David Boggs, Co-Inventor of Ethernet, Dies at 71

David Boggs, an electrical engineer and computer scientist who helped create Ethernet, the computer networking technology that connects PCs to printers, other devices and the internet in offices and homes, died on Feb. 19 in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 71. From a report: His wife, Marcia Bush, said his death, at Stanford Hospital, was caused by heart failure. In the spring of 1973, just after enrolling as a graduate student at Stanford University, Mr. Boggs began an internship at Xerox PARC, a Silicon Valley research lab that was developing a new kind of personal computer. One afternoon, in the basement of the lab, he noticed another researcher tinkering with a long strand of cable. The researcher, another new hire named Bob Metcalfe, was exploring ways of sending information to and from the lab's new computer, the Alto. Mr. Metcalfe was trying to send electrical pulses down the cable, and he was struggling to make it work. So Mr. Boggs offered to help. Over the next two years, they designed the first version of Ethernet. "He was the perfect partner for me," Mr. Metcalfe said in an interview. "I was more of a concept artist, and he was a build-the-hardware-in-the-back-room engineer." Many of the key technologies that would be developed over the next two decades as part of the Alto project would come to define the modern computer, including the mouse, the graphical user interface, the word processor and the laser printer, as well as Ethernet.

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