ChatGPT warned me in opposition to asking legendary engineer Bob Metcalfe about his 1996 prediction that the web would collapse. This got here after I sought the chatbot’s steerage on what inquiries to ask the person who this week obtained the ACM Turing Award, the $1 million prize dubbed the Nobel of computing. The AI oracle urged I persist with quizzing him on his well-known accomplishments—inventing Ethernet, beginning the threeCom Corporation, codifying the worth of networks, and educating college students in Texas about innovation, which he did till he retired final yr “to pursue a sixth career.”

But ChatGPT thought it was a horrible concept to deliver up Metcalfe’s daring prognostication, simply because the community he’d helped pioneer was taking off, that the quantity of bits zipping across the web would trigger the mom of all crashes. OpenAI’s black field instructed me that since Metcalfe’s guess had flopped in a really public method, I’d be risking the honoree’s pique if I raised it, and from then on he’d be too aggravated to share his greatest ideas. The interview could be a catastrophe.

Oh-kay, I believed. And then I clicked on the Zoom hyperlink.

The prizewinner who greeted me appeared terrific at 76, hardly modified from the man I final noticed possibly 30 years in the past when he was operating tech conferences and internet hosting nice events at his mansion in Boston’s Back Bay. (He spoke to me from his dwelling in Austin, the place he had moved for his educating gig.)

For somebody known for his bluster, he appeared genuinely humbled to affix the Turing membership, although you would possibly say it took them lengthy sufficient. It was virtually 50 years in the past to the day that Metcalfe wrote a memo to his bosses at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center proposing a approach to join the lab’s revolutionary private computer systems to its groundbreaking laser printer, and to at least one one other. Inspired by an obscure Hawaiian system known as AlohaNet, he discovered a approach to dynamically deal with high-speed knowledge in a community with out having the bits conflict or forcing reconfiguration every time a brand new person confirmed up. He dubbed it Ethernet. (He developed it with a co-inventor, David Boggs.)

Metcalfe’s concept not solely solved the issue at PARC, however wound up scaling into an important know-how for everybody. Over 5 billion folks use the web. Did he have that in thoughts when he concocted these first networks? “No, although it’d be convenient for me to say so,” he says. “PARC was a very much ‘build your own tools’ kind of place. But in retrospect, what we were doing was helping the internet transition from the networking of dumb terminals to the networking of personal computers.”

In 1979, Metcalfe founded 3Com to assist commercialize Ethernet, after he’d persuaded Xerox to make the networking know-how an open customary. Throughout the Eighties he relentlessly promoted the usual; by then he’d made a superb statement that defined the expansion of not simply the web, but in addition the various companies constructed on prime of it: that the worth of a community is proportional to the sq. of the variety of customers. In different phrases, every time a brand new person joins a community it grows extra highly effective.