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Essay on Metcalfe's Law
This Law is named after Robert M. Metcalfe, who proposed the Ethernet in his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard University and was one of the pioneers of internetworking in his research at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford University. In 1979, Metcalfe co-founded 3Com Corporation, which sold Ethernet adapter cards and became a major communications products company. The company’s name, 3Com, stands for Computer, Communication, and Compatibility – reflecting the idea that the Ethernet standard facilitates the addition of more computer users to the network, which increases its value according to Metcalfe’s Law. Metcalfe’s Law was part of a standard presentation that was used by Metcalfe to promote 3Com and the Ethernet standard.
The term “Metcalfe’s Law” was coined by George Gilder, who praised the power of interconnection – reflected by the philosophies of both Ethernet and the Internet. Gilder considered Metcalfe’s Law on par with Moore's Law. He wrote: “Indeed, the power of the telecosm reproduces on a larger scale - by interconnecting computers – the exponential yield of the microcosm, a law describing the near magical effect of interconnecting transistors on chips of silicon: As increasing numbers of transistors are packed ever closer together, the transistors run faster, cooler, cheaper and better.
Metcalfe's law suggests that a similar spiral of gains is available in the telecosm of computer communications.” (Gilder, 1993)
If the whole world is connected, the utility of the system is phenomenal. In the pre-digital age it could take many years for Metcalfe's Law to be manifest; indeed, it was not really until after the end of the Second World War that telephone manufacturers put a dial on the instrument, finally eliminating the tremendous cost of employing switchboard operators and extending the reach of the system. Primarily telephone usage had to reach a ‘critical mass’, or number of users, before its utility became meaningful....................
