Robert Metcalfe

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pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

.: Harvard University Press, 2019), 163. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21 The 3Com story that follows was constructed from multiple sources and then verified in an email exchange with Metcalfe. Metcalfe, email to the author, April 2, 2019. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 Robert Metcalfe, “Oral History of Robert Metcalfe,” interview by Len Shustek, Computer History Museum, Nov. 29, 2006, archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Metcalfe_Robert_1/Metcalfe_Robert_1_2.oral_history.2006.7.102657995.pdf. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23 John W. Wilson, The New Venturers: Inside the High-Stakes World of Venture Capital (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1985), 177.

In a final mark of caution, East Coasters took risk off the table early, often preferring to sell a portfolio firm to a bigger rival once it had made 5x or so. Because they were making fewer bets that went to zero, they did not feel compelled to drive their winners to 10x or higher. The contrast between the coasts was crystallized in the story of Bob Metcalfe.[22] A self-styled “Viking-American,” with grandparents from Oslo, Bergen, Leeds, and Dublin, Metcalfe sported bushy strawberry-blond hair and wing tip loafers and called himself “a right-wing hippie.”[23] After studies at MIT and Harvard, he moved out west to Xerox PARC, where he seldom used an alarm clock, frequently pulled all-nighters at the lab, and invented a computer-networking technology called Ethernet.

Krause called Metcalfe and asked for help. The family conversation had not gone so well. Maybe Metcalfe and Howard Charney could join Gay and him for dinner? The Krauses duly dined with Metcalfe and Charney. Afterward Gay said, “Howard Charney’s the smartest guy I ever met.” Then she added, “Bob Metcalfe’s the most charismatic guy I ever met.” Then she demanded, “What the hell do they need you for?” “Is that a yes?” Krause asked. “Go for it,” Gay responded.[32] With Krause ready to come on board, Metcalfe thought he had what he needed to press for a $20 share price.[33] But even with adult supervision in place, the venture guys were not budging.


pages: 459 words: 140,010

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Larry Tesler brought the newest programming techniques to his PARC software. Bob Metcalfe was involved in a technique for networking computers. * * * Figure 81. Bob Metcalfe While working at Xerox PARC, Metcalfe cocreated Ethernet, which became the standard for networking computers. (Courtesy of Richard Shoup) Over several years these engineers and programmers, building in part on the revolutionary work of Douglas Engelbart, created an impressive workstation computer called the Alto. The Alto boasted an advanced language called Smalltalk, an input device borrowed from SRI called the mouse, and that networking technique of Bob Metcalfe’s called Ethernet for connecting individual Altos for communication and cumulation of effort, as if they were one big computer.

It did, rapidly and impressively, licensing some browser technology and developing its own browser, Internet Explorer, to compete with Netscape’s browser. The company launched by the young coder and the industry veteran was, in Gates’s opinion, a threat to Microsoft’s existence, and it needed to be snuffed out. Gates was not alone in seeing the Internet as a threat to Microsoft’s dominance in the PC market. Bob Metcalfe, the networking guru who had developed the Ethernet protocol, wrote a weekly column for the industry magazine InfoWorld. In February 1995, he predicted that the browser would in effect become the dominant operating system for the next era. The dominant operating system for the current era was, of course, Microsoft’s Windows.

—Lee Felsenstein By 2000 the Internet was an integral part of life for millions of people. Indeed, 350 million or more people were online, the majority of them in the United States. That figure would grow by an order of magnitude over the next decade and a half, and more closely match the relative populations of countries. By 2014, China was home to the most Internet users. Robert Metcalfe’s 1995 prediction that the web browser would become the operating system for the next era had largely come true. If, as Sun Microsystems had famously claimed, the network was the computer, then the browser was the operating system, and single-computer-based operating systems were irrelevant. It wasn’t quite that simple, but websites were becoming more like applications, powered by JavaScript.


pages: 313 words: 95,077

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

Other students who have been especially incisive on social topics are Mouna Andraos, Jake Barton, Michelle Chang, John Geraci, Elizabeth Goodman, Christina Goodness, Sam Howard-Spink, James Robinson, Matty Sallin, Nick Sears, Mike Sharon, and Shawn van Every. Alicia Cervini’s careful reading has improved both the ideas and their expression from the first draft. My field has a tradition of thinking out loud. Chris Anderson, Andrew Blau, Stewart Brand, Lili Cheng, Esther Dyson, Hal Levin, Bob Metcalfe, Jerry Michalski, Richard O’Neill, Tim O’Reilly, Peter Schwartz, Andrew Stolli, and Kevin Werbach all provided both observations and public platforms for the development of this work. Articles written for Chris Anderson for Wired and Thomas Stewart for Harvard Business Review did likewise. Long-running conversations with many colleagues have provided material and insights for this book.

This increase in scale, both of the underlying social media and of the population that uses it, is still creating surprises because large systems behave differently from small ones. One fitting name for the way more is different is “the network effect,” the name given to networks that become more valuable as people adopt them. Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet networking protocol, gave his name to a law that describes this increase in value. Metcalfe’s Law is usually stated this way: “The value of the network grows with the square of its users.” When you double the size of the network, you quadruple the number of potential connections.

CHAPTER 2: SHARING ANCHORS COMMUNITY Page 25: Birthday Paradox Wikipedia contains a good general guide to the Birthday Paradox, at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox. (As always, Wikipedia also contains links at the bottom of the article to additional materials on the subject.) An alternate formulation of the same math is expressed as “Metcalfe’s law.” Robert Metcalfe, inventor of a core networking technology called Ethernet, proposed that “the value of a network rises with the square of its members,” which is to say that when you double the size of a network, its value quadruples, because so many new links become possible. Metcalfe’s law isn’t true in any literal sense, because not all links are created equal—being able to contact your friends matters more than being able to contact someone you’ve never heard of who lives on the other side of the world.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Daniel Colin James, “This Is How Google Collapsed”, Hacker Noon: Where hackers start their afternoons, April 27, 2017. https://hackernoon.com/how-google-collapsed-b6ffa82198ee 7. Ibid. Most of these numbers come from the Daniel Colin James blog. Chapter 5: Ten Laws of the Cryptocosm 1. “Safety Last” is the principle of Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe. 2. The source of the image of M&A unicorns and IPO gazelles is the financier-philosopher William Walton. Chapter 6: Google’s Datacenter Coup 1. George Gilder, “The Information Factories,” Wired, October 1, 2006. I originally made this trip as a contributing editor of Wired and much of the prose in the chapter, including the opening paragraphs, originally appeared in Wired.

Main Street: The symbol of the real economy of workers paid hourly or monthly and sealed off from the accelerated circular loops of Wall Street moneymaking. Perhaps the street where you live, Main Street is the site of local businesses and jobs. Metcalfe’s Law: The value and power of a network grows by the square of the number of compatible nodes it links. Named for the engineer Robert Metcalfe (1946–), a co-inventor of Ethernet, this law is a rough index and deeply counterintuitive. (The Internet is worth less than the square of its six billion connected devices.) But the law applies to smaller networks, and it explains the vectors of value creation of companies such as Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon, which now dominate stock market capitalization.


pages: 386 words: 91,913

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Gordon Gable, “Top 10 Bad Tech Predictions,” Digital Trends, November 4, 2012, accessed December 19, 2014, http://www.digitaltrends.com/features/top-10-bad-tech-predictions/4/#ixzz2s4mjo7iC. 19. Erin Skarda, “Top 10 Failed Predictions,” Time, October 21, 2011, accessed December 20, 2014, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2097462_2097456_2097467,00.html. 20. Bob Metcalfe, “From the Ether: Predicting the Internet’s Catastrophic Collapse and Ghost Sites Galore in 1996,” Info World, December 4, 1995, http://bit.ly/1AlCm3B. 21. K. Binnemans, P. T. Jones, K. Acker, B. Blanpain, B. Mishra, and D. Apelian, “Rare-Earth Economics: The Balance Problem,” JOM, 2013, http://www.kuleuven.rare3.eu/wp-content/plugins/rare/images/papers/binnemans_jom_2013.pdf; Molycorp, “Advanced Communications,” accessed December 19, 2014, www.molycorp.com/technology/green-element-technologies/advanced-communications; APS Physics, “New Prototype Magnetic Refrigerators Hold Commercial Promise,” accessed December 19, 2014, www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200305/refrigerators.cfm; Binnemans et al., “Rare-Earth Economics: The Balance Problem.” 22.

People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box,” Darryl Zanuck, founder of Twentieth Century Pictures (1946).18 • “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (1977).19 • “I predict the Internet … will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse,” Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and the Ethernet (1995).20 Since we don’t know which invention will take off, we can’t estimate which rare metal will either. Thirty years ago, dysprosium had little use. Now, in part because of its use in magnets, it is essential for our new high-tech lives. Gallium, because of its low melting point, could find itself in high demand in 3D printing, a type of home-based manufacturing.


pages: 559 words: 157,112

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Elkind, laboratory manager (1971–1978) Robert W. Taylor, associate manager Butler W. Lampson, key contributor to the Alto personal computer, Ethernet networking system, laser printer, Mesa programming language, Dorado computer, Dandelion processor Charles P. Thacker, designer of MAXC time-sharing system and Alto and co-inventor of Ethernet Bob Metcalfe, principal inventor of Ethernet David Boggs, co-inventor of Ethernet Dick Shoup, inventor of Superpaint, pioneering video graphic device Charles Simonyi, developer of Bravo word processing program with “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) capability Peter Deutsch, expert programmer Ed McCreight, hardware designer of MAXC time-sharing system and the Alto Ed Fiala, co-designer of MAXC Ron Rider, designer of the research character generator, adjunct to the laser printer John Ellenby, head planner of Futures Day presentation (1977), at which PARC technology was introduced to Xerox senior management Charles Geschke, co-developer of Mesa programming language and Interpress page description language John Warnock, co-developer of Interpress and other printing and page description systems Severo Ornstein, supervisor of the Dorado computer project SYSTEMS SCIENCE LABORATORY William F.

June-August: Kay and a hand-picked team complete the first version of their revolutionary object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk, which will heavily influence such modern programming systems as C++ and Java. November: Starkweather completes work on the world’s first laser computer printer. June: Bob Metcalfe encounters a technical paper describing Hawaii’s ALOHAnet, several principles of which he will incorporate into Ethernet. September: MAXC having been completed, Thacker and Lampson invite Kay to join their project to build a small personal computer. The machine will be known as the Alto. November 22: Thacker begins design work on the Alto.

