David Boggs
David Boggs | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 June 1950 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Died | 19 February 2022 (aged 71) Stanford University Medical Center, California, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Electrical engineer, Internet pioneer |
| Known for | Co-developer of Ethernet, foundational Internet protocols, file servers, gateways, network interface cards |
David Reeves Boggs (June 17, 1950 – February 19, 2022) was a pioneering American engineer specializing in electrical and radio fields, notable for his role in creating foundational Internet protocols, file servers, gateways, and network interface cards. Alongside Robert Metcalfe and others, he co-developed Ethernet, a leading technology in local area networking.
Biography
Born in Washington, D.C., Boggs completed his secondary education at Woodrow Wilson High School in 1968 before obtaining a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1972. He became part of the research team at Xerox PARC, where he partnered with Robert Metcalfe to advance Ethernet technology. Drawing on his background as an amateur radio operator (WA3DBJ), Boggs was instrumental in converting Metcalfe’s concepts into workable hardware solutions.
In 1973, they engineered Ethernet interfaces specifically for the Xerox Alto personal computer. A patent application was submitted by Xerox in 1975 naming Metcalfe, Boggs, Chuck Thacker, and Butler Lampson as inventors. Their influential 1976 publication titled "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks" outlined the principles that would underpin modern networking.
During his tenure at Xerox, Boggs pursued graduate studies at Stanford University, earning a master’s degree in 1973 and a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1982. His doctoral thesis focused on "Internet Broadcasting," a notion that was subsequently developed into IP multicasting by Steve Deering.
Boggs was honored as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and received the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award in 1988. He also played a key role in developing the PARC Universal Packet protocol framework.
Following his work at Xerox, Boggs contributed to Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Laboratory on the "Titan" project and later co-founded LAN Media Corporation (LMC) with Ron Crane. LMC was acquired by SBE Incorporated in 2000, which itself was purchased by Neonode in 2007.
David Boggs died from heart failure at Stanford University Medical Center on February 19, 2022, at the age of 71.