Users of the internet need not think about its physical underpinnings

In 1973 Bob Metcalfe, a researcher for Xerox at Palo Alto Research Centre, helped think up a way for the company’s computers to send information to each other via co-axial cables. He called this concept Ethernet after the medium by which, in 19th-century physics, electromagnetic forces were thought to be transmitted. Ethernet would become a cornerstone of the internet.