. The Apple Newton came along in 1993 and partially due to processor speed and partially due to just immaturity in the market, both devices failed to resonate with the market. The Newton did better, but the General Magic ideas that had caught the imagination of the world were alive and well. HP Jaguars were using Palm's synchronization software and so they were able to stay afloat.  And so Hawkins got to work on new character recognition software. He got a tour of Xerox PARC, as did everyone else in computing and they saw Unistrokes, which had been developed by David Goldberg. Unistrokes resembled shorthand and required users to learn a new way of writing but proved much more effective. Hawkins went on to build Graffiti, based on that same concept and as Xerox patented the technology they would go into legal battles until Palm eventually settled for $22.5 million.  More devices were coming every year and by 1995 Palm Computing was getting close to releasing a device. They had about $3 million dollars to play with. They would produce a device that had less buttons and so a larger screen size than other devices. It had the best handwriting technology on the market. It was the perfect size. Which Hawkins had made sure of by carrying around a block of wood in his pocket and to meetings to test it. Only problem is that they ran out of cash during the R&D and couldn't take it to market. But they knew they hit the mark.  The industry had been planning for a pen-based computing device for some time and US Robotics saw an opening. Palm ended up selling to US Robotics, who had made a bundle selling modems, for $44 million dollars. And they got folded into another acquisition, 3Com, which had been built by Bob Metcalfe, who co-invented Ethernet. US Robotics banked on Ethernet being the next wave. And they were right. But they also banked on pen computing. And were right again! US Robotics launched the Palm Pilot 1000 with 128k of RAM and the Palm Pilot 5000 with 518k of RAM in 1996. This was the first device that actually hit the mark. People became obsessed with Graffiti. You connected it to the computer using a serial port to synchronize Notes, Contacts, and Calendars. It seems like such a small thing now, but it was huge then. They were an instant success. Everyone in computing knew something would come along, but they didn't realize this was it. Until it was! HP, Ericsson, Sharp, NEC, Casio, Compaq, and Philips would all release handhelds but the Palm was the thing.  By 1998 the three founders were done getting moved around and left, creating a new company to make a similar device, called Handspring. Apple continued to flounder in the space releasing the eMate and then the MessagePad. But the Handspring devices were eerily similar to the Palms. Both would get infrared, USB, and the Handspring Visor would even run Palm OS 3. But the founders had a vision for something more. They would take Handspring public in 2000. 3Com would take Palm public in 2000. Only problem is the dot com bubble. Well, that and Research in Notion began to ship the Blackberry OS in 1999 and the next wave of devices began to chip away at the market share. Shares dropped over 90% and by 2002 Palm had to set up a subsidiary for the Palm OS. But again, the crew at Handspring had something more in mind. They released the Tree in 2002. The Handspring Treo was, check this out, a smart phone. It could do email, SMS, voice calls. Over the years they would add a camera, GPS, MP3, and Wi-Fi. Basically what we all expect from a smartphone today.  Handspring merged with Palm in 2003 and they released the Palm Tree 600. They merged back the company the OS had been spun out into, finally all merged back together in 2005. Meanwhile, Pilot pens had sued Palm and the devices were then just called Palm. We got a few, with the Palm V probably being the best, got a few new features, lots and lots of syncing problems, when new sync tools were added.  Now that all of the parts of the company were back together, they started planning for a new OS, which they announced in 2009. And webOS was supposed to be huge. And they announced the Palm Pre, the killer next Smartphone.  The only problem is that the iPhone had come along in 2007. And Android was released in 2008. Palm had the right idea. They just got sideswiped by Apple and Google.  And they ran out of money. They were bought by Hewlett-Packard in 2010 for 1.2 billion dollars. Under new management the company was again split into parts, with WebOS never really taking off, the PRe 3 never really shipping, and TouchPads not actually being any good and ultimately ending in the CEO of HP getting fired (along with other things). Once Meg Whitman stepped in as CEO, WebOS was open sourced and the remaining assets sold off to LG Electronics to be used in Smart TVs.  The Palm Pilot was the first successful handheld device. It gave us permission to think about more. The iPod came along in 2001, in a red ocean of crappy MP3 handheld devices. And over time it would get some of the features of the Palm. But I can still remember the day the iPhone came out and the few dozen people I knew with Treos cursing because they knew it was time to replace it. In the meantime Windows CE and other mobile operating systems had just pilfered market share away from Palm slowly. The founders invented something people truly loved. For awhile. And they had the right vision for the next thing that people would love. They just couldn't keep up with the swell that would become the iPhone and Android, which now own pretty much the entire market.  And so Palm is no more. But they certainly left a dent in the universe. And we owe them our thanks for that. Just as I owe you my thanks for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to decided to listen in - you're welcome back any time! Have a great day!