Starkweather’s SLOT and Rider’s character generator were two of the four legs of the complete interactive office environment PARCwas creating on the fly. In the same period Thacker, McCreight, and Lampson were building the Alto; Alan Kay and his Learning Research Group were designing a graphical user interface aimed at making computers intuitively simple to use; and Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs were designing a network—the Ethernet—to tie all the other components together. “We had in mind that you ought to be able to create a file on the Alto and ship it via the Ethernet to a print server [that is, a communal computer managing everyone’s print orders], which would convert it to a raster and print it out,” Rider recalled.


pages: 352 words: 96,532

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

But there wasn’t enough natural traffic on the network to really push the limits of the routing and anticongestion schemes. There were some interesting early uses. Programmers at SRI were using Utah’s PDP-10 compiler in preparation for installing their own PDP-10, and they generated the most actual traffic. Jon Postel at UCLA was using the network to run SRI’s oNLine System. Bob Metcalfe, a Harvard graduate student working at MIT, and a friend, Danny Cohen, who taught at Harvard, did one of the more exciting early experiments over the network. Metcalfe and Cohen used Harvard’s PDP-10 to simulate an aircraft carrier landing and then displayed the image on a graphics terminal at MIT.

At the moment, however, the turtle was jumping up and down, twitching and jerking crazily. Instead of sending Postel’s file to the printer, the system had accidentally sent it to the turtle port, and the robot dutifully offered its interpretation of what it took to be motion commands. As an enthusiastic graduate student, Bob Metcalfe had undertaken the task of writing a booklet to accompany the demonstrations. It described nineteen scenarios for using the ARPANET, listed resources at various sites, and showed how to log on to a remote host, how to gain access to one of the applications, and how to control a program or engage in some kind of interactive communication over the network.

With a clean separation of the protocols, it was now possible to build fast and relatively inexpensive gateways, which would in turn fuel the growth of internetworking. By 1978, TCP had officially become TCP/IP. ETHERNET In 1973, just when Cerf and Kahn had begun collaborating on the concept of internetworking, Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC was inventing the technological underpinnings for a new kind of network. Called a short-distance, or local-area, network, Metcalfe’s network would connect computers not in different cities but in different rooms. Metcalfe had received his undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and management from MIT and enrolled at Harvard for graduate school.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

Somehow, Taylor told his people, you have to network these machines together; otherwise, you'll be tak- ing a giant step backward, graphics or no graphics. Fortunately, however, Thacker and his colleagues didn't really have to focus on communications. For something like six months now, PARC had had an ex- perienced networking hotshot hard at work on the problem-a relatively new re- cruit by the name of Bob Metcalfe. In an odd sort of way, admits Bob Metcalfe, a lot of the credit for the network he developed at PARC has to go to the applied-mathematics department at Har- vard University: he hated it. In fact, he'd spent his entire graduate career there staying as far away as possible-which was why he'd actually done his Ph.D. re- search for money, working on the Arpanet as a full-time staffer for J.

On the communications front, meanwhile, the proliferation of Macs and PC clones was very good news for networking start-ups such as 3Com, which had al- ready begun to prosper by selling Ethernet products for VAXes and worksta- tions. Indeed, the personal-computer revolution was what transformed the Bob Metcalfe of 1979 into the Bob Metcalfe of today: the proud possessor of a farm in Maine, a town house suitable for an embassy in Boston's tony Back Bay neighborhood, a prestigious second career in technology journalism, and a per- sonal fortune that amounts to a noticeable fraction of Bill Gates's. "I tell people I didn't get rich inventing Ethernet," he says with a laugh.

Given the nature of inter- active computing, in fact, even the fieriest activists among them could argue that they were co-opting the Pentagon, and not vice versa. They were striking a blow for intellectual freedom. They were liberating human potential. And not incidentally, they were liberating a few dollars that might otherwise be spent on B-52s. "That was the lie we told ourselves," recalls a wry Bob Metcalfe, then an undergraduate computer-science major at MIT: "Our money was bloody on only one side." Then, too, many of these kids were nothing if not escapist. The obsessive techno-weenies who haunted the terminal rooms of Project MAC and the other ARPA sites were children of the sixties, all right.


pages: 323 words: 92,135

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

It was lunchtime at George Gilder’s Telecosm conference, and we were waiting for the featured speaker, Gary Winnick of Global Crossing, to explain how he sends billions of packets per second under the Atlantic Ocean. George Gilder has hosted his Telecosm conference for years. Tech luminaries like Carver Mead, Bob Metcalfe and Paul Allen were regulars. “I don’t know what the first packet was,” I confessed. My tablemate turned out to be Leonard Kleinrock, a UCLA professor, according to his name tag. It turned out that he had been at the creation. Since the 1978 introduction of the Apple II computer, to the 1981 announcement of the IBM PC, the world has been flooded with smaller, cheaper and faster computers.

It’s almost as if you become desensitized to the pace of advance because it becomes expected. Bored to tears, I scanned the room for someone, anyone, to give the high sign to, to make a quick exit to coffee and jokes in the hall. Nick Moore wasn’t here, damn. My eyes got stuck in the middle of the room. There was Bob Metcalfe staring at the slide, looking at the line going up and up Packet Racket 189 and up. He was shaking his head with a look of both amazement and disbelief, and this was the guy that invented it. After a dozen of those IMP nodes were up and running, it was time to start giving demos to people who mattered.

One of the ARPANET researchers was in charge of giving a demonstration to some bigwigs from AT&T. Keep in mind that the phone network was engineered to fail for only two minutes every 40 years. That is one of those six nine’s, or four to the right of the decimal point, or 99.9999% reliability. As the story goes, researcher Bob Metcalfe was in the middle of demonstrating the packet network when, like any good demo, it crashed. This put smiles on the faces of those 10 AT&T execu-humps, and they merrily skipped back to headquarters singing the stillbirth of packet switching. Of course, they were right for another 30 years, but packet switching would eventually be trouble for circuit-switched phone networks.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

As a result, he could handpick his team.VIII “All it took was a few phone calls from Taylor and the chosen researchers signed up,” recalled one Xerox executive.20 Taylor began recruiting at the University of Utah. He swept in several employees from Bolt Beranek and Newman. At Harvard, he pursued the networking expert Bob Metcalfe, even after Harvard balked at giving Metcalfe a PhD.VII Closer to home, Taylor bypassed the young microchip and electronics operations to pursue clusters of talent with academic, not business, leanings. From Berkeley, he plucked a group that had worked together on an ARPA project at the University of California and then launched a commercial operation near the campus.

Taylor, a competitive tennis player, enjoyed challenging the best players at PARC to hard-core, sweat-streaming matches on the court behind his neighbor’s home. Afterward, the players would adjourn to Taylor’s house. “The Dr Pepper was cold, the doors were open, a breeze was blowing through, and everyone was always welcome to come in,” recalls Bob Metcalfe.27 During the weekly lab meetings, Taylor also spent time fielding complaints. The cafeteria food was bad. Equipment was inadequate. Secretaries were overworked. Surprisingly often, grumblings about balky Xerox copiers led the list of problems. Taylor listened and took careful notes. He knew that truly creative computer scientists tend to be opinionated individualists.

Again and again over the course of the next decade, Taylor would try to interest the company’s leadership in the technology coming out of the computing labs at PARC. His efforts would meet with little success. In early 1972, the lab was at a critical point. The MAXC computer was almost complete. Soon Bob Metcalfe would connect it to the Arpanet, the computer network that Taylor had kick-started in 1966 when he was at ARPA. Researchers were beginning to complain that the final-stage refinements were “depressing” and too far removed from basic research.42 Around this time, Jerry Elkind, Taylor’s PhD-bearing boss, asked whether Xerox should “buy the ARPANET.”


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

A broadcast-era business maxim, called Sarnoff’s law after the founder of NBC, was that the value of a network varies arithmetically with the size of its audience. Silicon Valley’s updated twenty-first-century version was Metcalfe’s law (named after Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet technology, which permits direct, noncentralized communication between computer workstations), which has it that the value of a network varies exponentially with its number of users. (As a young engineer helping to design an early automatic teller machine for Chase Manhattan Bank, Bob Metcalfe was given a brief audience with the bank’s chairman, David Rockefeller, who had on his desk a five-foot-wide custom-built Rolodex containing more than a hundred thousand cards.

“all based on a theory”: Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, “Factors Affecting the Decisions of General Motors and Chrysler to Reduce Their Dealership Networks,” July 19, 2010, 31. “The report was ludicrous”: Rattner, Overhaul, 302. 6. NETWORK MAN you might well wind up in Silicon Valley: General background and history about Silicon Valley comes from author’s interviews with Arthur Rock, Hal Varian, Laszlo Bock, AnnaLee Saxenian, Bob Metcalfe, Ben Rosen, Reid Hoffman, Thomas Perkins, John Doerr, John Lilly, David Sze, David Hahn, Michael Mandel, Joe Kraus, Josh Kopelman, Nancy Lublin, Joi Ito, Peter Thiel, Simon Rothman, George Arison, David Sanford, Mark Pincus, Jeff Weiner, Premal Shah, James Manyika, Evan Williams, Allen Blue, Ann Miurako, John Etchemendy, Mike Maples, Roy Bahat, Terry Winograd, Ian McCarthy, Jen Pahlka, Tim O’Reilly, Linda Rottenberg, Ben Casnocha, and Dan Portillo.

Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy and Sociodrama, Beacon, 1953. “The Strength of Weak Ties”: Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume 78, Number 6 (May 1973), 1360–80. “much as levies were imposed”: Hoffman, Blitzscaling, 84. As a young engineer: Author’s interview with Bob Metcalfe. “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado”: Hoffman, Blitzscaling, 11. In 2014 Hoffman and two of his protégés: See Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, Harvard Business Review Press, 2014. The Start-Up of You: Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, Crown Business, 2012.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Everywhere there were these large tracts of prune orchards and every month another orchard would be taken down and they’d pile up all the cut trees next to a sign that said “free firewood” and soon there would be a concrete tilt-up there. The center of gravity was Mountain View and Sunnyvale, where Fairchild and Intel and National Semiconductor were. Bob Metcalfe: Intel was just getting started. There was no Apple. There was a Hewlett-Packard, but they barely made computers, just barely. They were old and respectable, but a tiny little company. Al Alcorn: The Valley at the time in the sixties and seventies was dominated by military stuff: Lockheed and all these big places—and semiconductor companies.

And it was extremely clear that they were wildly uneconomical at the time we built them. Alan Kay: Through money—and assuming Moore’s law—you can basically put a supercomputer on a desk, which is what we did. Dan Ingalls: It was almost a free ride, because so many things were just ready to be invented: The entire world of bitmapped graphics was there to be invented. Bob Metcalfe: And it was California, so we rode bicycles. I remember we used to ride our bikes along Arastradero Road over to Alpine Road and go to the Alpine Inn at lunchtime. We would drink beer at lunch, and that meant the afternoon was gone and that work might resume that evening after dinner. It was very laid-back.

