Bob Metcalfe has won the Turing Award for co-inventing the Ethernet system that gave rise to the Internet.

 

Bob Metcalfe has won the Turing Award for co-inventing the Ethernet system that gave rise to the Internet.  The $1M Turing Prize, which is often described as the Nobel Prize of the computing world, has been awarded since 1966. Metcalfe arrived at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a division of Xerox, in 1972, when he was 26. He connected PARC to Arpanet, a digital network that connected ~20 academic and corporate labs across the U.S. Over time, he collaborated with David Boggs to build out what would become Ethernet. During the 1980s and 1990s, Ethernet became the industry standard for personal computing and corporate communication networks. Metcalfe said that the name "ethernet" was inspired by the 19th-century pseudo-scientific notion of "the ether," an ethereal substance that was believed to permeate all matter and transmit light.