TIL, Robert Metcalfe (after whom Metcalfe’s Law is named), co-inventor of Ethernet, and co-founder of 3Com was rejected and flunked from Harvard for making ARPANET (internet’s precursor) the topic of his doctoral dissertation because it was “not theoretical enough”.

Harvard refused to let Metcalfe connect them to ARPANET so he went to MIT instead and hooked them up. 

In another anecdote, while presenting a personal version of the ARPANET to a bunch of AT&T executives, his servers crashed and everyone was smiling happy to see that it wasn’t working. At the time, AT&T began lobbying against the early version of the internet because they were afraid of what it would mean for their business. 

This is a fascinating read: https://www.wired.com/1998/11/metcalfe/