Glenn Ricart
loreThe man who built the first place where separate networks met as equals, and who led the first TCP/IP implementation for the IBM PC.
An exchange point is an unglamorous room where networks that do not own each other agree to hand over traffic, and it is the physical form of the interconnection principle. Before one exists, every pair of networks needs its own private arrangement; afterwards, joining once reaches everybody present. Every internet exchange since - and the entire peering economy that decides how traffic actually flows between continents - is that room repeated. The second achievement is easy to underrate: TCP/IP on the IBM PC is what moved the protocol off institutional machines and onto desks.
Also known as: ricart, first internet exchange point, fix
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame 2013: Ricart set up the first Internet Exchange Point and led teams writing code for the first implementation of TCP/IP for the IBM PC in the 1980s
- Ricart set up what was probably the first internet exchange point, the Federal Internet Exchange in College Park, Maryland, which interconnected the original federal TCP/IP networks and was extended to form MAE-East