Daniel C. Lynch, Founding father of Main Laptop 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 house in St. Helena, Calif. He was 82.

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

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

Associates of his had just lately began corporations together with Cisco Techniques and Solar Microsystems. “And I’m going, Wait a minute, I can do that, too,” he mentioned in a video recorded for his induction into the Web Corridor 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 means of the web. The purpose was to make completely different producers’ tools work collectively and exhibit the makes use of the web may have for companies. The primary occasion, attended by 300 distributors, was run largely by volunteers, who snaked cable by means of the room and programmed specialised computer systems known as routers, which have been simply turning into commercially obtainable, to speak with each other.

“His brainstorm was that you just couldn’t be there until you have been prepared to interconnect with everybody else,” mentioned Vinton G. Cerf, a vp and chief web evangelist at Google. Mr. Lynch required the attendees to stick to TCP/IP, a language spoken by computer systems linked to the web that was rapidly turning into the trade commonplace.

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

Interop additionally revealed ConneXions, a month-to-month technical journal targeted on information networking. In the present day’s marketplace for internet-related tools is estimated at $30 billion.

“He was basically serving to get the phrase out each manner he may 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 mentioned. And he was proper.

In 1991, Mr. Lynch offered Interop to Ziff Davis, a big writer of laptop 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 govt, and his mom, Irene Elizabeth (Courtney) Lynch, was an educator.

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

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

In 1973, Mr. Lynch was employed as a pc supervisor at Stanford Analysis 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 College of Southern California Info Sciences Institute, one other early Arpanet node, as a pc facility supervisor.

He left the institute in 1984 “as a result of issues have been taking place and I needed to become involved in a startup of some sort,” he mentioned 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 cost service for digital commerce. The corporate filed for chapter in 2001.

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

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