Dr. Robert “Bob” Metcalfe is an Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at The University of Texas at Austin and a Research Affiliate in Computational Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He was an Internet pioneer at MIT starting in 1970 and in 1973 received his PhD from Harvard for Packet Communication. He invented Ethernet in 1973 and founded 3Com Corporation (now part of HP) in 1979. In 2022, he received the Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet, the dominant way of connecting computers and billions of other devices to each other and the Internet.
Bob was also CEO of IDG’s InfoWorld Publishing Company (1992-1995). For eight years, he wrote an Internet column read weekly by 629,000 information technologists. He also wrote for The American Spectator, Forbes, Technology Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
For nearly a decade, Bob was a venture capitalist at Polaris Partners, where he invested in early-stage technology companies.
