Napkins and the History of Ethernet, Compaq, Facebook

alphadogg writes "Napkins don't really stack up well against hard drives or even floppy disks for preserving data over time. But some of the technology and business world's most enduring ideas are said to have at least gotten their starts as sketches on dinner or cocktail napkins (which in fact were inspiration for the 5 ¼ floppy disk's size). Robert Metcalfe's early Ethernet diagrams from his days at Xerox PARC back in the early 1970s might be the most famous napkin sketches in the technology industry, but there are napkin stories involving Compaq, Facebook, @home and more."

Comments

How did we invent napkins?

[Tr3vin]

How did we invent napkins without napkins on which to sketch? Inventing things in the old days must have been really hard.

Re:How did we invent napkins?

[decipher_saint]

Rough notes were flogged into the backs of peasants

The most important device sketched on a napkin

[smooth wombat]

I can't believe no one has mentioned the most important device ever sketched on a napkin. Its importance cannot be stressed enough.

I am speaking of the Smelloscope, a device which allows one to smell the odors of distant objects in the universe.

It also comes in handy for detecting large balls of garbage which have been floating around in space for a few hundred years and which is about to crash into Earth.