alt Hacker NewsThe Computer History Museum has a nice two-part oral history of Bob Metcalf (3Com founder and co-inventor of Ethernet) back in 2006: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKz07DdaKzw
For those with textual proclivities: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Hist...
Metcalfe has a reputation for being brash and outspoken and it clearly shows in the interview. I think it served him well in business and later in life as a pundit. I remember looking forward to his columns in InfoWorld, though I didn't necessarily give much stock to his predictions.
He talks a little bit about the downfall of 3Com in the interview, though he begs-off of talking about things that happened there after he left.
I very much enjoyed the trivia and minutiae about the creation of Ethernet and the Digital / Intel / Xerox relationship that ultimately resulted in it being standardized.
Basically, it was a long listen but there was some good stuff in there.
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> later in life as a pundit
An amusing example of his punditry:
"I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
Keep in mind he co-invented Ethernet, so he knew what he was talking about!
Here's hoping we'll be able to look back with equal amusement at the AI doom predictions.
https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/expert_predictions/from-the...
> though I didn't necessarily give much stock to his predictions.
Every year that I worked at 3Com, we proclaimed it was "the Year of the Network!" It became a running industry joke.
But of course, Metcalfe's Law contains some fundamental truths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
And the products got shitty. They sold a managed switch that couldn't save its configuration
It was great to work with Metcalfe. I have two funny stories to share.
I was on the Macintosh network os client team. For whatever reason (maybe he was annoyed that Apple copied so much from Xerox) Metcalfe didn't like Macs. In this era Macs used Apple's proprietary AppleTalk/LocalTalk network. We did a demo for 3Com execs using a large external monitor connected via a single black coax cable that looked just like thin-ethernet. He got excited for a moment and came right over to look at the Mac and was very disappointed to see the cable attached to a display! (3Com was working on Ethernet cards for Mac at the time but they weren't ready at the time of this demo.)
For those too young to remember: there was an SF Bay Area baseball park known as Candlestick Park that was briefly branded "3Com Park" -- to the great annoyance of SF Giants fans. During one interview he as asked if in the early days of 3Com he would have done anything differently. He said, "I would have named the company 'Candlestick'!"