ether - technical definition

Luminiferous ether. The omnipresent passive medium once thought to pervade all space and to support the propagation of electromagnetic energy, even through a vacuum.The existence of the ether was disproved around 1900 by a number of scientists, including Albert Einstein, Albert A. Michaelson, and Edward W. Morley. In 1973, Robert Metcalfe chose the name Ethernet to describe the local area network (LAN) technology he and his associates invented at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC). See also Ethernet; LAN; Metcalfe, Robert M.; and Xerox PARC.