[spreaker type=player resource="episode_id=18854320" width="100%" height="80px" theme="light" playlist="false" playlist-continuous="false" autoplay="false" live-autoplay="false" chapters-image="true" episode-image-position="right" hide-logo="false" hide-likes="false" hide-comments="false" hide-sharing="false" hide-download="true"] Bob Metcalfe (@bobmetcalfe) is an MIT-Harvard-trained engineer/entrepreneur Internet pioneer who invented Ethernet in 1973 at Xerox Parc, and founded 3Com Corporation in 1979.

On today's episode of the podcast John Papola has a conversation with UT professor of innovation, 3Com founder, co-inventor of ethernet, and the namesake of Metcalfe's Law: Bob Metcalfe. The two dive into Metcalfe's current career at the University of Texas as well as discuss his past experiences witnessing the earlier days of Silicon Valley. Bob's stories surrounding his winding career as an entrepreneur and innovator also give us a look into the underlying technology that lead to his co-invention of ethernet. More from our guest: Wikipedia Page Metcalfe's Law on Wikipedia Twitter Page (no longer active) Internet Hall of Fame Bio Computer History Museum Bio References from this episode: The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Invention is a Flower, Innovation is a Weed by Bob Metcalfe Where's my Roy Cohn? (movie) Get Me Roger Stone (movie) The Pursuit (movie)

James Johnston is CEO and cofounder of Piclo, an exciting company working to globally change the way we use energy today. James and his team have developed a way to make our energy grids more flexible and sustainable with a cutting edge energy DSO marketplace.   Highlights: Importance of understanding of the problem before working towards a solution Applying flexibility to utilise energy in a more efficient way How to build a team and how people form a company’s identity The power of ‘pivoting’ towards new ideas and adapting from failure How different investors are best suited for different stages of development   Useful links: Piclo -  https://piclo.energy/ Bethnal Green Ventures - https://bethnalgreenventures.com/ Bob Metcalfe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA811EPzwLI   Time Stamp: [01:35] Who is James Johnston? [02:05] Starting with a solution rather than a problem [03:45] Applying flexibility to make effective use of energy sources [05:00] Developing a market place to buy and sell flexibility services [06:25] James’ personal journey and gaining inspiration from Bob Metcalfe [08:25] Building a team with cofounders Andy and Alice [11:00] Learning from your failures and developing new business plans [14:25] How different investors are beneficial at different stages of development [17:45] Having a global mission [19:45] Methods of tracking progress [21:10] The future for Piclo For more information go to Green Add Venture (https://greenaddventure.com/) This episode is hosted by Jake Woodhouse - connect with Jake on Linkedin (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/jakewoodhouse) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/jakewoodhous) This episode is produced by Woon Tan of Podcast Publishing (http://podcastpublishing.help/) Designs are made by Joshua Barnes 

"Invention is a flower. Innovation is a weed," innovator Bob Metcalfe explains his famous quote during in this special bonus episode. Metcalfe also shares his experiences as a founder at 3Com, the company culture that allowed him to invent Ethernet, and why big companies should work with startups.

Ethernet’s 46th anniversary is Wednesday, May 22nd and on this occasion, Silicon Hills News has done a special edition Ideas to Invoices podcast with Bob Metcalfe, founder of Ethernet.

Inventor of Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe, creator of Ethernet, says Net Neutrality is a bad idea. Google had super-secret deal to link online ads with offline Mastercard purchases. A listener recounts an unusal experience with getting different directions to the same place using two different devices in Google maps. We help a listener using a laptop in different locations with tips to access mail in both locations by troubleshooting DNS issues. A caller reports his experiences "cutting the cord" with the local cable company by using a mobile hotspot. An iPhone 6s Plus user has problems connecting via a mobile hotspot. Fortnite refuses to put app in Google store; Google follows by publishing information about a vulnerability in the game. Walmart.com won't ship items that are too far away by claiming they are not in stock. A listener wants to stop renting the modem provided by the cable company in order to save money. Telsa network has massive outage; prevents people from remotely unlocking cars.

