John Romkey

John Romkey
Born
Known forPC/IP,[1] Netwatch

John Romkey is an American computer scientist who along with Donald W. Gillies[2] co-developed MIT PC/IP, the first TCP/IP stack in the industry for MS-DOS on the IBM PC[3][1][4][5] in 1983 while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1986, Romkey founded FTP Software, a commercial TCP/IP stack provider. Romkey authored the first network analyzer, Netwatch, predating the Network General Sniffer. He served on the IAB. With Simon Hackett, Romkey connected the first appliance (a toaster) to the Internet in 1990.[5] Romkey is currently one of the owners of Blue Forest Research, a consulting company.

FTP Software provided commercial third-party TCP/IP packages for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. With the advent of Microsoft's own free TCP/IP stack, codenamed "Wolverine" and first introduced as an optional extra for Windows for Workgroups 3.11, FTP Software was driven out of business, along with all the other commercial providers of TCP/IP stacks.

Publications

  • McCahill, M.; Romkey, J.; Schwartz, M.; Sollins, K.; Verschuren, T.; Weider, C. (November 1995). Report of the IAB Workshop on Internet Information Infrastructure, October 12–14, 1994. doi:10.17487/RFC1862. RFC 1862. Retrieved 2020-11-21.
  • Romkey, J. (June 1988). A nonstandard for transmission of IP datagrams over serial lines: SLIP. doi:10.17487/RFC1055. RFC 1055. Retrieved 2020-11-21.

References

  1. ^ a b Saltzer, Jerome H.; Clark, David D.; Romkey, John L.; Gramlich, Wayne C. (May 1985). "The Desktop Computer as a Network Participant". Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. SAC-3 (3). IEEE: 468–478. doi:10.1109/JSAC.1985.1146219. The desktop computer was the IBM Personal Computer attached to one of several local area networks: Ethernet, PRONET, and an RS-232 asynchronous serial line network. The collection of programs is known as PC/IP.
  2. ^ Donald W. Gillies, "Improved network security with a trusted email relay", bachelor's thesis, MIT, June 1984
  3. ^ "About - romkey.com". 2011-02-17. Retrieved 2011-11-10.
  4. ^ TCP/IP
  5. ^ a b Aboba, Bernard Aboba (1993-12-18). "How PC-IP Came to Be, as told by, John Romkey". Internaut: an online supplement to "The Online User's Encyclopedia'". Archived from the original on 7 August 2011. Retrieved 19 September 2020. My involvement with PC/IP began when I was a freshman at MIT in 1981, and I needed a job to pay my tuition. I had used the ARPANET a little bit, and there was an advertisement for a job with Dave Clark and Jerry Saltzer at the Lab for Computer Science (LCS). I interviewed for the job and got it. They were working on a research project to see if TCP/IP could run on something as small as an IBM PC.... While I was at Epilogue, we created an Internet Toaster for Interop in 1990.