Daniel C. Lynch, Founder of Major Computer Exhibition, Dies at 82

Daniel C. Lynch, a pc community engineer whose exhibitions on networking tools helped speed up the commercialization of the web within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, died on Saturday at his dwelling in St. Helena, Calif. He was 82.

His demise was confirmed by his daughter Julie Lynch-Sasson, who stated he had been affected by kidney failure.

In the mid-Nineteen Eighties, when the web was nonetheless the area of academia and the federal government, Mr. Lynch was a pc facility manager who performed a key function within the early years of knowledge networking. Although the web was very small and restricted to noncommercial use, Mr. Lynch was satisfied of its final business potential.

Friends of his had not too long ago began corporations together with Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems. “And I’m going, Wait a minute, I can do that, too,” he stated in a video recorded for his induction into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2019.

In 1986, Mr. Lynch determined to carry a workshop to coach distributors and builders to configure tools for routing visitors by the web. The level was to make completely different producers’ tools work collectively and exhibit the makes use of the web might have for companies. The first occasion, attended by 300 distributors, was run largely by volunteers, who snaked cable by the room and programmed specialised computer systems known as routers, which had been simply changing into commercially obtainable, to speak with each other.

“His brainstorm was that you just couldn’t be there except you had been prepared to interconnect with everybody else,” stated Vinton G. Cerf, a vice chairman and chief web evangelist at Google. Mr. Lynch required the attendees to stick to TCP/IP, a language spoken by computer systems related to the web that was shortly changing into the business normal.

Mr. Lynch began calling his occasion Interop within the late Nineteen Eighties. Within a decade, it had turn into one of many world’s largest pc exhibitions, serving to to create a worldwide group of specialists able to supporting a networking normal that made it doable for all of the world’s computer systems to share information. One pc business analyst known as it “the plumbing exhibition for the data age.”

Interop additionally printed ConneXions, a month-to-month technical journal centered on information networking. Today’s marketplace for internet-related tools is estimated at $30 billion.

“He was basically serving to get the phrase out each manner he might that the web was not only a flash within the pan or only a analysis experiment, that it was an actual factor, worthy of consideration and funding,” Dr. Cerf stated. And he was proper.

In 1991, Mr. Lynch offered Interop to Ziff Davis, a big writer of pc magazines, for an estimated $25 million.

Daniel Courtney Lynch was born on Aug. 16, 1941, in Los Angeles. His father, Thomas Allen Lynch, was a public relations government, and his mom, Irene Elizabeth (Courtney) Lynch, was an educator.

Mr. Lynch obtained his undergraduate diploma in arithmetic and philosophy from Loyola University (now Loyola Marymount University) in 1963. That yr, he married Bernice Fijak, a latest graduate of Mount Saint Mary’s College (now Mount Saint Mary’s University) in Los Angeles. Two years later, he obtained his grasp’s diploma in arithmetic from the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 1965, he entered the Air Force, and labored as a pc programmer at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico till 1969.

In 1973, Mr. Lynch was employed as a pc manager at Stanford Research Institute. The Arpanet, the precursor to the web, was in its first years of operation, and the institute was the second node — or level of connection — on the nascent community.

Mr. Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to work on the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, one other early Arpanet node, as a pc facility manager.

He left the institute in 1984 “as a result of issues had been occurring and I wished to get entangled in a startup of some sort,” he stated within the 2019 video. He financed the primary networking-equipment workshop with a Mastercard, a Visa and a mortgage of $50,000.

After the sale of Interop, Mr. Lynch began a winery in Napa Valley, and in 1994, he co-founded CyberCash, an early internet-based fee service for digital commerce. The firm filed for chapter in 2001.

Mr. Lynch’s first marriage resulted in divorce in 1976. In 1978, he married Georgia Sutherland; the wedding ended a yr later. His third marriage, to Karen Dement in 1980, resulted in divorce in 2003.

Beside his daughter Julie, Mr. Lynch is survived by 5 different youngsters — Christopher, Eric, Zachary, Katherine and Michael — and 7 grandchildren.