Computing and communications were once separate and monopolized, by IBM and AT&T, respectively. The FCC held repeated hearings about what exactly was computing and what was communications -- that was an untimely hardening of the categories. Those separate monopolies were broken – in 1968 it became legal to connect non-AT&T devices to AT&T’s telephone network; by 1984 the AT&T monolith was divided in seven. To build the Enernet, we will have to break energy’s various monopolies and the categories that sustain them. The transistor brought the Internet Moore’s Law and then PCs and then cellphones... Packet switching brought us, even if I do say so myself, Metcalfe’s Law and then the Internet and then social networks... What “laws” will we invent to inspire and direct The Enernet? The Internet’s winning architecture was distributed, layered, open, and competitive, roughly today (1) plumbing (Ethernet), (2) protocol (Internet per se, TCP/IP), (3) documents (World Wide Web), and (4) search (Google). How will The Enernet be layered? If the Internet is any guide, conservation will NOT drive The Enernet – we did not reduce our communications to save the world from the 1960s “information explosion.” IBM introduced its 360 mainframe in 1964, the same year Paul Baran invented packet switching in his RAND report “On Distributed Communications.” The Internet then started trending down and out, from batch card processing on mainframes, to interactive terminal networks on minicomputers, to the Internet of PCs, to the mobile networking of what we soon will not call cellphones, and next to networks of the 10 billion embedded microcontrollers we ship every year. When the packet-switching Internet first started operation in 1969, the aim was to connected interactive minicomputers of which you’d be lucky to have one per large company. Let’s learn that The Enernet will not be centralized. Let’s figure out what that means about the kinds of energy we’ll be producing over the next 50 years and how those energies (plural) will be flowing. If the Internet is any guide, The Enernet will not be built by consortia of lawyers, politicians, or activists; The Enernet will be built by competing teams of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and, of course, venture capitalists. These will come in waves over the next 50 years, as various new technologies play out in the Enernet ecology, with surprises. And if progress on The Enernet is to be as swift as that on the Internet, then there will be Enernet Bubbles, which I see as accelerating overshoots and ringing in our system of technological innovation.

About Bob Metcalfe

Bob Metcalfe ‘68 has entered his 8th year as a venture capitalist with Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, MA. He serves on the boards of Polaris-backed companies including Ember, SiCortex, Mintera, Infinite Power, SiOnyx, 1366, and GreenFuel, of which he is also now Interim CEO. Bob received the National Medal of Technology for leadership in the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet, of which a quarter billion new ports are delivered annually. Bob invented Ethernet in 1973 and founded the billion-dollar networking company 3Com in 1979. He received from MIT in 1969 an SB degree in industrial management and an SB degree in electrical engineering. He received from Harvard an MS in applied mathematics in 1970 and a PhD in computer science in 1973, for his dissertation PACKET COMMUNICATION, which is available at Amazon.com, as is his INTERNET COLLAPSES. He is member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Life Trustee of MIT.

mtl MIT