Robert "Bob" Melancton Metcalfe (born April 7, 1946)[2][3] is an American engineer and entrepreneur who contributed to the development of the internet in the 1970s.

[7][6] Metcalfe graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, receiving two Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and industrial management.

[9] While pursuing his doctorate in computer science, Metcalfe took a job with MIT's Project MAC after Harvard refused permission for him to connect the university to the then-new ARPAnet.

[10] Metcalfe decided how to improve his thesis while working at Xerox PARC, where he read a paper about the ALOHA network at the University of Hawaii.

[11] Metcalfe was working at PARC in 1973 when he and David Boggs invented Ethernet, initially as a standard for connecting computers over short distances.

"That is the first time Ethernet appears as a word, as does the idea of using coax as ether, where the participating stations, like in AlohaNet or ARPAnet, would inject their packets of data, they'd travel around at megabits per second, there would be collisions, and retransmissions, and back-off," Metcalfe explained.

[15] Metcalfe was a keynote speaker at the 2016 Congress of Future Science and Technology Leaders and, in 2019, he presented the Bernard Price Memorial Lecture in South Africa.

[20] In October 2003, he received the Marconi Award for "For inventing the Ethernet and promulgating his Law of network utility based on the square of the nodes".

During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.