Before there was an understanding of the vacuum of space (that is, the almost complete emptiness between astronomical bodies), there was a theory that a substance known as "ether," filled the void, and that substance was necessary for the transmission of light (all of that having to do with the thought that light was a wave, and waves need to travel through some medium--but that's a topic for a different post). It is from that definition of ether that Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center came up with the name for his idea to connect computers and other resources together: Ethernet.
It was on May 22, 1973, that he wrote his memo on how to connect the new Xerox "personal computers" to the printers at their facility. The original diagram Bob sketched out depicts the use of "cable ether," "telephone ether," and even "radio ether" as the connection infrastructure, and we can see where that has brought us today. In fact, I'm using "radio ether" right now to access this blog software from my laptop computer.
Wired Magazine has an interesting article about Bob Metcalfe online titled "The Legend of Bob Metcalfe." It's well worth the read--especially how he predicted the Internet would collapse in 1996... and then how he quite literally ate his words when that didn't come to pass.
- Hap Aziz