I met the mysterious Doctor Mudge on the doorstep of Bob Metcalfe's townhouse on Beacon Street in the fashionable Back Bay area of Boston. You've probably heard about Metcalfe -- he invented Ethernet, among other things -- but you might not . . .
I met the mysterious Doctor Mudge on the doorstep of Bob Metcalfe's townhouse on Beacon Street in the fashionable Back Bay area of Boston. You've probably heard about Metcalfe -- he invented Ethernet, among other things -- but you might not be as familiar with Mudge, who remains a somewhat mysterious figure. He is, according to some, the king of the hackers, and a man who's managed to parlay that expertise into big bucks from the corporate world.

The reason that we were standing on a doorstep was because Mudge was smoking a cigarette, which he held between his third and fourth fingers -- a style that I hadn't seen since I left Los Angeles 12 years earlier. Indeed, Mudge looked like a character from bygone times with his beard and moustache, long hair flowing down past his shoulders -- a younger image of the guys I used to hang with back when I was the junior dude in an OS development group in the late 1970s.

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