Dick Shoup: But of course from our point of view we were proud to be on the leading edge and trying to move Xerox and anybody else who would listen into the future, because we could see what was coming. Stewart Brand (writing in Rolling Stone): When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over. Bob Metcalfe: Right after we finished MAXC we started work on the Alto computer, arguably the world’s first personal computer. Chuck Thacker: And we finally started listening to Bob Taylor, who had been telling us what to do for a long time but we didn’t understand it. Bob Taylor: The design center of computers in those days was the arithmetic unit.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Worldcom and Global Crossing tried to revive the corpse with accounting tricks to buy themselves time to move to packets, hence the accounting scandals in 2002. In the fall of that year, I sat at the same table with Bob Metcalfe during a presentation on the future of networking. The talk was dull, but as a slide demonstrating uses of 10 gigabit and soon 100 gigabit Ethernet networks flashed on the screen, I noticed a funny look on Bob Metcalfe’s face: He was half stunned, half amused that Ethernet is still scaling from those 2.94 megabit per second beginnings. 150 HOW WE GOT HERE Metcalfe is also known for another famous observation – that the value of a network goes up by the square of the number of nodes attached to it.

One of the ARPANET researchers was in charge of giving a demonstration to some bigwigs from AT&T. Keep in mind that the phone network was engineered to fail for only 2 minutes every 40 years. That is one of those 5 nine’s to the right of the decimal point or 99.99999% reliability. As the story goes, Bob Metcalfe was in the middle of demonstrating the packet network when, like any good SOFTWARE AND NETWORKS 147 demo, it crashed. This put smiles on the face of those 10 AT&T execuhumps, and they merrily skipped back to HQ singing the stillbirth of packet switching. Of course, they were right for another 30 years, but packet switching would eventually be trouble for circuit-switched phone networks.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

The people who built the first interactive, multiaccess computers, the first intellectual augmentation systems, and the first packet-switching computer networks were gathering under the same roof for the first time, in order to turn those dreams into prototypes as soon as possible. Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, Jim Mitchell, Ed McCreight, Bob Sproull, Jim Morris, Chuck Geschke, Alan Kay, Bob Metcalfe, Peter Deutsch, Bill English -- to those who knew anything about the esoteric world of computer design, the PARC computer science founders constituted an unprecedented collection of talents. It wasn't the kind of shop where old-style hierarchies and pecking orders would do any good. You don't run an outfit like that as much as you mediate it -- which is where Bob Taylor came in.

The PARC folks were hungry for personal computing power, but they didn't want to give up that hard-won and effort-amplifying community they were just beginning to know on the ARPAnet. Dan Swinehart, an SRI alumnus who joined PARC early in the game, remembers that "From the day the Alto was proposed, Butler Lampson and Bob Metcalfe pointed out that if we were going to give everybody at PARC a self-contained computer instead of hooking them all into a central time-sharing system, we'd need a connecting network with enough communicating and resource-sharing capability that the people at the personal work stations wouldn't be isolated from each other."

But when Xerox failed to become the first name in the industry, and the hobbyist side of personal computing had grown to the point where some of the original hobbyists were recruiting PARC scientists and building their own personal computer empires, the first high-level PARC defectors began to seed the rest of the industry with the user interface concepts embodied in the Star. Bob Metcalfe, the man responsible for the creation of the Ethernet, left to start 3-Com, a company specializing in local area network technology. Alan Kay, whose Smalltalk team made impressive contributions to the Star interface, left to become the chief scientist at Atari. John Ellenby, who helped reengineer the Alto 2, became the chairman of Grid.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 1998), 143. 17. Ibid., 182. 18. Ibid., 153. 19. Katie Hafner and John Markoff, CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Revised (Simon & Schuster, 1995), 279. 20. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity: A Flaw in the Design.” 21. Bob Metcalfe, “The Stockings Were Hung by the Chimney with Care,” IETF Tools, tools.ietf.org/html/rfc602. 22. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, 190. 23. Levy, Hackers, 423. 24. Jimmy Maher, “Zork on the PDP-10,” Digital Antiquarian, January 3, 2012, www.filfre.net/2012/01/zork-on-the-pdp-10/. 25.

They break into banks because that’s where the money is,” explained Janet Abbate, the author of Inventing the Internet. As she said, “They thought they were building a classroom, and it turned into a bank.”20 Trust was inherent and expected on ARPANET—and yet as the network grew, the costs of that approach were becoming more clear. In December 1973, Robert Metcalfe, one of the system’s early creators, sent out a message warning that most sites had inadequate security protections—fundamentally, the network and its users were just too trusting. The phone numbers to dial up ARPANET were widely known and, once a user dialed in, the system required “no user identification before giving service.”21 Whereas hackers were professionals who subscribed to a shared online code and were focused on openness, the decentralization of information, and a collective responsibility to never harm data—the data was the treasure they shared together—malicious network users were known as “network randoms,” “net randoms,” or simply “randoms,” a reference to their uncertain online origins.22 The presence of “randoms” online undermined the network’s collective spirit.


pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

There were “Moore’s Laws” of doubling capacity in digital storage, in communications bandwidth, and in the ubiquity of microprocessors in everything from dolls and doorknobs to hearing aids. New machines became obsolete every three years. The proliferation of personal computers and the digitizing of communications via the Internet set off what came to be called Metcalfe’s Law, named after Xerox engineer Bob Metcalfe. It states that the power of a network grows as the square of the number of users (people or devices) on the net. Hence the explosion of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s, when the Net’s total content was doubling every one hundred days. Related technologies such as biotech also took off. By 1997 Monsanto Corporation claimed that a computer-accelerated “Monsanto’s Law” was operating at a similar pace: “The ability to identify and use genetic information is doubling every twelve to twenty-four months.

Monsanto chose not to mention human germline engineering—that is, designing disease-resistant, higher-yield people. Velocity itself became the dominating characteristic of the world’s quicksilver economy. “We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small,” remarked Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, “to a world in which the fast eat the slow.” FIGURE 3.2 Bob Metcalfe’s original diagram shows how the value of a net increases as the square of the number of nodes (or people) on the net. It was drawn in 1973 at Xerox PARC (a corporate research center in California) while he was working on a local-area network system called Ethernet. The diagram shows that the costs of a network system are linear, whereas the growing value of the net is exponential, and that therefore the value will surpass the costs at the “critical mass crossover” and thereafter ascend to glory.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

A system with two phones means that there is one possible connection—we can call each other. But when you increase the number of phones by a factor of two—from five to ten, say—the number of possible connections more than doubles, from twenty-five to ninety. The difference between Bob Metcalfe and his wife sharing grocery lists and a connected, national network of husbands and wives is immense—an insight that led Bob Metcalfe and his wife to start a networking company that made them billionaires. Metcalfe’s Law has another angle, and it’s here where some of the unique Macht of network gates is revealed: It’s not merely that the power of a network grows exponentially with each additional user; it’s that the cost of being cut out grows every bit as fast.

In traditional economic terms this would be insane, but with network logic the strategy is clear: The more people who use TensorFlow, the smarter it gets, which in turn attracts still more users. Dense and self-learning fusions of mind and data such as TensorFlow and other soon-to-be-arriving AI systems are all gated universes. 5. The topological charm of these explosively growing clusters was first teased apart by the electrical engineer Bob Metcalfe in the 1970s. Metcalfe was hunting for a better way to send data—say, grocery lists to his wife—through Menlo Park, and he perfected a connection protocol called Ethernet, which soon became a standard for linking machines. What Metcalfe noticed as more and more users piled into the gateland of Stanford’s Ethernet-connected machines was that the reach of the system was growing exponentially.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Without the efficiencies described by Moore’s Law, the PC, the Internet, and mobile telephones would have been impossibly large, unintelligent, and expensive. What happens when you link devices based on Moore’s Law? When ARPA wizards gathered at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s to create the first personal computers, one of the engineering aces, Bob Metcalfe, led the team that invented the Ethernet, a high-speed network that interconnected PCs in the same building.80 Metcalfe left PARC, founded 3Com, Inc., cashed out, and came up with Metcalfe’s Law, which describes the growth of value in networks. The math is simple and is based on a fundamental mathematical property of networks: The number of potential connections between nodes grows more quickly than the number of nodes.

Alun Anderson, “The Mathematics of Mayhem,” in The World in 2001, <http://www.theworldin.com/arts/sci/fs1.html> (5 May 2001). 78. Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, 8 (19 April 1965):114117. 79. “Moore’s Law,” Intel Corporation, <http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm > (21 December 2001). 80. Scott Kirsner, “The Legend of Bob Metcalfe,” Wired 6.11, November 1998, <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//6.11/metcalfe.html?person=bob_met-calfe&topic_set=wiredpeople > (27 January 2002). 81. David P. Reed, “That Sneaky Exponential: Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building,” originally appeared in Context Magazine, Spring 1999 (by permission of DiamondCluster International, Inc. © 1999) <http://www.contextmag.com/archives/199903/digitalstrategyreedslaw.asp> (25 January 2002). 82.

See Apple Computer Maenpaa, Pasi McMaster University McNett, David Mad Wing Angels gang Madison, James Maes, Pattie Maguire, Gerald Mainframe computers Malda, Rob "Man-Machine Symbiosis" (Licklider) Manhattan Project Manila Mann, Steve and OCAP and WearComp use of the term cyborg by Marcos regime Marine biology . See also Biology Marx, Gary Mathematics Matshushita Matsunaga, Mari MCI M-commerce market Media spheres Medical research MeshNetworks Metalica Metatechnologies Metcalf, Bob Metcalfe's Law, xv and cooperation amplification and wireless networks Metricom Mexico Microprocessors,i and ad-hocracies clustering cycles and grid computing Intel, advent of and Moore's Law, xv and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Microsoft and Bluetooth developer conferences and Linux museum .NET initiative and reputation systems Research and wireless networks Middle Ages Middleware Milinski, Manfred Military research: and ARPA and DARPA and frequency-hopping and GPS systems and smart dust Minitel Mira computer tablet Mirror Worlds concept MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Artificial Intelligence lab Auto-ID Center bioacoustics research Center for Bits and Atoms Digital Nations consortium Media Lab and reputation systems Sloan School of Management and wireless networks and wearable computing Mitchell, William J.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

John Seely Brown, who was to become director of PARC, told me that two principles were at the center of the PARC philosophy. To begin with, Bob Taylor had brought the core directive of ARPANET with him to PARC. As Brown notes, “Decentralization was fundamental to ARPANET in the sense that a nuclear strike on a single city could not bring down the entire network.” Everything done at PARC, from the Alto to Bob Metcalf’s Ethernet architecture, was geared to making a decentralized network of personal computers function efficiently. This was new. The second core principle flowed from Alan Kay’s Dynabook. As Brown says, “The Dynabook and then the Alto were inspirations meant to empower the artistic individual.” When Brown first started working with Kay, he was playing music on the Alto and working with Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

As European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager acknowledged last week, we live in the Google age.” So the techno-determinist philosophy has even reached into the brain of Google’s most determined regulatory opponent. This theory of self-reinforcing dominance has often been called the network effect, or Metcalfe’s law, after PARC researcher Bob Metcalfe’s formula that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. As more people use Google’s search engine, the company becomes exponentially more valuable. Could it be that Google is now what economists call a natural monopoly—a firm, such as a utility, that can supply an entire market’s demand for a service at a price lower than two firms could?


