David Boggs was born on June 17, 1950, in Washington, D.C., to James Boggs and Jane (McCallum) Boggs. He graduated from the city's
Woodrow Wilson High School in 1968, then from
Princeton University with a B.S.E. in
electrical engineering in 1972. He joined the
Xerox PARC research staff, where he met Robert Metcalfe, who was
debugging an
Interface Message Processor interface for the PARC systems group. Boggs, an
amateur radio operator with the
call sign WA3DBJ, recognized similarities between Metcalfe's theories and
radio broadcasting technologies and joined his project. According to
The Economist, "the two would co-invent Ethernet, with Mr Metcalfe generating the ideas and Mr Boggs figuring out how to build the system." After 18 months of work, the published Ethernet's seminal paper in 1976: "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks”. It would be reprinted in
Communications of the ACM in a special 25th-anniversary issue. For a session at the
National Computer Conference in June 1976, he produced a slide from a Metcalfe sketch of Ethernet terminology which was widely reprinted. The original prototype circuit is held by the
Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of American History. While working at Xerox, Boggs went to
Stanford University for graduate study in
electrical engineering; he earned a master's degree in 1973 and a Ph.D. in 1982. He wrote his dissertation on "Internet Broadcasting", a concept that
Steve Deering, also at Stanford, later expanded to
IP multicasting. He was also one of the developers of the
PARC Universal Packet protocol architecture. He became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and received the IEEE Computer Society technical achievement award in 1988. He worked as a consultant in
Silicon Valley and co-founded LAN Media Corporation with
Ron Crane. In July 2000, LMC was acquired by SBE Incorporated and then SBE was acquired by
Neonode in 2007. Boggs died of heart failure at
Stanford University Medical Center in
Stanford, California, on February 19, 2022, at the age of 71. == See also ==