In the 1970s, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was a budding hub for innovation, kind of like a miniature version of Bell Labs during the first half of the 20th century. Bell Labs was an innovation hub, and it led to some of the most amazing innovations of the 20th century, not to mention an incredibly robust network of telephones that connected the entire world together in real time.
Robert Metcalfe was working on a new kind of network at Xerox PARC. This wasn’t the vast telephone network Bell Labs had steadily built over half a century, but it was a close cousin.
The existing ARPANET (the early proto-Internet) was great for a small handful of far-away users; it famously connected two cities in California during the so-called Mother Of All Demos, but Metcalfe was interested in solving a different problem altogether.
On May 22nd, 1973, Metcalfe penned a memo he titled “Alto Ethernet.” This addressed the technical challenges so that lots of individuals could hook their computers u…
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