[ih] James Sterbenz has passed away

[Joe Touch]

> On Feb 26, 2019, at 6:46 PM, Craig Milo Rogers <rogers at ISI.EDU> wrote:
> 
> 	According to Posts on James' Facebook page, he passed away
> unexpectedly today.

Hi,all,

A unfortunately am able to confirm this news. I just spoke with his department at KU and they indicated that James passed on Monday afternoon, Feb 25, 2019.

I have asked to be informed as to any arrangements, which I will post here as they deem appropriate.

A personal note on his passing follows. Please feel free to post similar notes here; I will be glad to gather them and forward both to his department and family.

Joe

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As a personal note, I first met James when in graduate school at UPenn in the late 1980s through my PhD advisor Dave Farber, who advised James's advisor Guru Parulkar. James was working at IBM at the time and he and I shared deep interest in high speed networking throughout our careers that began there.

Later, he and I worked together in the IEEE to help create the Comsoc’s Tech Committee on Gigabit Networking (TCGN, later renamed to TCHSN for ‘high speed networking’), and led discussions there defining the “gigabit problem” that was the focus of both our theses. James’ Axon dissertation was arguably the first on ‘zero-copy’, a key technique to help overcome that problem.

We worked together on a number of technical and conference committees, where I followed his lead as chair of TCGN and later we co-chaired the IFIP Protocols for High Speed Networking VI in Salem, MA in 1999. Around that time we realized we had spent the better part of the prior decade both answering the same questions repeatedly - how to make networks work faster, and he decided we should log our experience as a book. The result was our co-authoring "High Speed Networking: A Systematic Approach to High-Bandwidth Low-Latency Communication” (Wiley) in 2001.

He and I worked together many times over our careers, spending many “gap” days at conferences wandering around cities around the world. This included many visits to train platforms where he would photographically document train signals - a passion he shared with Bob Braden. 

Although his work and mine overlapped in many areas, his core interests and mine diverged over the past years. I last spoke with him this past May about a conference he was attending while I was on a business trip.

James was my first professional colleague, someone who helped both mentor me and later work by my side. I’m deeply sorry to see him pass, but very grateful for the time he shared with me.

- Joe