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Likewise, Gmail, Gchat, Google Voice, Google Docs, and a host of other products are part of an orchestrated campaign for Google lock-in. The fight between Google and Facebook hinges on which can achieve lock-in for the most users. The dynamics of lock-in are described by Metcalfe’s law, a principle coined by Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet protocol that wires together computers. The law says that the usefulness of a network increases at an accelerating rate as you add each new person to it. It’s not much use to be the only person you know with a fax machine, but if everyone you work with uses one, it’s a huge disadvantage not to be in the loop.

LinkedIn Linux Lippmann, Walter Livingston, Jessica local-maximum problem lock-in “Long Live the Web” (Berners-Lee) Loopt Lovell, Todd Lowenstein, George luck Lynch, Zack Ma, Jack MacDougald, Harry machine learning Mancini, Paul Mark, David Mayer, Marissa Mayer-Schonberger, Viktor McLarty, Mack McLuhan, Marshall McPhie, Jonathan Meadowlands meaning threats mean world syndrome MeetUp Metcalfe, Bob Metcalfe’s law Microsoft Bob Live middleman, elimination of Migra corridos Milgram, Stanley Mill, John Stuart Minority Report Moore’s law MORIS Moses, Robert mousetraps MoveOn Mulvenon, James MySpace Nabokov, Vladimir National Rifle Association (NRA) National Security Agency (NSA) Nauman, Arthur Ne’eman, Yuval Negroponte, Nicholas Nemeth, Charlan Netflix Netflix Challenge Newmark, Craig news Facebook feeds Google News people-powered Yahoo News newspapers editorial ethics and ombudsmen and New York Times 9/11 Nordhaus, Ted Norvig, Peter Nosenko, Yuri Obama, Barack Oceana “Of Sirens and Amish Children” (Benkler) OkCupid Olson, Carrie Oswald, Lee Harvey overfitting Pabst Page, Larry PageRank Palmer, Chris Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Pandora PanelDirector Pareles, Jon Parker, Sean Pattern Language, A (Alexander et al.)


pages: 781 words: 226,928

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

“It pretty much had the PET expansion bus on the back but we knew we couldn’t put the IEEE-488 on it,” says Seiler. Chuck Peddle hired a former Xerox PARC engineer named Robert Metcalfe to help his engineers figure out the port. “He organized the meetings at Moorpark with Metcalfe because we were trying to design an expansion bus,” says Seiler. “We knew we couldn’t put the expensive HP IEEE bus in it so we tried to come up with something cheaper.” “That summer in San Jose, Robert Metcalfe was a consultant who worked for Commodore before he founded 3Com,” says Feagans. “He was hired as a consultant to look at networking.” Metcalfe pitched an idea he was currently working on.

“Jack flew me and my wife to Las Vegas for Comdex, and also our honeymoon, on the loaner PET Jet after the belly landing in Iowa,” says Feagans. “That was my first meeting with Jim Finke.” At the newly reopened Moorpark offices, where the disk drive designers now resided, Feagans continued working on the concepts introduced to him by Robert Metcalfe, including networking and graphical user interfaces. The others began work on a data storage device using VCR tape. Robert Russell, the young engineer hired in 1979, entered Tramiel’s inner family after his heroic efforts making the VIC-20 a reality. Russell worked out of an office at 3330 Scott Boulevard, in the same building as Tramiel.

Unfortunately, it seemed to set the pattern for computer design in later years. * * * John Feagans continued working at the Moorpark R&D office after the C64 debut at CES. “I developed the music player for the launch of the C64 there and stayed to develop the Commodore network for the C64 and PET,” he says. Inspired by Robert Metcalfe’s visit in 1980, Feagans created a computer network. His network required a master computer, which served up to 10 slaves. “I created a plug-in for the expansion port on the PET and also the C64 which brought out the serial port from the 6522 to an RS-422 interface,” says Feagans. “The ‘teacher’s PET’ was the master and the C64s were the slaves.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Engelbart stages the Mother of All Demos with Brand’s help. 1969 First nodes of ARPANET installed. 1971 Don Hoefler begins column for Electronic News called “Silicon Valley USA.” Demise party for Whole Earth Catalog. Intel 4004 microprocessor unveiled. Ray Tomlinson invents email. 1972 Nolan Bushnell creates Pong at Atari with Al Alcorn. 1973 1973 Alan Kay helps to create the Alto at Xerox PARC. Ethernet developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC. Community Memory shared terminal set up at Leopold’s Records, Berkeley. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn complete TCP/IP protocols for the Internet. 1974 Intel 8080 comes out. 1975 Altair personal computer from MITS appears. Paul Allen and Bill Gates write BASIC for Altair, form Microsoft.

Within a few years, there were other packet-switched networks that were similar but not interconnected. For example, engineers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) wanted a local-area network to connect the office workstations they were designing in the early 1970s, and a recent Harvard PhD there named Bob Metcalfe created a way to use coaxial cable (the type that plugs into cable TV boxes) to create a high-bandwidth system that he named “Ethernet.” It was modeled on a wireless network developed in Hawaii known as ALOHAnet, which sent packet data through UHF and satellite signals. In addition, there was a packet radio network in San Francisco, known as PRNET, and also a satellite version called SATNET.

he kept shouting—and finally was given, at the behest of Xerox’s top management, a fuller show. Jobs bounced around the room as his engineers studied each pixel on the screen. “You’re sitting on a goldmine,” he shouted. “I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.” There were three major innovations on display. The first was Ethernet, the technologies developed by Bob Metcalfe for creating local area networks. Like Gates and other pioneers of personal computers, Jobs was not very interested—certainly not as interested as he should have been—in networking technology. He was focused on the ability of computers to empower individuals rather than to facilitate collaboration.


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Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

Harlam, Jacques César & David Trounce, ‘Quantifying and improving promotion effectiveness at CVS’, Marketing Science, vol. 26, no. 4, 2007, pp. 566–75. 36Ju-Young Kim, Martin Natter & Martni Spann, ‘Pay what you want: A new participative pricing mechanism’, Journal of Marketing, vol. 73, 2009, pp. 44–58. 37Greer K. Gosnell, John A. List & Robert Metcalfe, ‘A new approach to an age-old problem: Solving externalities by incenting workers directly’, NBER Working Paper No. 22316, Cambridge, MA: NBER, 2016. 38Bruce S. Shearer, ‘Piece rates, fixed wages and incentives: Evidence from a field experiment’, Review of Economic Studies, vol. 71, no. 2, 2004, pp. 513–34. 39Lan Shi, ‘Incentive effect of piece-rate contracts: Evidence from two small field experiments’, B.E.

See Laura and John Arnold Foundation, ‘Laura and John Arnold Foundation announces expanded funding for low-cost randomized controlled trials to drive effective social spending’, press release, 7 December 2015. 9David Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference, London: WH Allen, 2015, p. 274. 10Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, p. 274. 11Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, pp. 91–2. 12Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, p. 89. 13Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, pp. 113–15; Michael Hallsworth, John List, Robert Metcalfe & Ivo Vlaev, ‘The behavioralist as tax collector: Using natural field experiments to enhance tax compliance’, Journal of Public Economics, vol. 148, issue C, 2017, pp. 14–31. The Australian Taxation Office reports that it increased compliance from tax debtors by 5 per cent simply by removing from its letters the opening words: ‘Please disregard this letter if you have paid this debt in full in the last seven days’: Peter Martin, ‘Mind games could pay handsomely’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 2013. 14Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, p. 90. 15Tim Harford, ‘Nudge, nudge.


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Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin by Jesse Berger

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, carbon footprint, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, diversification, diversified portfolio, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, liquidity trap, litecoin, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Satoshi Nakamoto, the medium is the message, Vitalik Buterin

Chapter 5: Innovation 10Vildana Haijric, “Bitcoin’s 9,000,000% Rise this Decade Leaves the Skeptics Aghast” Bloomberg: Cryptocurrencies online (December 31, 2019). 11“Bitcoin’s Security Model: A Deep Dive” CoinDesk online (November 13, 2016; updated February 22, 2019). Chapter 6: Resilience 12Accredited to Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe’s law was presented in 1980. George Gilder expressed it in this form in 1993. Chapter 7: Scarcity 13Andrew Glester, “The Asteroid Trillionaires” physicsworld (June 11, 2018). 14Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (Random House, 2012).


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

This is not to say that supply economies of scale no longer matter; of course they do. But demand economies of scale, in the form of network effects, have become the most important differentiating factor. Metcalfe’s law is a useful way of encapsulating how network effects create value for those who participate in a network as well as for those who own or manage the network. Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, pointed out that the value of a telephone network grows nonlinearly as the number of subscribers to the network increases, making more connections among subscribers possible. When there’s only one node in a network, no connections are possible. An MIT professor we know likes to joke that the prize for “greatest salesperson in history” should go to whoever sold the first telephone.

The accuracy of the search algorithm and the intuitiveness of the navigation tools offered to users as they seek other users with whom they can engage in value-creating interactions. Matching quality is critical to delivering value and stimulating the long-term growth and success of a platform. It is achieved through excellence in product or service curation. Metcalfe’s law. A principle formulated by Robert Metcalfe which states that the value of a network grows nonlinearly as the number of users of the network increases, making more connections among users possible (a type of growth also known as convex growth). Specifically, Metcalfe’s law posits that the value of a network with n connected users is proportional to the square of the number of users (n2).


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

A lot of people have written on this phenomenon of a new economy; one of my favorites is Wired editor Kevin Kelly. Many of the ideas in this chapter come from his book New Rules for the New Economy (New York: Viking, 1998). Peter F. Drucker has also been detailing these changes for decades, starting with The End of the Economic Man (1939). See also his Post-Capitalist Society (1993). 8. Robert Metcalf, founder of 3Com, argues the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of people in it. 9. Attempting to regulate these decentralized networks is certain to give bureaucrats ulcers— or worse. See, for example, Peter Maas, “Silicorn Valley,” Wired, September 1997: 131–38. 10.


