Robert Metcalfe: In 1973, engineer Robert Metcalfe and his colleague Dave Boggs developed a new networking technology at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to solve a growing problem: how to connect computers so they could quickly share data. The technology, called Ethernet, would go on to become the world's most widely used local area network (LAN) and remains the standard way of making wired connections between desktop computers, servers and networking equipment.