Opportunity: Green Power, Packet Origination

Next week, I'll have the opportunity - through a green-power startup that I'm assisting - to meet with David Boggs in Palo Alto. The startup is in stealth mode, but I hope to spend the time discussing a few marketing options and the operational implications of data-center power retrofitting

For those of you who know your Ethernet packets, David's name may not be quite as familiar as that of his boss, Robert (Bob) Metcalfe. Yet both of them are listed on the Microsoft academic search for a few interesting papers, including this one in 1975:

R. M. Metcalfe, D. R. Boggs : 

Ethernet: distributed packet switching for local computer networks

 

, 1975

 

(Citations: 8)

In both 1975 and 1976, Ethernet was being presented by and at the Berkeley Workshop on Distributed Data Management and Computer Networks.

Boggs, Metcalfe and colleagues went on to deal with issues facing early Ethernet implementations, including:

Robert M. Metcalfe, David R. Boggs, Charles P. Thacker, Butler W. Lampson : 

Multipoint data communication system with collision detection

 

, 1977

(Citations: 3)

I asked a friend, who recently went to hear SRI's Doug Engelbart speak during the 40th anniversary of his famous "mother of all demos" on Augmentation, why we seemed to be getting the opportunity to meet these pioneers when they live so close to many of Silicon Valley's newest, hottest upstarts.

"It's because we care," she said.