Welcome back to The Fire Show, the podcast from Austin about entrepreneurs, business strategy, and working your face off.Today, I'm bringing to you the second panel I recorded at the FUND conference in April, brought to Austin for the first time every by FUND, Deloitte, Wilson Sonsini, and Entrepreneur Network.In the first panel, we had investors and entrepreneurs, such as Jay Samit and BackGril Ventures amon many, talk about how meet investors, make an impression, and eventually raise capital for your company. In this panel, we have a different focus, i.e investing and venture capital ecosystem in Texas. What problems do Texas entrepreneur face in this area? Why is there a perception of having to go to the east coast of the west coast for money? What are investors around us looking for that they can't find here? I mean, texas has no shortage of money. The panelists introduces themselves as they speak, but we have on the panel Bob Metacafe, creator of the Ethernet Cable who was on the Tim Ferriss show recently, Paul o'brien founder of idea Tech Ventures, Joe Merrill and Amanda Eakin from Sputnik ATX, Martin Martinz from Founders Insittue, and more.This panel was live streamed on the ENtrepreneur Network, and shared to a audience of more than 4MM.Huge shout out to the FUND conference and MediaTech Ventures for helping me set this up.I also invite you to the FUND conference on Oct 24,25th in Chicago, where I will be live-streaming the hell out of panels, interviewing people.Ladies and gents, enjoy.

In this episode, Jason Staples and Erik Rostad discuss book 1 of Jason’s 2018 Reading list – Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Show Notes Suggested by Joe De Sena, Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis, Bryan Callen, Laird Hamilton, Nick Szabo, Bob Metcalfe in various episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show Podcast Author: Ayn Rand Jennifer... The post #45: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand appeared first on Books of Titans.

We are at a rare juncture in time where the future is up for grabs and the following realms are in a state of upheaval: Environment Economics Society Education Politics Technology “When the winds of change blow, some people build walls, others build windmills” - Chinese Proverb This book and this innovation show are about windmills and the people who are building them. We talk about the heroes of innovation and disruption, those people sacrificing so much to make the World a better place: Jamie Heywood's nonprofit PatientsLikeMe portal – modelled after dating sites and his fight to find a cure for ALS after his brother Stephen contracted and died from the illness. Samir Brahmachari, India's highest ranking scientist who is fighting for a cure to fight antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. TB kills 4,000 per day worldwide and 1 person per minute in India. There hasn't been a front-line drug since 1970. We talk about Dr Erika Syger who was suffering death threats for her drive to disrupt and implement new food systems. We discuss Peter Dearman's “liquid air” engine, which brings food refrigeration to the developing world. We talk about the energy trilemma and the clash between environmentalists and fossil fuel lobbyists. We discuss the great story of former professional basketball player Reinhard Koch and Mayor Peter Vadasz and the town of Güssing, Austria, which experienced a massive revival when it went green. We mention the case of “Open Utility” and James Johnson who was inspired by Ethernet co-director Bob Metcalfe and built a smart grid based Ethernet, an uber for energy. Ashley Atkinson and KGD (keep growing Detroit), which uses “urban farming” to achieve urban renewal. In education, we talk about Carl Jarvis and how he turned around one of the UK's worst-performing schools in spite of the education system who bullied him. In politics, we mention Maria Ines Naha and Fernando Pimental of Brazil and the idea of participatory budgeting, where citizens decide where the budget is assigned. You can find out more about Mark Stevenson and his books here: https://markstevenson.org/

What doesn't kill you may not necessarily make you physically stronger, but if you tackle every challenge life and sport throws at you with the right mindset, you can develop some powerful grit and mental toughness that will not only make you a better athlete, but a stronger, more determined human in every facet of life. If you or someone you know is going through a rough time, you are not alone, reach out and connect with those around you. 
If you don't have anyone you feel comfortable speaking with, give the good people at Lifeline a call, or chat online, free and available 24/7: 13 11 14 https://www.lifeline.org.au For resources: Seven habits of highly effective people by Stephen R Covey This website provides a summary and overview of each chapter. https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits.php For the visual learners, try this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktlTxC4QG8g Victor Frankl (a good article explaining his philosophy and theories) https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-happy/266805/ The Tim Ferriss episode with Bob Metcalfe https://tim.blog/2018/02/14/bob-metcalfe/ The obstacle is the way by Ryan Holiday (summary video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rQfr7XAQi0 www.coreadvantage.com.au

