Ethernet turns 30 and is more important than ever

Alpha Geek Robert M. “Bob” Metcalfe talks to Computerworld magazine in this interviews…

30 year, eh?

I don’t quite remember the invention of it (insert age joke here) but I do remember carrying heavy desktops around and hooking them up to play LAN games against friends. It seems like an eternity ago but it is actually about 10 years since that dark time.

There was a certain epic battle of 16 players in one room fighting 16 others in another involving a match to the death of X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter in an asteroid field. Call me geek, but that was definitely one of the coolest things we’ve done.

Then there was the time we convinced our math teacher that computer networking was a valid project for our high school’s project week. So we carried our computers together, set them up in an hour or two, and then spend the rest of the week killing each other in Quake and Duke Nukem 3D.

I don’t think I ever had more fun in that high school.

Of course things could not be more different now. I have my trusty Ti and my wife has her iBook. I open it and my iTunes library is added to hers for seamless streaming.

I can also walk into my work place The Oracle, open my Ti, plug in the ethernet wire and OS X will instantly realize “a-HA! I am now at The Oracle” and switch to the right settings.

Kudos to the man who got this entire thing started!

The interview at Computerworld