Metcalfe and Lampson, along with Xerox researchers David Boggs and Chuck Thacker, built their first Alto Aloha system in Bob Taylor’s lab at Xerox PARC. To their great delight, it worked. In May 1973 Metcalfe suggested a name, recalling the hypothetical luminiferous medium invented by nineteenth-century physicists to explain how light passes through empty space. He rechristened the system Ethernet.
