March 11, 2005, 5:31 PM — Bruce Taylor spoke with Robert Metcalfe on the occasion of his receiving the National Medal of Technology for 2003 on March 14, 2005. This is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here.
On March 14, Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe will receive the National Medal of Technology for 2003, presented by President Bush in ceremonies at the White House. The award is for his pioneering work while at the Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC as it is commonly known, that in 1973 resulted in the invention of Ethernet. Ethernet is the local area networking standard on which he shares four patents. In 2003, Ethernet's 30th year, 184 million new Ethernet connections were shipped globally for $12.5 billion in sales value.
Bob is an MIT graduate and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard in 1969. Today, Bob is a general partner in the venture capital firm Polaris Ventures. He specializes in Boston area based information technology startups. Prior to becoming a VC, Bob enjoyed three quite distinctly different careers. From 1965 - 1979, Bob was a research scientist and engineer. He was the founder of networking company 3Com where he served as Chairman and CEO. For the decade ending in the year 2000, Bob took a turn in the IT publishing world as both a publisher and an industry pundit, first as CEO of InfoWorld, and then for 8 years as an Internet column writer. He is co-founder and continues to be actively involved with one of the foremost global conferences on the intersection of people and technology, PopTech in Camden, Maine. He also serves on the boards of IDG, IDC, and MIT's Technology Review magazine.
Bruce Taylor: Bob, welcome to the program. And for all of us here at ITworld, congratulations.
Robert Metcalfe: Thank you very much.
Taylor: You're someone over the years who's been honored in so many ways for so many contributions that it may appear to be that this is just one more. But I promise you I don't see it that way. And so for you, what does it mean to receive the National Medal of Technology from the President?
Metcalfe: It means that my mom and dad get to go with me to the White House. That's actually the biggest thing it means to me. To my parents who have lived the American dream and worked hard to send their boy to college and now it's sort of coming full circle for them.
Taylor: The National Medal, according to the press announcement, and as we know, is to recognized innovation that has advanced the nation's global competitiveness. Have you ever tried to imagine the scale of what Ethernet has made technologically and economically possible? Has anyone?
Metcalfe: Well, I think I have been through 10 or 15 ah-ha experiences where I realized that Ethernet was really catching on. Like last year for example I learned recently from IDC that there were 200 million new Ethernet switch ports shipped worldwide, 200 million. And that's a really big number. I have never conceived of numbers that big. Even the last time I had an ah-ha experience. And Ethernet doesn't seem to be tapering off; it seems to be continuing to proliferate and evolve.
Taylor: And has anyone ever tried to put an economic value to Ethernet?
Metcalfe: I've not seen it. I know that the revenue number associated with the 200 million ports is on the order of $12 or $13 billion, but that's just for the ports. And that's just in one year. So I don't know. I'm not sure how you'd go about assessing the economic impact of something like Ethernet.
Taylor: So depending on what birth date one chooses to use, Ethernet is now 30 years old, is that, is it 31 or 29?
Metcalfe: The birth date that I have chosen for many years is May 23, 1973, which would make it 31 years old.
Taylor: 31 years old. So now I have to ask you, casting back to those days at Xerox PARC, and perhaps even before, what in the world were you thinking? How'd this happen?
Metcalfe: Well, when I graduated from MIT and went up the river to Harvard to graduate school, I was a new grad student. And what we grad students do is when we arrive we start looking for how we're going to leave, what our dissertation research is going to be about. And as it turns out in 1969 when I arrived at Harvard, the big thing in university research was a thing called the ARPA Computer Network, the ARPANET, which I think of as Internet 1.0. And so it was obvious that I should get involved in that somehow.
