SRI's Dan Lynch dies

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

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:

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

2

I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Lynch, but I thought id add that from other sources I am told he was 82 years old.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/technology/daniel-c-lynch-dead.html

Thank you for sharing the news to this list. I’m sure he is and will be greatly missed by those who knew him. I’m thankful for all he did for computing and the Internet.

John Stitt

3

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.

4

Thanks for sharing this, too. Lynch was really underrated for what he did. He basically made certain that people made their dreams work together, or at least that is what I saw.

Too, when you asked any questions in the Internet’s early days, all the answers eventually seemed to wind back to Dan.

I only knew him by remote interaction, and I have often felt cheated that I didn’t get to know him better.

5

Wow, I have not spoken to Dan Lynch in 8 years. He was brilliant!

Raise glass for Dan!

6

Dan lynch was our neighbor in Los Altos in the early 2000s. He was a lovely guy & became a great friend. He was a mentor and advisor on a number of ventures over the years and wouldn’t hesitate to offer his guidance when asked.

rest in peace old buddy.

Eric Litvin

7

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

8

Charles calls out the major reason the InterOp conferences were so useful to so many. It is a shame there is nothing like this today in many domains like IPv6 or Smart Home or others.

Thanks to Dan for his work to drive this kind of effort during the early days of the commercial Internet.