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The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

It took a long time to build 3G networks, ensure their stability, and create an ecosystem of applications, but once Apple introduced the first iPhone in 2007 and Android followed shortly after, smartphones took over the market within three years. We believe something very similar is about to happen in the M2M space. A big part of technology adoption is awareness. As Peggy Smedley says: It’s all of these great minds that helped us understand what the technology can do for us, people like Robert Metcalfe or Steve Jobs and other great visionaries. They helped us really understand what the technologies can do, what the data behind the technologies can do. We have to look back before we can look forward. We will talk more about the M2M technology ecosystem and its challenges in chapter 2; for now, let’s look at the history of M2M or the Internet of Things.


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Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Computer retailers were eager to put a new IBM in their windows, but they wanted customers to be able to bring their computers in for repairs and modifications without IBM’s oversight. The solution was for Big Blue to start thinking like a hacker: Instead of building its PC from the ground up, it assembled off-the-shelf parts bought from contractors. Intel’s new 8088 processor was the brain; Zenith made an iconic green monitor; Epson made a printer; Bob Metcalfe’s PARC networking spin-off, 3Com, contributed the Ethernet board.15 That was one configuration, but there were plenty more, depending on what you wanted the computer to do and how much money you wanted to spend. By assembling contracted parts, IBM incorporated start-up geniuses who got pushed out the door at Xerox.

Chapter 4.4 Americas Online San Jose Sharks—The Tiger Woods Economy—Cocaine and Cappuccinos—Web Yahoos—Broken Windows—Pets.com Now that the gamers, hackers, and small-business owners had shrunk computer power down to personal size, they had to reconnect. Single-player games and sole proprietorships gave Apple a customer base, and Steve Jobs famously left the Ethernet connectivity port behind at Xerox PARC. Bob Metcalfe encouraged Xerox to license the board cheaply. The inventor got in line himself and started looking up venture capitalists. Ethernet boards were expensive, and bootstrapping wasn’t feasible, but the venture capital industry was coming together after the Fairchildren and Atari wins as well as some helpful deregulation in the financial sector.

It was all fine and good to issue press releases about how the web was going to improve life for everyone, but you weren’t supposed to actually spend billions of dollars investing in that image. “Move fast and build things” wasn’t going to cut it; what Silicon Valley needed was a reversion to Reagan. Footnotes i One of Bob Metcalfe’s most famous achievements was convincing Xerox to send him to Hawaii for three months to study ALOHAnet to begin his employment at PARC. ii For a summary of these networks and their development, see Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 1996), 219–46.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The entry of venture capital into cleantech has gone from the trickle to the veritable flood. Investment in the U.S. cleantech industry went from $286 million in 2001 to $3.7 billion in 2010—a rise of more than ten times. In 2010 cleantech represented 17 percent of total VC investment in the United States.16 “MIT IS DOING ENERGY” Robert Metcalfe is one the legends of the information technology business. He invented the Ethernet, which makes possible the LANs—local area networks—that link computers in offices and homes. He was also on the board of the company that developed PowerPoint, the inescapable tool of most presentations. He has been awarded the U.S.

Vinod Khosla, a prominent cleantech venture capitalist has said that venture capital will do to energy what it did to the old IBM-dominated computer industry and the old AT&T-dominated phone business: undermine the established companies, redefine the business model, and spawn a host of major new competitors. (To be sure, the U.S. Justice Department helped that “undermining” with its far-reaching antitrust cases against both companies.) Others have a different perspective. Robert Metcalfe sees the possibility of a green tech and global-warming bubble that will end with a crash. But from a big-picture perspective, that will accelerate the development of new technologies. “Bubbles accelerate innovation,” said Metcalfe. And one spin-off from innovation is “surprises.”17 Actual experience has been mixed.

Ante, Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008), pp. 80–88, 198. 11 Interview with Samuel Bodman; Ante, Creative Capital, pp. 109, 126 (“peaceful life”), 198; Charter of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/charter.html. 12 David Packard, The HP Way (New York: Collins Business Essentials, 1995), p. 22. 13 Tom Perkins, Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins (New York: Gotham Books, 2007); interview with Ray Lane. 14 Interview with Nancy Floyd. 15 Interview with Ira Ehrenpreis. 16 Interview with Ray Lane; Kleiner Perkins, “MoneyTree Report,” PricewaterhouseCoopers, January 21, 2011, at https://www.pwcmoneytree.com/MTPublic/ns/moneytree/filesource/exhibits/10Q4MTRelease_FINAL.pdf. 17 Interview with Robert Metcalfe; Susan Hockfield, Inaugural Address, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 6, 2005, at http://web.mit.edu/hockfield/speeches/2005-inaugural-address.html. 18 Steven Koonin, “From Energy Innovation to Energy Transformation,” p. 6 (“decades”); interviews with Ray Lane and Ernest Moniz. 19 Steven Chu, speech, CERAWeek, March 9, 2010; interview with Matt Rogers; U.S.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

In the summer of 1973, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, computer scientists doing research at ARPA, designed the basic architecture of the Internet, building on work toward a communication protocol conducted by Kahn at his research firm, BBN. They called a meeting at Stanford, attended by researchers from ARPA and various universities and research centers, including PARC/Xerox, where Robert Metcalfe was working on packet-communication technology that would lead to the creation of local area networks (LANs). Technological cooperation also included various groups in Europe, particularly the French researchers associated with the Cyclades program. Working on the basis of this Stanford seminar, Cerf, Metcalfe, and Gerard Lelann (from Cyclades) specified a transmission control protocol that would accommodate the requests of different researchers, and of different existing networks.

Behind the development of the Internet there was the scientific, institutional, and personal networks cutting across the Defense Department, National Science Foundation, major research universities (particularly MIT, UCLA, Stanford, University of Southern California, Harvard, University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of California at Berkeley), and specialized technological think-tanks, such as MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute), Palo Alto Research Corporation (funded by Xerox), ATT’s Bell Laboratories, Rand Corporation, and BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman). Key technological players in the 1960s–1970s were, among others, J. C. R. Licklider, Paul Baran, Douglas Engelbart (the inventor of the mouse), Robert Taylor, Ivan Sutherland, Lawrence Roberts, Alex McKenzie, Robert Kahn, Alan Kay, Robert Thomas, Robert Metcalfe, and a brilliant computer science theoretician Leonard Kleinrock, and his cohort of outstanding graduate students at UCLA, who would become some of the key minds behind the design and development of the Internet: Vinton Cerf, Stephen Crocker, Jon Postel, among others. Many of these computer scientists moved back and forth between these various institutions, creating a networked milieu of innovation whose dynamics and goals became largely autonomous from the specific purposes of military strategy or supercomputing linkups.

Moreover, when networks diffuse, their growth becomes exponential, as the benefits of being in the network grow exponentially, because of the greater number of connections, and the cost grows in a linear pattern. Besides, the penalty for being outside the network increases with the network’s growth because of the declining number of opportunities in reaching other elements outside the network. The creator of local area networks technology, Robert Metcalfe, proposed in 1973 a simple mathematical formula showing how the value of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes in the net. The formula is V = n(n – 1) where n is the number of nodes in the network. Fourthly, related to networking but a clearly distinct feature, the information technology paradigm is based on flexibility.


pages: 232 words: 71,024

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

IBM eventually responded to Ethernet with its own technology called Token Ring, but, in typical IBM fashion, it was lower in performance and higher in price. Token Ring was rated at four megabits-per-second to Ethernet’s 10 megabits. IBM touted the greater efficiency of its deterministic Token Ring algorithm, but all Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe had to do was recite over and over again: “Ten is bigger than four.” And though Token Ring was eventually souped-up to sixteen megabits, by that time Ethernet was going one hundred megabits—now a gigabit or more—and had already won the day. Corporate America was moving to networks in a big way and IBM was losing most of that business.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Jane Jacobs is inspirational in terms of reminding us that deep systemic analysis can be linked to action.7 Metcalfe’s Corollary These infrastructure battles become more and more important because as complex systems evolve over time, what gets constructed now, no matter how ad hoc, tends to be grandfathered in as time goes by. Bob Metcalfe—coinventor of the Ethernet technology, founder of industrial giant 3COM, and a pioneer in wiring people together—put forth one of the most succinct analyses of networks ever offered: the value of 86 WEB n.0 a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n2). Networks become more powerful and valuable as more users join them.


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

And as the value of each phone increases, the more phones tend to become available to contact on the network, until there are so many other connections that the value of an additional connection is negligible. Network effects were first developed as a concept by the President of Bell Telephones in making his case for a monopoly in 1908, but the ideas were developed and refined in the 1980s and 1990s. Robert Metcalfe, one of the co-inventors of the Ethernet, was the progenitor of Metcalfe’s Law – that the value of a communications network varied with the square of the number of connections in the network. This idea was vigorously promoted by the economic guru George Gilder2 during the 1990s. Where there are network effects, investment typically doesn’t take place until there is a critical mass of potential users.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

It now chiefly relies on other vectors of innovation, such as parallel processing, multi-threading, lower voltages, and three-dimensional chip architectures. Moore’s Law has become an important principle of INFORMATION THEORY. Metcalfe’s Law: The value and power of a network grows by the square of the number of compatible nodes it links. Named for the engineer Robert Metcalfe, a co-inventor of Ethernet, this law is a rough index and deeply counterintuitive. (It would be preposterous to claim that the Internet is worth the square of its six billion connected devices.) But the law applies to smaller networks, and it explains the vectors of value creation of companies such as Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon, which now dominate stock market capitalization.


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

Although Nelson seems to figure in every major history of computing and multimedia (for example Segaller 1998; Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003; Ceruzzi 1998; Rheingold 2000; Abbate 1999; Shurkin 1996 and Bardini 2000) as the man who dreamed up hypertext, he is not a known quantity outside of the digerati. The people he appears beside in such histories – Doug Engelbart, Bob Metcalfe, Tim Berners-Lee – have attained worldwide recognition (and in the case of Metcalfe, wealth) and have directly influenced the course of computing with their systems. Nelson’s influence on computing history is undeniable, but harder to touch; all we have of Xanadu is a tantalizing design, its ideals and its ideas.


pages: 270 words: 75,803

Wall Street Meat by Andy Kessler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, automated trading system, banking crisis, Bob Noyce, George Gilder, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Pepto Bismol, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, undersea cable, Y2K

Whatever the revenue numbers or margin numbers or earnings forecasts companies reported, their stocks went down. The ducks were quacking in the opposite direction. Momos started dumping. Until the fall, it wasn’t 213 Wall Street Meat obvious that it was all over and many investors kept looking for signs that things might turn back up, or that there might be a bottom in these stocks. Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet networking and a networking industry legend, ran a conference called Vortex, and he asked me to be on a financial panel that he was moderating. In May 2000, I caught a flight to John Wayne Airport in Southern California and then cabbed it to the Ritz Carlton at Laguna Niguel.


