SRI's Dan Lynch dies

Tue Apr 2 19:54:20 UTC 2024

Well said. Dan Lynch's requirement that vendor gear must interop on
the show floor was a big deal and required extra work to accomplish
compared to other "dog and pony" shows.

His ground rules for the Interop conferences had the effect of
ensuring that competent people showed up to set up and run the gear
being shown. Interoperability also ensured that vendors got the
opportunity to find bugs and fix things (whether they wanted to or
not) which helped improve the quality of vendor offerings.

Another benefit was that the people who showed up to make things work
on the show floor were often available during the show as resources to
answer questions or help with issues.

As a result of Dan's efforts the Interop conferences were a very
valuable resource both for attendees and vendors for a number of
years.

-Charles

--
Charles Spurgeon
c.spurgeon at austin.utexas.edu
Networking at the University of Texas at Austin (1988-present)
Networking at Stanford University (1981-1988)               

* Sajit Bhaskaran <sajit at aspen-networks.com> [2024-04-01 11:12:39 -0700]:

> RIP Dan Lynch. It is worth adding that he was also the founder of
> the Interop shows in the mid 80s which achieved a great deal in
> terms of advancing TCP/IP adoption, and inter-operability testing
> was a big deal back then when the future of TCP/IP was also not at
> all certain, as it was in competition then with the ISO/OSI protocol
> suite. Dan's efforts and passion as an entrepreneur created an
> exponentially growing community of users and vendors all over the
> world that made the TCP/IP protocol suite the de facto standard.
> Thanks very much for sharing. Today we take the Internet for
> granted. It could have been very different.
> 
> On 3/31/2024 12:19 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> >>From Lauren Weinstein @ PRIVACY Digest:
> >
> >"""
> >Dan Lynch, one of the key people involved in building the Internet and
> >ARPANET before it, has died.
> >
> >Dan was director of computing facilities at SRI International, where
> >ARPANET node #2 was located and he worked on development of TCP/IP, and
> >where the first packets were received from our site at UCLA node #1 to
> >SRI, and later at USC-ISI led the team that made the transition from the
> >original ARPANET NCP protocols to TCP/IP for the Internet. And much more.
> >
> >Peace. -L
> >"""
> >
> >He was well written up across the web, but here's a 2021 piece for those
> >who aren't as familiar with his background:
> >
> >https://www.internethalloffame.org/2021/04/19/dan-lynchs-love-brilliant-complexity-fuels-early-internet-development-growth/
> >
> >And his IHoF induction speech:
> >
> >http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/dan-lynch-ihof-2019-speech/
> >
> >I would note his age here, as obits usually do, but it seems unusually difficult
> >to learn.
> >
> >Happy landings, Mr Lynch.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >-- jra
> >>This message is from an external sender. Learn more about why this <<
> >>matters at https://links.utexas.edu/rtyclf.                        <<

-- 
Charles Spurgeon
c.spurgeon at austin.utexas.edu

ITS Networking
University of Texas at Austin
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512.750.3675 Cell