Bob Metcalfe (@BobMetcalfe) is an MIT-Harvard-trained engineer-entrepreneur who became an Internet pioneer in 1970, invented Ethernet in 1973, and founded 3Com Corporation in 1979. About 1.2B Ethernet ports were shipped last year — 400M wired and 800M wireless (Wi-Fi).3Com went public in 1984, peaked at $5.7B in annual sales in 1999, and after 30 years became part of HP last year. Bob was a publisher-pundit for IDG-InfoWorld for about 10 years and a venture capitalist for about 10 years with Polaris Venture Partners, where he continues as a Venture Partner.Bob is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a recipient of the National Medal of Technology.In this conversation, we talk about everything from how he toasts when drinking with friends, how he learned to recruit and fire, what he does to scale businesses, different approaches to talent evaluation, critical decisions and mistakes made, how he has gotten through dark times, and much more. Please enjoy!This episode is brought to you by WeWork. I haven’t had an office in almost two decades, but working from home and coffee shops isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. When I moved to Austin, one of the first things I did was get a space at WeWork, and I could not be happier. It’s dog friendly and serves the best cold-brew coffee on tap I’ve ever had!WeWork is a global network of work spaces where companies and people grow together — in fact, more than ten percent of Fortune 500 companies use WeWork. The idea is simple: you focus on your business, and WeWork takes care of the rest — front desk service, utilities, refreshments, and more. WeWork now has more than 200 locations all over the world, so chances are good there’s one near you. Check out we.co/tim to become a part of the global WeWork community!This podcast is also brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that’s onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

Bob Metcalfe is an Internet pioneer, Ethernet inventor, 3COM founder, former venture capital partner with Polaris Partners in Boston, former pundit and publisher with InfoWorld and now professor of Innovation at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. In this interview, he discusses how he invented Ethernet and founded 3Com.   Just so know: We recorded this interview at Galvanize in the 2nd Street District in downtown Austin and construction workers were creating a cafe on the first floor. We were in a conference room on the fourth floor, but you can still occasionally hear the buzzing of the construction workers below. Just wanted listeners to know what that sound is. Also, the first couple minutes of the interview are not in stereo because I had to use the backup recording from my iPhone. But after that it goes back to stereo recording. The interview is really good so please listen. 

Dr. Marcus has founded several startups including Exos and Zeemote. The technologies on which her companies are based tend to be widely adopted. Very few inventors can say that their invention is in the hands of ten million people. Beth has those bragging rights. She is a recognized expert in the hand-device interface and has provided strategic advice to leading firms in the space. She is also a highly sought-after advisor to startups with particular understanding of product design and fundraising for technology-based enterprises. Her thoughts can be found on Twitter @StartupDoc. Beth, is a graduate of MIT and Imperial College, London, and continues to be involved with both institutions. She is Entrepreneur In Residence at Imperial College London. In this chatty and candid episode, Beth Marcus imparts some of the hard-earned lessons that can help an entrepreneur turn a defeat into victory. She recounts the story of the remarkable pivot she executed at Exos which led the company from a rout to a very attractive sale to Microsoft. She provides her views on IP strategy, boards of directors, venture capitalists and hiring. Among the luminaries that play a role in the conversation are Bob Metcalfe, Ed Roberts and Pierluigi Zappacosta. 

In this mash up episode we join forces with Bob Metcalfe from THE FIREFIGHTERS PODCAST and review the brand new ERG and what was improved on. Great refresher for those of you who haven’t taken a look at it for a while!   Please subscribe to all of our Haz Mat shows: The Haz Mat Guys Podcast, THMG Hot wash, THMG Instructors corner.   You can now check us out doing the show live on Google Hangouts Live periodically. We also do a weekly round table discussion with experts from around the country live on Google Hangouts under The Haz Mat Guys Nation every Tuesday night at 21:15EST. You can find us on YouTube. Thanks for listening and watching!

. The post Education, Innovation, & Disadvantaged Students with Bob Metcalfe & Tom Leppert appeared first on RealClear Radio Hour.

James and Laurence discuss the history of ethernet, our raspberry pis, and the movie Iron Sky. Laurence’s Ethernet Mini Feature! To replace his boring IPv6 features The History of Ethernet. Bob Metcalfe and Xerox Parc. We both has Raspberry Pi! What are we going to do with them? Linux Time Lapse Creation Don’t use crappy […]

Bob Metcalfe finds numerous similarities between the history of the development of the internet and the current development of energy, and that we can learn from the advances and surprises of the Internet. (May 20, 2009)