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

How far is this more-powerful-cheaper-smaller trend going? To the vanishing point, it seems. Some believe that will happen in about ten years. We are among those who disagree because of the important emergent trend, nanotechnology, which envisions microprocessors being reduced to a single cell. Metcalfe’s Law. Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe set forth the theory that the value of the telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected system nodes. He made his observations back when networks consisted of desktop computers, printers, fax machines and phones. But the law holds true today as billions of nodes are connected via Wifi and are growing rapidly toward the trillions.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Engelbart’s SRI operation had drifted after the great demo—investors couldn’t figure out the devices’ commercial potential—and several members of his team moved over to PARC. Still more came from the academic engineering diaspora of Stanford and Berkeley. There was Alan Kay, who wanted to develop a computer small enough to fit in a book bag. Down the hall, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs invented a way to connect multiple computers that they called the Ethernet. Across the way were Adele Goldberg and Dan Ingalls, also computer-education evangelists, who collaborated with Kay on a transformative and classroom-friendly new computer language called Smalltalk. Conway, who’d already made major breakthroughs in high-performance computer architecture in an earlier career at IBM, was recruited from Memorex.

John Heilemann, Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era (New York: CollinsBusiness, 2001), 58, 91. 5. Karen Southwick, High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems (New York: Wiley, 1999), 45, 48. 6. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Random House, 1995), x. Andreessen later said he was requoting 3Com’s Bob Metcalfe when he made that famous Windows slam; see Chris Anderson, “The Man Who Makes the Future,” Wired, April 24, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff-andreessen/, archived at https://perma.cc/6D5K-XGWJ. 7. Gates, Memorandum, “The Internet Tidal Wave,” May 26, 1995, Exhibit 20, United States v.


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

For example, when users can simultaneously be on two or more platforms (multihoming), a single platform need not prevail—so while SitterCity may have reached a tipping point, the matchmaking between parents and babysitters hasn’t tipped toward any one platform. 43.This statement is a corollary of the so-called Metcalfe’s Law, which postulates that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the network. We shouldn’t take this formula literally, and Bob Metcalfe himself has said that his point was to show a crossover point of cost and value, the critical mass of users before which a network doesn’t pay, rather than to tout the wondrous value of a large network. Regardless of the exact relationship, the basic idea that the value of a network grows at a faster rate than its size is well accepted.


pages: 791 words: 85,159

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

And in the late 1970s, the personal computer, the Ethernet and local networks, and word-processing software were all under development in service of that faith. Yet even within PARC, none of these tools, startlingly innovative though each was, was quite the "killer" it was expected to be. That came with another PARC invention, one that transformed all these inventions into the indispensable office tools we know them to be today. Bob Metcalfe, one of the Ethernet's designers, got a clear sighting of the critical addition early on. Page 177 Metcalfe would regularly take down the Ethernet links connecting researchers' workstations to one another so that he could work on the system. The traffic along the network was so light that no one bothered about the irregular downtime.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The IPO realized a payout of $765 million for Kleiner Perkins, which was more than double the value of the entire fund from which the original investment came.18 Clark’s investment of $3 million came to be worth $633 million—which explains why the incorrigibly self-aggrandizing entrepreneur put the identifying number 633MN on the tail of an executive jet he bought with some of his proceeds from the IPO.19 And the just turned twenty-four-year-old Marc Andreessen, who two years earlier had been making $6.85 an hour as a NCSA programmer, was suddenly worth $58 million, thus becoming the first in a long line of boy tycoons minted by the Internet.20 “What happened to Netscape Communications was without parallel,” notes David Kaplan, “and came to define modern Silicon Valley.”21 Netscape’s success drove the first great commercial expansion of the Internet. The number of Internet users grew from 16 million in 1995 to 361 million in 2000. This growth confirmed Metcalfe’s law—Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe’s eponymous rule that each new person who joins a network increases the power of that network exponentially. It triggered the dot-com boom, a half decade of irrational exuberance that created Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, and thousands of failed Internet startups, including my own, an online music website backed by Intel and SAP called AudioCafe.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Kleiner, “Reforming Occupational Licensing Policies,” Brookings Institution, Hamilton Project Discussion Paper 2015-01, January 2015, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/01/28%20reforming%20occupational%20licensing%20kleiner/reform_occupational_licensing_policies_kleiner_v4.pdf. 17.Kleiner, Licensing Occupations, p. 115. 18.Andrew Bender, “Uber’s Astounding Rise: Overtaking Taxis in Key Markets,” Forbes, April 10, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbender/2015/04/10/ubers-astounding-rise-overtaking-taxis-in-key-markets/#4d6699a922ef. 19.Peter Cohen, Robert Hahn, Jonathan Hall, Steven Levitt, and Robert Metcalfe, “Using Big Data to Estimate Consumer Surplus: The Case of Uber,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 22627, September 2016, http://www.nber.org/papers/w22627. 20.Scott Wallstein, “Has Uber Forced Taxi Drivers to Up Their Game?” Atlantic, July 9, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/uber-taxi-drivers-complaints-chicago-newyork/397931/. 21.Kleiner, “Reforming Occupational Licensing Policies.” 22.Kleiner and Krueger, “Analyzing the Extent and Influence of Occupational Licensing.” 23.Angrist and Guryan, “Teacher Testing, Teacher Education, and Teacher Characteristics.” 24.Maya N.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Companies in the network include Right-Click Capital in Australia, Dalus Capital in Mexico, Wavemaker in Singapore and South East Asia, Blume Ventures in India, as well as the various Draper branded funds: Draper Dragon in China, Draper Athena in Korea, Draper Nexus in Japan, Draper Esprit in the UK, Draper Triangle in the Midwestern US, Draper Aurora in Russia, and Draper Associates in Silicon Valley as well as three smaller firms in our DVN beta program, and we are adding more partners every year. A network provides network effects. More nodes on a network increase the power of the network as the square of the number of nodes on the network increases. This concept is known as Metcalfe’s Law, after entrepreneur, venture capitalist, educator and pundit Bob Metcalfe. The DVN allows me to evaluate and potentially fund any company from anywhere in the world. My deal flow has also expanded and improved. My judgment can only have been improved by seeing more companies from more regions, and Draper Associates’ returns should continue to improve because we see so many more companies for each one I invest in.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

SOURCES Interviews (conducted 2009–2011) Al Alcorn, Roger Ames, Fred Anderson, Bill Atkinson, Joan Baez, Marjorie Powell Barden, Jeff Bewkes, Bono, Ann Bowers, Stewart Brand, Chrisann Brennan, Larry Brilliant, John Seeley Brown, Tim Brown, Nolan Bushnell, Greg Calhoun, Bill Campbell, Berry Cash, Ed Catmull, Ray Cave, Lee Clow, Debi Coleman, Tim Cook, Katie Cotton, Eddy Cue, Andrea Cunningham, John Doerr, Millard Drexler, Jennifer Egan, Al Eisenstat, Michael Eisner, Larry Ellison, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Gerard Errera, Tony Fadell, Jean-Louis Gassée, Bill Gates, Adele Goldberg, Craig Good, Austan Goolsbee, Al Gore, Andy Grove, Bill Hambrecht, Michael Hawley, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Elizabeth Holmes, Bruce Horn, John Huey, Jimmy Iovine, Jony Ive, Oren Jacob, Erin Jobs, Reed Jobs, Steve Jobs, Ron Johnson, Mitch Kapor, Susan Kare (email), Jeffrey Katzenberg, Pam Kerwin, Kristina Kiehl, Joel Klein, Daniel Kottke, Andy Lack, John Lasseter, Art Levinson, Steven Levy, Dan’l Lewin, Maya Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Mike Markkula, John Markoff, Wynton Marsalis, Regis McKenna, Mike Merin, Bob Metcalfe, Doug Morris, Walt Mossberg, Rupert Murdoch, Mike Murray, Nicholas Negroponte, Dean Ornish, Paul Otellini, Norman Pearlstine, Laurene Powell, Josh Quittner, Tina Redse, George Riley, Brian Roberts, Arthur Rock, Jeff Rosen, Alain Rossmann, Jon Rubinstein, Phil Schiller, Eric Schmidt, Barry Schuler, Mike Scott, John Sculley, Andy Serwer, Mona Simpson, Mike Slade, Alvy Ray Smith, Gina Smith, Kathryn Smith, Rick Stengel, Larry Tesler, Avie Tevanian, Guy “Bud” Tribble, Don Valentine, Paul Vidich, James Vincent, Alice Waters, Ron Wayne, Wendell Weeks, Ed Woolard, Stephen Wozniak, Del Yocam, Jerry York.

Seven Days in May: Interviews with Jean-Louis Gassée, Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Al Eisenstat, John Sculley, Mike Murray, Mike Markkula, Debi Coleman. Bro Uttal, “Behind the Fall of Steve Jobs,” Fortune, Aug. 5, 1985; Sculley, 249–260; Rose, 275–290; Young, 396–404. Like a Rolling Stone: Interviews with Mike Murray, Mike Markkula, Steve Jobs, John Sculley, Bob Metcalfe, George Riley, Andy Hertzfeld, Tina Redse, Mike Merin, Al Eisenstat, Arthur Rock. Tina Redse email to Steve Jobs, July 20, 2010; “No Job for Jobs,” AP, July 26, 1985; “Jobs Talks about His Rise and Fall,” Newsweek, Sept. 30, 1985; Hertzfeld, 269–271; Young, 387, 403–405; Young and Simon, 116; Rose, 288–292; Sculley, 242–245, 286–287; letter from Al Eisenstat to Arthur Hartman, July 23, 1985 (courtesy of Al Eisenstat).


