Geoff Thompson has been part of the IEEE 803.3 Ethernet Working Group since 1983. He chaired it from 1993 until 2002, a period in which standards innovations such as 1000BASE-T and Gigabit Ethernet “effectively cemented Ethernet as the top dog in wired LANs (local area networks).”
But his connection with the technology and its inventors goes even further back. “I was a very, very early customer of Ethernet.” At Xerox Research in 1974, he was working on laser printing when David Boggs, a co-inventor of Ethernet, introduced Thompson and his colleagues to an early implementation of the technology for connecting computers in their labs. “So I was an early user of the experimental internet.”
