After his parents divorced, David Boggs grew up in Washington with his mother, Jane (McCallum) Boggs, and his older brother, Walter. The three of them lived in his grandmother’s house near American University, where his mother went on to work as an administrator and eventually oversee law school admissions.
After saving up for a radio operator license, David started building ham radios and spending his nights chatting with other operators across the country. His brother recalled that they had stretched two antennas from a second-floor bedroom to the roof over the garage.
“Back then, those wires seemed so long,” says Walter Boggs, who still lives in the house. “Now it seems like a very short distance.”
David Boggs received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University before entering Stanford, where he eventually earned both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. also in electrical engineering. Early in his Stanford career, he saw a presentation from Alan Kay, one of the key thinkers at PARC. He introduced himself to Mr. Kay, which led to an internship in the lab and later a full-time research position.
At PARC, while Mr. Metcalfe and Mr. Boggs put together a blueprint for Ethernet technology, borrowing ideas from a wireless network at the University of Hawaii called ALOHAnet. This work connected with one of Mr Boggs’ oldest interests: radio.
By sending small packets of information between computers and other devices, including printers, Ethernet could potentially work with or without cables. In the 1980s, it became the standard protocol for wired PC networks. In the late 1990s, it served as the foundation for Wi-Fi, which would permeate homes and offices for the next two decades.
However it was used, the power of Ethernet was that it assumed things would go wrong. Even if some packets were lost – which would be unavoidable – the network could continue.
