Who had a tremendous impact on the history of computers?

Answer 1

I would say Robert Metcalfe the inventor of Ethernet. You know, the way you plug your computer into the internet now a days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe

Metcalfe was working at Xerox PARC in 1973 when he co-invented Ethernet, a standard for connecting computers over short distances, with David Boggs. Metcalfe pegs the exact day Ethernet was born: May 22, 1973, the day he circulated a memo titled "Alto Ethernet" which contained a rough schematic of how Ethernet would work. "That is the first time Ethernet appears as a word, as does the idea of using coax as ether, where the participating stations, like in AlohaNet or Arpanet, would inject their packets of data, they'd travel around at megabits per second, there would be collisions, and retransmissions, and back-off," Metcalfe explains. David Boggs offers another date as the genesis of Ethernet: November 11, 1973, the first day the system actually functioned.[3]

In 1979, Metcalfe departed PARC and founded 3Com, a manufacturer of computer networking equipment. In 1980 he received the Association for Computing Machinery Grace Murray Hopper Award for his contributions to the development of local networks, specifically Ethernet. In 1990 Metcalfe lost a boardroom skirmish at 3Com in the contest to succeed Bill Krause as CEO. The board of directors chose Eric Benhamou to run the networking company Metcalfe had founded in his Palo Alto apartment in 1979. Metcalfe left 3Com and began a 10 year stint as a publisher and pundit, writing an Internet column for InfoWorld. He became a venture capitalist in 2001 and is now a General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners. He is a director of Pop!Tech, an executive technology conference he cofounded in 1997. He has recently been working with Polaris-funded startup Ember to work on a new type of energy grid, Enernet.