Ethernet was first developed in the early 1970s by Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC). Originally designed as an interconnection technology for the PARC s many disparate minicomputers and high-speed printers, the original version operated at a whopping 2.9 Mbps. Interestingly, this line speed was chosen because it was a multiple of the clock speed of the original Alto computer. Created by Xerox Corporation in 1972 as a personal computer targeted at research, Alto s name came from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where it was originally created. The Alto was the result of developmental work performed by Ed McCreight, Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson, Bob Sproull, and Dave Boggs, engineers and computer scientists attempting to create a computer small enough to fit in an office but powerful enough to support a multifunctional operating system and powerful graphics display.

In 1978, Xerox donated 50 Alto computers to Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon Universities. These machines were quickly adopted by campus user communities and became the benchmark for the creation of other personal computers. The Alto comprised a beautiful (for the time) graphics display, a keyboard, a mouse that controlled the graphics, and a cabinet that contained the central processing unit (CPU) and hard drive. At $32,000, the thing was a steal.

The concept of employing a visual interface ( what you see is what you get [WYSIWYG]) began in the mid-70s at Xerox PARC, where a graphical...