Daniel C. Lynch, a computer network engineer who helped accelerate the commercialization of the Internet by showcasing networking equipment in the 1980s and 1990s, died Saturday at his home in St. Helena, California. He passed away at the age of 82.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Julie Lynch-Sasson, who said he had been suffering from kidney failure.
Lynch played a key role in the early days of data networking as a computer facility manager in the mid-1980s, when the Internet was still the domain of academia and government. Although the Internet was very small and limited to non-commercial use, Lynch believed in its ultimate commercial potential.
His friends have recently founded companies such as Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems. “And I’m going to go, wait a minute, I can do this too,” he said in a video recorded for his 2019 Internet Hall of Fame induction.
In 1986, Mr. Lynch decided to hold a workshop to train vendors and developers to configure equipment to route traffic over the Internet. The key was to make equipment from different manufacturers work together to demonstrate how the Internet could be used for business. The first event, which included 300 vendors, was run primarily by volunteers, who strung cables around the room and programmed specialized computers called routers, which were just beginning to become commercially available, to communicate with each other.
“His brainstorm was that you can’t be there unless you’re willing to interconnect with everyone else,” said Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. Mr. Lynch challenged attendees to adhere to his TCP/IP, the language used on computers connected to the Internet, which is quickly becoming an industry standard.
Lynch began calling his events Interop in the late 1980s. Within 10 years, the exhibition became one of the largest computer exhibitions in the world and created a worldwide community of experts capable of supporting networking standards that would allow all computers in the world to share data. contributed to. One computer industry analyst called it “the plumbing show of the information age.”
Interop also published ConneXions, a monthly technology magazine focused on data networking. The current market for Internet-related equipment is estimated at $30 billion.
“He was essentially helping spread the word in every way that the Internet was real, worthy of attention and investment, and not just a fad or just a research experiment,” Dr. Cerf said. Ta. And he was right.
In 1991, Mr. Lynch sold Interop to Ziff Davis, a major publisher of computer magazines, for an estimated $25 million.
Daniel Courtney Lynch was born on August 16, 1941 in Los Angeles. His father, Thomas Allen Lynch, was a public relations executive and his mother, Eileen Elizabeth (Courtney) Lynch, was an educator.
Mr. Lynch received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy from Loyola University (now Loyola Marymount University) in 1963. That same year, she married Bernice Figeac, a recent graduate of Mount Saint Mary’s College (now Mount Saint Mary’s University) in Los Angeles. Two years later, he earned a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles.
He joined the Air Force in 1965 and worked as a computer programmer at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico until 1969.
In 1973, Mr. Lynch was hired as a computer manager at Stanford Research Institute. His Arpanet, the predecessor of the Internet, was in its first years of operation, and this institute was his second node, or connection point, on the early network.
Mr. Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to work as a computer facilities manager at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, another early Arpanet node.
He left the institute in 1984, “because things were going on and I wanted to be involved in some kind of startup,” he said in a 2019 video. He funded his first network equipment workshop with Mastercard, Visa, and his $50,000 loan.
After selling Interop, Mr. Lynch started a vineyard in Napa Valley and in 1994 co-founded CyberCash, an early Internet-based payment service for electronic commerce. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
Mr. Lynch’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1976. He married Georgia Sutherland in 1978. The marriage ended after a year. He married Karen Dement for the third time in 1980, but they divorced in 2003.
In addition to his daughter Julie, Mr. Lynch is survived by five children, Christopher, Eric, Zachary, Katherine, and Michael, and seven grandchildren.
