Ethernet will be 30 next Thursday

Hooray! Nice interview with Bob Metcalfe, who with Dave Boggs invented it at that wonderful ideas factory, Xerox PARC. Interviewer asked “Why did you come up with the name Ethernet?”

Answer: ” The luminiferous ether was once theorized to pervade all of space and was passive and omnipresent, a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves and particularly carrying light from the sun to the earth. That was the 1800s, and around 1900, thanks to Michaelson, Morley, and Einstein, et al., the ether was determined not to exist. So in 1973, while searching for a word to describe the medium that would be everywhere, that would be passive and would serve as a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves into particular data packets, we took that word that had fallen into disuse and called it the ether network.”