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Bob Metcalfe, networking pioneer, founder and former chief executive of 3Com, and now an Internet pundit, has had to eat his words before. But in January last year, he did it literally, chomping and swallowing the glossy paper on which his 'From the Ether' column in US computer trade magazine InfoWorld is printed.

 The cause for this less-than-tasty meal was his bold predictions throughout 1996 that the Internet would collapse that year, leaving millions unable to read their e-mail or browse the Web.

 As Mr Metcalfe told it during a stopover in Hong Kong last month, he was almost right.

 'I predicted that the Internet would slow down and break down occasionally' that year, the inventor of Ethernet, the most popular networking standard, said.

 He points to America Online, whose 6.2 million customers lost service for 19 hours that year, and NetCom, with 400,000 subscribers, which broke down for 13 hours. But Mr Metcalfe says he went too far in forecasting what he calls a 'gigalapse' - equal to a billion lost user-hours.

 If the Internet continues to become faster and more reliable, thank Mr Metcalfe and his gadfly columns, which take regular jabs at telecoms firms, ISPs, and any other Net-related companies.

 Anyone using a computer in an office should thank Mr Metcalfe. Back in 1973, after he got his doctorate from Harvard, the then fashionably bearded computer scientist was working at Xerox Parc in the Silicon Valley.

 Xerox Parc was a cutting-edge research laboratory famous for the technologies it created that made billions for companies other than Xerox.

 One of those was Ethernet. At the time, a computer terminal that wanted to print needed to send data in the exact order of the words to be printed, and if the whole document was not sent flawlessly, the user had to start again.

 Mr Metcalfe's innovation was to break a document's words and put them into individual packets, like letters in an envelope. That way, the packets could be sent individually, and reassembled by the destination machine in the correct order for printing, and could be re-sent if necessary.

 The original Ethernet cards were the size of a small suitcase, used huge integrated circuits and coaxial cables, and cost US$5,000, Mr Metcalfe said. And they ran at 2.94 megabits per second, plugging into mini-computers such as the Digital Vax.

 An Ethernet card now costs as little as HK$200, uses one tiny chip, connects via telephone wire (twisted pair copper), and runs at 10 mbps.

 No one had seen anything like Ethernet for local-area networking before.

 Many mid-70s computer users, in fact, were able to argue eloquently why a 1,200 bits-per-second modem was overkill.

 Their logic was that if you sat in front of a computer terminal and printed the words at 600 bits per second, you could still read the text as it flowed down the screen; but at 1,200 bits per second, it would go by too fast to read, Mr Metcalfe said - still incredulous to this day.

 That inertia was one reason Ethernet was not proposed as a networking standard until mid-1980, after Mr Metcalfe had left Xerox Parc to found 3Com the previous year.

 The Ethernet standards war lasted nearly two years, as individual parties proposed their own networking standards. Digital, Intel and Xerox advocated what became today's Ethernet standard, while IBM pushed its Token Ring technology standard.

 And there was car-maker General Motors, which felt, according to Mr Metcalfe, that the vendors were ignoring customers and decided to create its own networking protocol.

 Wrangling over Ethernet lasted until December 1982, six months longer than Mr Metcalfe, then chief executive of 3Com, expected. It was 'almost fatal' to his start-up firm, and resulted in him being demoted to head of sales and marketing.

 As Ethernet took off, Mr Metcalfe helped 3Com grow into a near-billion-dollar company. He retired from 3Com in 1990 after losing his bid to become chief executive to Eric Benhamou, whom he lauds as a 'nice guy' and good executive.

 Mr Metcalfe no longer has any official affiliation with 3Com, nor stock, although he readily admits to being 'still emotionally involved'.

 After 3Com, Mr Metcalfe published InfoWorld for 2.5 years. Since 1995, he has lived on a farm, where he writes columns (available at www.infoworld.com) and sends them to the Internet via a leased 56 kbps line.

 Displaying his Silicon Valley libertarian stripes, Mr Metcalfe opposes monopolies, especially telecoms companies, which he says should be barred from running ISPs or offering broadband consumer services such as cable modems or Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), a fast networking technology.

 He advocates creating a corporate tax system where companies pay no tax on profits until they earn US$1 billion in profits.

 That way, companies would have an incentive to spin off profitable divisions to avoid paying taxes, and make monopolies less likely.

 He believes Ethernet is a valuable history lesson, as networking standards wars continue, not so much in Gigabit Ethernet - 100 times faster than Ethernet but still unratified by the international standards bodies - but in DSL.

 Compaq, Intel and Microsoft are backing ADSL which Mr Metcalfe thinks is technologically inferior, though it has the blessing of US telecoms firms.

 He backs other forms of DSL, but believes a standard will not emerge in the near future.

 'There will be a million more DSLs before we are done,' he said.



Ethernet pioneer admits to gigalapse