Thursday, September 10 | 4–5 p.m. | Morgridge Hall

MIT researcher and legend Bob Metcalfe will be on campus on September 10th to tell the story of the internet. According to the event announcement, Metcalfe is going back to 1969, when the technological breakthroughs that came to be the internet, later the web, and today AI were being conceived. For us internet users today, terms like packet switching and Ethernet may sound like nothing, but they form the foundation of our digital lives. And Metcalfe was there when some of these systems were being built.

Metcalfe is also quite the legend, having been in the digital space since the 1970s. In 2022, he won the coveted Turing Award, dubbed the Nobel Prize of computer science.

His books are available at the UW library for those interested in exploring his ideas before he arrives: Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (1997), Packet Communication (1996), and Internet Collapses and Other InfoWorld Punditry (2000).

It should be an intriguing event for the historical context it can bring, something much needed today when we seem to be stuck in a world that is constantly on the frontier of something new. I don’t know about Metcalfe’s claim, as the event announcement suggests, that the internet has helped reduce global poverty, but I am intrigued.

The talk is free and open to everyone. You can attend in person at WARF Seminar Room 7560 or join live via Microsoft Teams. Go here for more details.

When: Thursday, September 10, 4–5 p.m.
Where: Morgridge Hall, Room 7560 (or online)
Cost: Free
Questions? Contact gigi.mitchell@wisc.edu or call 608-262-1204