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The Internet began switching packets on October 29, 1969. Since then, we’ve been awash in connectivity – over five billion people are already on the Internet, mostly mobile, mostly video. Stories about connectivity are full of mission, platform, and traffic evolutions, surprises, and pathologies. The first Ethernet, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, ran over a shared coaxial cable at 2.94Mbps ─ 10,000 times faster than the network it replaced. Why coax and not Wi-Fi in 1973? I’ll tell some of these stories starting when I helped bring up TELNET at MIT on the Arpanet in 1970. At Xerox PARC we helped birth the personal computer by inventing Ethernet for the Internet. My 1979 Internet startup 3Com Corporation used the Silicon Valley ecosystem to help grow the Internet into the billions, and in the mid-1980s to move Silicon Valley from Boston to Palo Alto.

Speaker: Robert Metcalfe, Turing Laureate, Emeritus Professor at UT Austin
Host: Venkat Padmanabhan, Deputy Managing Director, Microsoft Research India