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

By the 2024 election, almost every human will be online. The combination of fast data processing and fast transmission has produced some absolutely enormous digital networks, like Facebook with its two billion users. There is a very good reason for this—it’s called Metcalf’s law. Metcalf’s Law Robert Metcalf—the third and least colorful of the digital lawmakers—observed that being connected to a network gets more valuable as the network grows, even as the cost of joining falls. This not only helps explain why digital networks grow so fast, it also explains the winner-take-all outcomes we see with online competition among networks.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

For years, AT&T’s communication monopoly stymied the creativity of computer scientists and innovators, reaffirming in their minds the great distrust of large institutions that had taken root during the late 1960s. The man widely credited with inventing Ethernet and modern computer networking, Robert Metcalf, described it like this in Vanity Fair: Imagine a bearded grad student being handed a dozen AT&T executives, all in pin-striped suits and quite a bit older and cooler. And I’m giving them a tour. And when I say a tour, they’re standing behind me while I’m typing on one of these terminals. … And I turned around to look at these ten, twelve AT&T suits, and they were all laughing.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Rather—and assuming that long-distance services would eventually connect all users with telephones to each other—each additional user multiplied the potential value of the network by the number of other existing users (nodes) already connected. Today, we refer to the network dynamic described here as Metcalfe’s law, after Robert Metcalfe, the primary inventor of the Ethernet local networking technology during the early 1970s. Metcalfe argued that the value of a communications network was the same as the number of links between its nodes. He described this relationship with a simple equation: For a network of n nodes, the value of the network is n(n – 1)/2.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Emma Jones, “Operation Varsity: How the Rich and Famous Cheated the US University System,” BBC News, March 18, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-56427793. 21. Machin, McNally, and Ruiz-Valenzuela 2020. 22. It is interesting to investigate what causes students to underachieve in high-stakes exams. Robert Metcalfe, Simon Burgess, and Steven Proud (2019) find that students taking GCSEs during a World Cup year underperform significantly. These students are 12 percent less likely to achieve Cs in at least five subjects, compared with those taking GCSEs during a non–World Cup year. The problem is even worse for boys from a poor background, whose grades suffer by as much as a third.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

George Gilder observed that bandwidth grows three times more rapidly than computer power—doubling every six months. This allows transmission advances to help relax computing and storage constraints. Advances in data transmission, processing, and storage amplify each other. This is the economic basis of “the cloud” and its various uses. Robert Metcalfe asserted that the usefulness of a network rises with the square of the number of users. When the number of network users is, say, 100,000, the number of possible new connections created by adding one more user is 100,000. When there are 200,000 users, adding one more creates 200,000 new connections.


pages: 332 words: 91,780

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

Such a network is present if the nodes’ degree frequency distributes according to the power distribution. 14. Metcalfe’s law is a way to observe the increased benefits obtained as more people engage in the network. See Gilder, Telecosm. Reed’s law also looks at the exponential benefits to social networks. David Reed argues that Robert Metcalfe does not fully capture the extent to which additional members of a social network produce exponential connections to members (Reed, “The Law of the Pack”). 15. Social network analysts more formally call this the difference between an individual’s positions in a network and cause for his or her participation in some network and position in that network. 16.


pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

“This Western Union seems to me very like collecting all the paupers in the State and arranging them into a union so as to make rich men of them,” quipped a man of finance. Of course, Western Union eventually succeeded for a variety of reasons, the most interesting of which is a nineteenth-century version of Metcalfe’s Law. Named for Robert Metcalfe, an engineer at Xerox PARC and coinventor of Ethernet, the law simply states that a network increases in value as more users (or communicating devices) are added to it. Stated another way, one electromagnetic telegraph was useless, two marginally better, and six better still. Specifically, a network’s value is proportional to the square of the number of devices or users.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Something has a network effect when the behavior of other users has a direct impact on the value that you will get out of the same service. The classic example of this kind of effect is a telephone network that gets more valuable to each individual user as more people join its network (see Figure 7.1). Metcalfe’s Law, named after one of the inventors of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe, suggested that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users in a system (network value = n2). Figure 7.1. Network effects in a telephone network: Value grows as the number of connections increases. As more users join a network, the number of possible unique connections within the network grows according to the function: (n2 – n)/2, where n represents the number of users.


The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

A 18 • Chapter 2 social network with no users is useless, while a search engine or an online app like Google Docs might still be valuable even before becoming popular. Confusing different sorts of scale economies leads to misunderstandings and ultimately bad policy. Second, there is the persistent misuse of “Metcalfe’s Law,” a rule of thumb—and definitely not a real law—named after ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe. As popularly understood, Metcalfe’s Law claims that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of connected users. A network that connected a hundred users, for example, would be a hundred times more valuable than than a network that connected ten. The endorsement of Metcalfe’s Law has been repeated at the highest levels of public policy.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

The dark side of network effects is that rich nodes get richer. Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value of a network increases in proportion to the square of connections, creates winner-take-all markets, where the gap between the number one and number two players is typically large and growing.”12 Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet protocol that wires computers together, regarded the network effect as so prevalent that he formulated the law that goes by his name: the usefulness of a network increases at an accelerating rate as you add each new person to it.13 Google search is an example; the quality of its algorithm improves with more users, leaving other search engines with a less effective and attractive product.


pages: 349 words: 107,334

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, Linda Lear, Edward O. Wilson

John Snow's cholera map, Robert Metcalfe

The amount of food available, conditions of weather and climate, the presence of competing or predatory species, all are critically important. "The greatest single factor in preventing insects from overwhelming the rest of the world is the internecine warfare which they carry out among themselves," said the entomologist Robert Metcalf. Yet most of the chemicals now used kill all insects, our friends and enemies alike. The second neglected fact is the truly explosive power of a species to reproduce once the resistance of the environment has been weakened. The fecundity of many forms of life is almost beyond our power to imagine, though now and then we have suggestive glimpses.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

In the 1980s, Sun Microsystems, HP and other companies started to dominate enterprise computing platforms for accounting and basic enterprise systems. However, the personal computer was about to revolutionise the workplace environment too, primarily as a result of emerging networking technology. In 1979, Robert Metcalfe founded 3Com, expanding on the work Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had done in the early 1970s on local and wide area network (LAN/WAN) Ethernet technology. Initially, the software that could utilise these LAN-based protocols was limited to simple tasks like file sharing, printing files or sending emails.


pages: 398 words: 108,889

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

Similarly, the advantage of participating in a payments service like PayPal increases as the number of other users goes up. If only a handful of people in the world accept money through PayPal, there is little benefit to taking the time to create an account. But if PayPal can be used to pay millions of people, the account is much more valuable. Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, coined Metcalfe’s Law as a way of understanding the power of networks. He claimed that the value of a network equals the square of its users, implying that a network with twice as many users as a competitor is four times as valuable.4 Given Peter’s firm belief in the importance of quickly scaling up our network, it didn’t surprise anyone that the calmness he displayed at the disappointing Scotty event was absent following the dotBank and X.com launches.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Vail realized that networks create something extra, for free. In addition to utility for the user of a telephone and revenue for the owner, he noticed a third thing: the more people join the network, the more useful it becomes to everybody. The problem comes when you try to measure and capture that third thing. Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet switch, claimed in 1980 that a network’s value is ‘the number of users squared’. So while the cost of building a network rises in a straight line, its value rises in an exponential curve.38 By implication the art of doing business in a knowledge economy is to capture everything between the straight line and the rising curve.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

We’re bad at guessing where present breakthroughs will take us: I predict the Internet . . . will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse . . . The Internet’s naïve flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth, if there were any, but there won’t be, so no problem. —Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, in 199547 We’re even worse at guessing what future breakthroughs will be. “Where are the flying cars?” is the perfect refrain to illustrate how our thinking gets trapped inside present paradigms. In the 1950s and 1960s, suddenly everyone drove cars and rode in airplanes.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

Two phones can make only one connection, five can make ten, and twelve can make sixty-six. Network Effects 2 phones = 1 connection 5 phones = 10 connections 12 phones = 66 connections This relationship, known as Metcalfe’s law, is named after Robert Metcalfe, the co-inventor of the networking technology Ethernet. It describes the nonlinear growth in network value when nodes are connected to one another. His law oversimplifies reality since it assumes that every node (or telephone in this case) has the same value to the network and that every node may want to contact every other, but nevertheless it serves as a decent model.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Notes 1. Sergio Focardi, Peter Kolm, and Frank Fabozzi, “New Kids on the Block,” Journal of Portfolio Management 30, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 42–53. The first article in the issue, by Andy Lo, “The Adaptive Market Hypothesis,” is an excellent in-depth discussion of the modern view of market efficiency. 2. Robert Metcalfe is the inventor of Ethernet (the ubiquitous wiring of the Internet), and the founder of 3Com. His law was demonstrated first with telephones and fax machines. 3. Okay, let’s belabor them a little for Generations X and Y and the Millennials, who may have missed these back when they were everywhere, but may also pick up this book.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

It turns out it didn’t have to. The high-tech firms had a kind of power not envisioned in Ayn Rand’s theories of capitalism from the 1980s or in traditional models of market regulation. These firms were not new entrants to market systems but new market systems. They were networks. As the computer scientist Robert Metcalfe had shown, a network’s value increases exponentially with its growth. Over time, the most attractive thing about a network may be simply that a large number of people have already chosen it. When a network reaches critical mass, competition becomes pointless. Yes, some other company might design a “better” network, but that wouldn’t necessarily make it a competitor.


pages: 506 words: 146,607

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market by Daniel Reingold, Jennifer Reingold

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, George Gilder, high net worth, informal economy, junk bonds, margin call, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, Michael Milken, new economy, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Telecommunications Act of 1996, thinkpad, traveling salesman, undersea cable, UUNET

Reinforcing the bullish point of view was the fact that even the slow-growing Baby Bells were reporting 30 percent growth in their data services divisions, far beyond the 4–6 percent growth rates of more traditional Bell product lines. O’Dell’s and Sidgmore’s numbers would go on to become those “statistics” that everyone cited as gospel without knowing where they came from or whether they were actually true. In May of 1998, I attended the grandly named Vortex Conference, a dot-com and technology get-together organized by Bob Metcalfe, the scientist from Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Center who invented Ethernet, today’s standard for rapid computer networking, and later founded 3Com. It took place at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California, a gorgeous resort south of Los Angeles overlooking the ocean. But no one there cared much about the surf.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

Low-Counter: Typically a desk station within a branch where the relationship manager can sit with customers and potential clients and advise them on available products and services. Lo-Fi Prototype: A simple method of prototyping products, interfaces or applications and testing with target customers or users. LIBOR: London Interbank Offered Rate LinkedIn: An online social network for business professionals. Metcalfe’s Law: Attributed to Robert Metcalfe, this law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). MFI: Microfinance Institution—an alternate form of bank found in developing countries which provides microcredit lending. MIRC: Magnetic Ink Character Recognition Mobile Portal: A website designed specifically for mobile phone interfaces and mini-browsers.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

These quotes and opinions were obtained in an interview with the author in June 2008. 5. To read about AT&T at the time of the Internet’s inception, see Christopher H. Sterling, Phyllis Bernt, and Martin B. H. Weiss, Shaping American Telecommunications: A History of Technology, Policy, and Economics (New York: Routledge, 2006). To read how Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn, and Robert Metcalf interacted with AT&T, see their individual entries in Laura Lambert et al., The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: MTM Publishing, 2005). 6. “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” in Jeremy M. Norman, ed., From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology (Novato, CA: historyofscience.com, 2005) 871–90. 7.


Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, Gary Kildall, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, popular electronics, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, thinkpad, traveling salesman

The trouble has even extended beyond the loss of business among customers looking to do new applications: Many of IBM’s customers are even considering taking the soft­ ware they’ve written painstakingly for their mainframes and rewriting the soft­ ware for networks of small machines. This used to be unthinkable. The cost of rewriting is so high and the risk of error when redoing millions of lines of software code is so great that IBM felt it had existing mainframe customers locked into its systems forever. But Bob Metcalfe, publisher of InfoWorld, a big PC publication, says that every company he talks to is at least considering disposing of some mainframes so they can move to PCs. He even jokes that he knows the exact moment when the mainframe will disappear forever: midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1999. The reason is that IBM, in design­ ing the current style of mainframe in the 1960s, didn’t consider what would happen in the year 2000.


Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

Garfinkel, James Gee, Lisa Gitelman, Wendy G o r d o n , N i c k H a h n , M a r y Beth Haralovich, John Hartley, Heather Hendershott, Matt H i l l s , M i m i Ito, M a r k Jancovich, Steven Johnson, Sara G w e n l l i a n Jones, Gerard Jones, Louise Kennedy, Christina Klein, Eric Klopfer, Robert Kozinets, Ellen Kushner, Christopher Ireland, Jessica Irish, K u r t Lancaster, Brenda Laurel, C h a p Lawson, Geoffrey L o n g , Peter L u d l o w , Davis Maston, Frans M a y r a , Robert Metcalfe, Scott M c C l o u d , Grant McCracken, Jane M c G o n i g a l , E d w a r d M c N a l l y , Tara McPherson, Jason Mittell, Janet Murray, Susan J. Napier, Angela N d l i a n i s , Annalee N e w i t z , Tasha Oren, Ciela Pearce, Steven Pinker, Warren Sack, Katie Salens, N i c k Sammond, K e v i n Sandler, Greg Shaw, Greg Smith, Janet Sonenberg, Constance Steinkuehler, M a r y Stuckey, D a v i d Surman, Steven J.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

—Ken Olson, 1977 “640,000 bytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody.” —Bill Gates, 1981 “Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of college degrees, majors and credits will be a shambles.” —Alvin Toffler “The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.” —Robert Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet), who, in 1997, ate his words (literally) in front of an audience Now I get to toot my own horn, and can share with you those predictions of mine that worked out particularly well. But in looking back at the many predictions I’ve made over the past twenty years, I will say that I haven’t found any that I find particularly embarrassing (except, maybe, for a few early business plans).


pages: 550 words: 154,725

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

For all these reasons, the technology couldn’t attract enough users to attract even more users. “To start up a service, you have to think about: I have one, you don’t have one—so I can’t talk to you,” Irwin Dorros says. “So I can only talk to you if you have one. So how do you get a critical mass of people that have them?” Many years later, a computer engineer named Robert Metcalfe would surmise that the value of a networked device increases dramatically as the number of people using the network grows. The larger the network, in other words, the higher the value of a device on that network to each user.36 This formulation—sometimes known as Metcalfe’s law—can help explain the immense appeal of the telephone system and Internet.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

,” Harvard Business Law Review 4 (2014): 235, University of Pennsylvania Institute for Law & Economics, Research Paper No. 14–41, posted December 18, 2014, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2539098. 293 “if not more than, the bottom line”: Etsy, “Building an Etsy Economy: The New Face of Creative Entrepreneurship,” 2015, retrieved April 4, 2017, https://extfiles.etsy.com/Press/reports/Etsy_NewFaceofCreativeEntrepreneur ship_2015.pdf. 293 the ouster of Chad Dickerson, Etsy’s CEO: The Associated Press, “Etsy Replaces CEO, Cuts Jobs Amid Shareholder Pressure,” ABC News, May 2, 2017, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/etsy-replaces-ceo-cuts-jobs-amid-shareholder-pressure-47167426. 293 supported more than 10,000 jobs: “Airbnb Community Tops $1.15 Billion in Economic Activity in New York City,” Airbnb, May 12, 2015, https://www.airbnb.com/press/news/airbnb-community-tops-1-15-billion-in-economic-activity-in-new-york-city. 293 helped them stay in their home: “Airbnb Economic Impact,” Airbnb, retrieved April 4, 2017, http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/. 294 A third-party economic study: Peter Cohen, Robert Hahn, Jonathan Hall, Steven Levitt, and Robert Metcalfe, “Using Big Data to Estimate Consumer Surplus: The Case of Uber,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 22627, September 2016, doi:10.3386/w22627. 294 nine million third-party sellers: Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House That Jack Built (New York: Harper, 2016), 5. 294 in order to favor more lucrative sales by big brands: Ina Steiner, “eBay Makes Big Promises to Small Sellers as SEO Penalty Still Stings,” eCommerce Bytes, April 23, 2015, http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y15/m04/i23/s02. 294 half of all private sector employment: “SBA Advocacy: Frequently Asked Questions” Small Business Administration, September 2012, retrieved May 12, 2017, https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf. 295 “now drying the clothes”: Steve Baer, “The Clothesline Paradox,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1975, retrieved April 3, 2017, http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/2008/article/358/the.clothesline.paradox. 296 value as and if created: Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (London: Anthem, 2013), 185–87. 296 “a minuscule fraction”: William D.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

Yes,” Harris remembers reasoning. “But it would have taken a lot longer and a huge amount of resources to get there. And it’s not at all clear which side would have won.” To Harris, the merger wasn’t just defensive—it was a strategic piece of offense. He cited Metcalfe’s Law. Devised in the 1980s by Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, the basic idea was simple: The value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network. If a computer network contains five machines, the total network has a value of 25—5 squared; if it has a thousand machines, the network has a value of 1,000,000—1,000 squared.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

It cost $85 a month. Over the next few days, Thefacebook began a relentless takeover of the Harvard student body. As more Harvard students signed up, the chances increased that they would find profiles of their friends, of people they might like to have as friends. In the early 1980s, computer scientist Bob Metcalfe wrote about the network effect, postulating that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of people joining (this became known as Metcalfe’s law). Hour by hour, the impetus for students to sign up began to flip from engaging in a diverting pastime to an absolute necessity, as not being on Thefacebook made you a virtual exile on the physical campus.


pages: 654 words: 191,864

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book value, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demand response, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, index card, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, nudge unit, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Shai Danziger, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, union organizing, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

., Measuring the Subjective Well-Being of Nations: National Account of Time Use and Well-Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Paul Dolan, Richard Layard, and Robert Metcalfe, Measuring Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Recommendations on Measures (London: Office for National Statistics, 2011). Irrational is a strong word: The view of the mind that Dan Ariely has presented in Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: Harper, 2008) is not much different from mine, but we differ in our use of the term.


pages: 612 words: 187,431

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

A Pattern Language, Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Boeing 747, Clayton Christensen, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, correlation coefficient, David Brooks, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, end-to-end encryption, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, finite state, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, history of Unix, Innovator's Dilemma, job automation, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, level 1 cache, machine readable, macro virus, Multics, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, OSI model, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, pre–internet, publish or perish, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, transaction costs, Turing complete, Valgrind, wage slave, web application

No other operating system has shone simultaneously as a research vehicle, a friendly host for technical custom applications, a platform for commercial-off-the-shelf business software, and a vital component technology of the Internet. Confident predictions that Unix would wither away, or be crowded out by other operating systems, have been made yearly since its infancy. And yet Unix, in its present-day avatars as Linux and BSD and Solaris and MacOS X and half a dozen other variants, seems stronger than ever today. Robert Metcalf [the inventor of Ethernet] says that if something comes along to replace Ethernet, it will be called “Ethernet”, so therefore Ethernet will never die.[4] Unix has already undergone several such transformations. -- Ken Thompson At least one of Unix's central technologies — the C language — has been widely naturalized elsewhere.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Maggs (1997); Matheny (1997); McGinty (1997); Nelson (1987); Ozzie and Kawell (1997); Sides (1997); Woolley (1997). Other interviews: Bitzer (1975). Published Sources Barnett, D. C. “A Suicide Prevention Incident Involving Use of the Computer.” Professional Psychology 13(4), August 1982, 565–70. DalSanto, Bob. “The Wonderful World of PLATO.” DI, September 20, 1975, S-4, S-5. Metcalfe, Bob. “Metcalfe’s Law: A Network Becomes More Valuable as It Reaches More Users.” Infoworld 17(40), October 2, 1995, 53. Nelson. Computer Lib/Dream Machines, 93–95. Pesman, C. “PLATO Games People Play.” DI, September 20, 1975, S-2, S-3. Rheingold. Virtual Community. Springer, P. G. “PLATO’s Retreatists: The Sordid World of the Computer Addict.”


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

This term describes a network effect. If we have a network such as the Internet, its effect or value can reasonably be shown to be proportional to n Î log(n) where n is the number of nodes. Each node (each user) benefits, so this accounts for the n multiplier. The value to each user (to each node) = log(n). Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) has postulated the value of a network of n nodes = c În2, but this is overstated. If the Internet doubles in size, its value to me does increase but it does not double. It can be shown that a reasonable estimate is that a network's value to each user is proportional to the log of the size of the network.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

I had a software program running on it that was as good as Microsoft Word—in fact it was developed by the fellow who left PARC and went to Microsoft and built the Office product line for them, Charles Simonyi. I had a great mail system on it that could mail to anybody in the ARPANET community, as well as within Xerox. It was on the precursor of the 3Com Ethernet technology, developed by Bob Metcalfe, who later left PARC and started 3Com. The network connected the personal computers to laser printers. We had a 60-page-a-minute black-and-white laser printer, a 10-page-a-minute color printer. We had a file server where you could store files and share them for projects. All of these computers were connected in both an internal and external network throughout Xerox Corporation and into the ARPANET, which was the precursor of the Internet.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

The same sorts of analyses that lead to Zeno’s paradox are also popular in the computing field to show that certain things just can’t work. When Xerox/DIX Ethernet was first proposed, technical journals contained detailed analyses showing that it couldn’t work [117][118][119][120], which is no doubt why the entire world is currently using token ring instead of Ethernet. This led to Bob Metcalfe’s famous observation that “Ethernet works in practice but not in theory”. A similar problem exists with many computer security mechanisms. Consider the use of SMS-based authentication for Internet banking. This security mechanism has the bank send the user an SMS text message containing a one-time code that’s used to authorise a banking transaction.