Daniel C. Lynch, a computer network engineer whose reports on networking equipment helped accelerate the commercialization of the Internet in the 1980s and ’90s, died Saturday at his home in St. Helena, California. He was 82 years old.
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 years of data networking. Although the Internet was very small and limited to non-commercial use, Mr. Lynch was convinced of its ultimate commercial potential.
Friends of his had recently founded companies such as Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems. “And I go, wait a minute, I can do that too,” he said in a video recorded for his induction into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2019.
In 1986, Mr. Lynch decided to hold a workshop 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 the use of the Internet for business. The first event, attended by 300 vendors, was run largely by volunteers, who ran wire across the room and programmed specialized computers called routers, which were just becoming commercially available, to communicate with each other.
“His mindset was that you couldn’t be there if you weren’t willing to network with everybody else,” said Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google. Mr. Lynch asked attendees to adhere to TCP/IP, a language spoken by computers connected to the Internet that was quickly becoming the industry standard.
Mr. Lynch began calling his event Interop in the late 1980s. Within a decade, it had become one of the largest computer shows in the world, helping to create a global community of experts capable of supporting a networking standard that allowed all computers in the world to share data. One computer industry analyst called it “the plumbing exhibition for the information age.”
Interop also publishes ConneXions, a monthly technical magazine focused on data networking. Today’s Internet-related equipment market is estimated at $30 billion.
“It basically helped communicate in every way that the Internet wasn’t just a flash in the pan or just a research experiment, that it was a real thing, worthy of attention and investment,” Dr. Cerf said. And he was right.
In 1991, Mr. Lynch sold Interop to Ziff Davis, a major publisher of computer magazines, for about $25 million.
Daniel 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 his undergraduate 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 received his master’s degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles.
In 1965, he entered the Air Force and worked as a computer programmer at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico until 1969.
In 1973, Mr. Lynch was hired as director of computing at the Stanford Research Institute. The Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet, was in its early years, and the institute was the second hub—or connection point—in the nascent network.
Mr. Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to work at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, another early Arpanet hub, as a computer installation manager.
He left the institute in 1984 “because things were happening and I wanted to get involved in a startup of some kind,” he said in the 2019 video. He funded the first networking-equipment lab 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 online 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 other children — Christopher, Eric, Zachary, Kathryn and Michael — and seven grandchildren.
