When we connect a personal computer (but also a printer, or TV) to the Internet with a cable, we say that we connect them to the Ethernet network. The first time this happened was on November 11, 1973 and we were in Silicon Valley. In particular at the Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, born just three years earlier and immediately legendary research laboratory from which many innovations in the digital world have emerged.
Before then, connections between computers (which were not yet personal) were certainly possible (in 1969 there was the first connection between four computers in the Arpanet network which would later become the Internet). They were possible and they were done, but each as he wanted or how he succeeded. There was no standard. At Xerox Parc they weren’t really trying to “change the world” when they created a dedicated workgroup – they just wanted to connect the first personal workstation with a graphical interface to the world‘s first laser printer (the Scanned Laser Output Terminal). In the working group there was a 26-year-old engineer, Robert Metcalfe, who then made the history of technology even coining a law that bears his name (the Metcalfe law that measures the network effect: it says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of users, or connected devices. Very useful for calculating the value of today’s social networks).
In short, Metcalfe to connect the workstation to the laser printer started from what he had read on a 1970 thesis on the functioning of Alohanet, the first Internet network in Hawaii. Without getting into technicalities, Metcalfe then devised an algorithm that brought the data transmission efficiency on Alohanet from 17 to 90 percent. Except that in Hawaii the connection was wireless, while at Xerox Parc they wanted a solid cable connection. With classic coaxial cable. Metcalfe could have called the new CoaxNet network or Alto Aloha Network, but instead decided to recover a word widely used in certain scientific textbooks of the previous century: ether, or the “luminiferous ether” through which light travels.
On May 22, 1973 Metcalfe wrote a memo in which he technically explained how the new network could work: in Palo Alto they began to put cables in the corridors and the first computers were connected on November 11 at the speed of 3 megabits per second. In reality at that point not much happened: the scientific document that told the invention was released only in 1976, when Xerox patented it, in the meantime there had been alternative proposals to connect computers via cable, such as that of IBM called a “token ring”. But in 1983 the consortium that defines the technological standards of the network chose Ethernet for several reasons but essentially because it is a more open technology, which integrates with everyone.
Then came the sure wifi. But Ethernet is destined to remain in our lives for a long time to come.
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