The engineer Daniel Courtney Lynch a leading figure in the commercial acceleration of the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s, died this weekend at his home in St. Helena, California (United States) at the age of 82.
After graduating with a master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of California in 1965, and entering the Armed forces Americans, where he worked as a programmer, Daniel C. Lynch was hired at Stanford Research Institute in 1973 to work on the Arpanet project, the precursor network of today’s Internet, created in 1969 at the request of the United States Department of Defense, which wanted to have a means of communication between the different organizations and institutions of the country.
In 1980 he moved to the University of Southern California to work on another Arpanet node, but four years later he left to enter the business world with the aim of boost the commercial potential of the Internet. Initially through workshops that at the end of the 80s were transformed into the Interop event which even had its own monthly publication, ConneXions, focused on data networks.
The news of Daniel C. Lynch’s death was shared by his daughter Julie Lynch-Sasson, who reported that he was suffering from kidney failure, as reported in The New York Times.