Daniel C. Lynch, Founder of Prominent Computer Exhibition, Passes Away at 82

Daniel C. Lynch, a pioneering computer network engineer renowned for his contributions to the commercialization of the internet during the 1980s and ’90s, passed away on Saturday at his residence in St. Helena, Calif. He was 82 years old.His daughter, Julie Lynch-Sasson, confirmed his death, stating that he had been battling kidney failure.

During the mid-1980s, at a time when the internet was primarily utilized by academia and the government, Mr. Lynch served as a computer facility manager and played a pivotal role in the early stages of data networking. Despite the internet's limited scope and noncommercial nature at the time, Mr. Lynch foresaw its potential for commercialization and was unwavering in his conviction regarding its future prospects.Daniel C. Lynch was inspired by friends who had recently founded companies such as Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems. Reflecting on this, he remarked, "And I’m going, Wait a minute, I can do this, too," in a video recorded for his induction into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2019.

In 1986, Mr. Lynch organized a workshop aimed at training vendors and developers to configure equipment for routing traffic through the internet. The objective was to enable interoperability among equipment from different manufacturers and showcase the potential uses of the internet for businesses. The inaugural event, attended by 300 vendors, relied heavily on volunteers who assisted in tasks such as laying cable throughout the room and programming specialized computers known as routers, which were only just becoming commercially available, to establish communication with each other.

Mr. Lynch's insight was that participation required a willingness to interconnect with all other attendees," explained Vinton G. Cerf, a vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. Mr. Lynch mandated that all attendees adhere to TCP/IP, the language spoken by computers connected to the internet, which was rapidly becoming the industry standard.Mr. Lynch began referring to his event as Interop in the late 1980s. Within ten years, it had evolved into one of the largest computer exhibitions globally, fostering a global community of specialists capable of supporting a networking standard that enabled all computers worldwide to share data.

One computer industry analyst described it as "the plumbing exhibition for the information age." Interop also produced ConneXions, a monthly technical journal dedicated to data networking. Today, the market for internet-related equipment is estimated at $30 billion.“He was essentially helping get the word out every way he could that the internet was not 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 large publisher of computer 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 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 a computer manager at Stanford Research Institute. The Arpanet, the precursor to the internet, was in its first years of operation, and the institute was the second node — or point of connection — on 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 node, as a computer facility 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 financed the first networking-equipment workshop with a Mastercard, a Visa and a loan of $50,000.After the sale of Interop, Mr. Lynch started a vineyard in Napa Valley, and in 1994, he co-founded CyberCash, an early internet-based payment service for electronic 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.Beside his daughter Julie, Mr. Lynch is survived by five other children — Christopher, Eric, Zachary, Katherine and Michael — and seven grandchildren.