Daniel C. Lynch, a computer network engineer whose networking equipment exhibitions accelerated the commercialization of the Internet in the 1980s and '90s, died Saturday at age 82 at his home in St. Helena, California.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Julie Lynch-Sasson, who said he had been suffering from kidney failure.
In the mid-1980s, when the Internet was still the domain of academia and government, Mr. Lynch was a computer facilities manager who played a key role in the early days of data networking. Although the Internet was very small and limited to non-commercial use, Mr. Lynch was confident in its ultimate commercial potential.
His friends have recently started companies including Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems. “I'm going. Wait a minute. I can do that, too,” he said in a video recorded for his 2019 Internet Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
In 1986, Mr. Lynch decided to hold workshops to train vendors and developers to configure equipment to route traffic over the Internet. The point was to make equipment from different manufacturers work together and demonstrate how the Internet could be leveraged for business. The first event, attended by 300 vendors, was run primarily by volunteers. Volunteers wired the rooms and programmed special computers called routers, which were just beginning to become commercially available, to communicate with each other.
“His idea was that you can’t be there if you’re not willing to interconnect with everyone else,” said Vinton G. Cerf, Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist. Mr. Lynch challenged attendees to adhere to TCP/IP, which is the language used on computers connected to the Internet and is quickly becoming an industry standard.
Mr. Lynch began calling his events Interop in the late 1980s. Within a decade, the show had grown into one of the world's largest computer exhibitions and helped create a global community of experts who could support networking standards that would allow computers all over the world to share data. One computer industry analyst called it “the plumbing show for the information age.”
Interop also publishes ConneXions, a monthly technical journal focused on data networking. Today, the Internet-related equipment market is estimated at $30 billion.
“He essentially helped spread the word in any way he could that the Internet was not just a flash in the pot or a research experiment, but a real thing and worthy of attention and investment,” Dr. Cerf said. And he was right.
In 1991, Mr. Lynch sold Interop to Ziff Davis, a large computer magazine publisher, for about $25 million.
Danielle Courtney Lynch was born on August 16, 1941 in Los Angeles. His father Thomas Allen Lynch was a public relations executive and his mother Irene 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 year he married Bernice Fijak, 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 enlisted in 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 administrator at the Stanford Research Institute. The Internet's predecessor, Arpanet, was in its first year of operation, and the lab was the second node (or connection point) of 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 said in a 2019 video that he left the institute in 1984 because “things were happening and I wanted to be involved in some kind of startup.” He financed his first networking equipment workshop with Mastercard, Visa, and a $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 e-commerce. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
Mr. Lynch's first marriage ended in divorce in 1976. In 1978, he married Georgia Sutherland. The marriage ended a year later. His third marriage, to Karen Dement in 1980, ended in divorce in 2003.
In addition to his daughter Julie, Mr. Lynch is survived by five children (Christopher, Eric, Zachary, Catherine and Michael) and seven grandchildren.