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 GeneralSniffer. 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.
^ abAboba, 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.