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There’s a lot of inventions to award people for. Some of the other recipients look overdue by the time it came to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award

It coming to Metcalfe for Ethernet 7 years after to Berners-Lee for the WWW is amusing though.

Indeed, the one would not have existed without the other.

Perhaps they are giving it by OSI layers.

That's very funny :)

ACM awards are dominated by the theory community. A lot of theoreticians with NO impact on the world have awards. Metcalfe was one of a dozen people who co-invented Ethernet and does not fit the historians "Great man" theory where history is decided by a few "Great Men" who went a different direction at a critical moment ... Ethernet's success is only 25% due to him.

For example, in 1979 at UIUC a grad student built 230kbps S-100 cards using rs232 chips and I wrote the Z-80 csma/cd drivers (as a high school student) so it was not rocket science.

So there was reluctance to give him an award for something he didn't pioneer all alone.

Exactly. He really should have.