[ih] Remembering Dan Lynch: "Up From the Computer Underground" (NYT August 27, 1993)

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 26— The bustling Interop computer-network trade show,
running here through Friday, was once the sole province of hackers in jeans
interested in fashioning ways to make the gear of different manufacturers
work together.

But in recent years, marketing vice presidents in suits have become a
reliable staple, demonstrating how the Internet -- a global collection of
computer networks on which the show is based -- has transcended the techie
underground to become one of the world's largest computer exhibitions.

Like the personal computer industry, which left its hobbyist roots for
venture capital and corporate board rooms a decade ago, the nerdy world of
computer networks has finally arrived on Main Street.

The first Interop Workshop, attended by 300 people in 1986, was run almost
entirely by volunteers, many with ponytails, who rolled out the cables and
programmed the specialized computers that are the backbone for modern data
networks. Doubling in Size

But the exhibition has doubled in size each year since that first
gathering. This year, it attracted 65,000 people, few of them with long
hair. The show, now a remarkably successful commercial venture, is a forest
of green and yellow cables dangling from the high ceilings, linking more
than 6,000 computers on the floor.

"Interop is the plumbing exhibition for the information age," said Tom
Hargadon, an industry analyst at the Inside Report on New Media in Redwood
City, Calif.

Next year the exhibition will have grown too large for San Francisco and
will move to Las Vegas, Nev., the site of the nation's largest trade shows.

Interop has exploded, driven by the once-radical notion of its founder,
Daniel C. Lynch, that all the industry's data networking gear should
communicate. By breaking down the walls between proprietary vendors and
forcing them to adhere to a single industry standard known as TCP/IP -- the
common language spoken by all computers connected to the Internet -- Mr.
Lynch, 52, has helped pave the way for the commercial Internet. An arcane
specialty when he started, Internet is now sweeping through new markets
ranging from the telephone to cable television.

The service providers and hardware manufacturers that have created Internet
make up a $2 billion business, Mr. Lynch said. The Internet itself, which
has approximately 15 million users and 1,776,000 computers in 137
countries, has become a powerful political and economic force.

Mr. Lynch sold Interop for an undisclosed sum two years ago to Ziff-Davis
Communications the nation's largest publisher of computer magazines, which
will merge it with a rival show, Network World, next year. But Mr. Lynch
still manages the show as founder and chairman.

When Mr. Lynch founded the show, he was an unemployed computer network
engineer. In the 1970's, he managed the computer network connections for
SRI International Inc., a Government-oriented research center in Menlo
Park, Calif. SRI was one of the original sites for the pioneering ARPAnet,
the forerunner of today's global Internet.

On his first day at SRI, Mr. Lynch said, he caught a glimpse of the
potential of computer networks, a vision of a national data highway that
has since captured the attention of millions of Americans, including
President Clinton.

"It gave me a chill," Mr. Lynch said. "I saw computer networks as something
that could make society dramatically different."

But in the 1970's and 1980's, networking was expensive and a specialty
accessible to only a few computer hackers dedicated to managing the
networks.

When Mr. Lynch found himself without a job in the mid-1980's, he struck on
the idea of an exhibition as a way to assemble all the data networking
companies in one location so that he could look for a job as a marketing
vice president.

By the final day of the first conference, he was visibly worried because no
one had offered him a job. Then, at one session, he said, someone stood up
and said, "We know what you're trying to do, but what you should do is run
this conference for the whole industry." Everyone in the room cheered. Mr.
Lynch agreed, starting the annual conference with a Mastercard, a Visa and
a loan of $50,000. "He's a wild man," said Geoff Goodfellow, chairman of
the RadioMail Corporation, a San Mateo, Calif., company that offers a
wireless electronic mail service. "He's like a maypole around which all the
companies weave their spider web networks."

At this year's Interop, the big news involved some of the nation's largest
high-tech companies. The Sprint Corporation, for example, announced that it
would begin offering a new high-speed data protocol designed to provide
support for future multimedia applications.

In control rooms cluttered with dozens of computer terminals and work
stations above the show's floor today, Mr. Lynch acknowledged that Interop
had changed dramatically in seven years.

"It's true," he said, as he watched the volunteer engineers maintaining the
network he created. "This is the only place at the show where you find
people in T-shirts anymore."

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/27/business/up-from-the-computer-underground.html
-or-
https://web.archive.org/web/20150526094401/https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/27/business/up-from-the-computer-underground.html

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True