John Shoch

Last updated

John F. Shoch is an American computer scientist and venture capitalist who made significant contributions to the development of computer networking while at Xerox PARC, in particular to the development of the PARC Universal Protocol (PUP), an important predecessor of TCP/IP.

Contents

His contributions were significant enough to warrant including his name on the memorial plaque at Stanford University commemorating the "Birth of the Internet."

Career

Shoch attended Stanford, where he earned a B.A. in political science (1971); he later went on to earn an M.S. (1977) and a Ph.D. (1979) in Computer Science from Stanford as well. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Design and Performance of Local Computer Networks". [1]

He joined Xerox in 1971, working at PARC, where his research interests included internetwork protocols, [2] computer local area networks (in particular the Ethernet, which he helped develop), packet radio, programming languages, and various other aspects of distributed systems. His best-known work from that period, after the Ethernet and PUP, is on network worms; although the most famous incident involves one that ran out of control, they were actually early experiments in distributed computing over a network of loosely coupled machines.

In 1980, he became the assistant to the CEO of Xerox and director of the Corporate Policy Committee. In 1982, he moved on to become president of Xerox's Office Systems Division (which developed network-based office systems derived from research performed at PARC). [3]

He left Xerox to become a venture capitalist with Asset Management Associates in 1985, and then became a founding general partner at Alloy Ventures in 1996. [4]

He has also taught at Stanford University, is a member of the ACM and the IEEE, and serves as a trustee for the Computer History Museum. [3]

Publications

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer worm</span> Self-replicating malware program

A computer worm is a standalone malware computer program that replicates itself in order to spread to other computers. It often uses a computer network to spread itself, relying on security failures on the target computer to access it. It will use this machine as a host to scan and infect other computers. When these new worm-invaded computers are controlled, the worm will continue to scan and infect other computers using these computers as hosts, and this behaviour will continue. Computer worms use recursive methods to copy themselves without host programs and distribute themselves based on exploiting the advantages of exponential growth, thus controlling and infecting more and more computers in a short time. Worms almost always cause at least some harm to the network, even if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethernet</span> Computer networking technology

Ethernet is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3. Ethernet has since been refined to support higher bit rates, a greater number of nodes, and longer link distances, but retains much backward compatibility. Over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as Token Ring, FDDI and ARCNET.

Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks, such that any pair of hosts in the connected networks can exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting system of interconnected networks are called an internetwork, or simply an internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Local area network</span> Computer network that connects devices over a limited area

A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger geographic distance, but also generally involves leased telecommunication circuits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Router (computing)</span> Device that forwards data packets between computer networks

A router is a computer and networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks, including internetworks such as the global Internet.

In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into packets that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.

Xerox Network Systems (XNS) is a computer networking protocol suite developed by Xerox within the Xerox Network Systems Architecture. It provided general purpose network communications, internetwork routing and packet delivery, and higher level functions such as a reliable stream, and remote procedure calls. XNS predated and influenced the development of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking model, and was very influential in local area networking designs during the 1980s.

The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a communication protocol used for discovering the link layer address, such as a MAC address, associated with a given internet layer address, typically an IPv4 address. This mapping is a critical function in the Internet protocol suite. ARP was defined in 1982 by RFC 826, which is Internet Standard STD 37.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Butler Lampson</span> American computer scientist

Butler W. Lampson FRS is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Metcalfe</span> American engineer (born 1946)

Robert "Bob" Melancton Metcalfe is an American engineer and entrepreneur who contributed to the development of the internet in the 1970s. He co-invented Ethernet, co-founded 3Com, and formulated Metcalfe's law, which describes the effect of a telecommunications network. Metcalfe has also made several predictions which failed to come to pass, including forecasting the demise of the internet during the 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Tesler</span> American computer scientist (1945–2020)

Lawrence Gordon Tesler was an American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Taylor (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist

Robert William Taylor, known as Bob Taylor, was an American Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies. He was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 through 1983, and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles P. Thacker</span> American computer scientist

Charles Patrick "Chuck" Thacker was an American pioneer computer designer. He designed the Xerox Alto, which is the first computer that used a mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI).

The PARC Universal Packet was one of the two earliest internetworking protocol suites; it was created by researchers at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s. The entire suite provided routing and packet delivery, as well as higher level functions such as a reliable byte stream, along with numerous applications.

EFTP was a very simple file transfer protocol developed as part of the PARC Universal Packet protocol suite at Xerox PARC in the late 1970s. It was the inspiration for the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) in the TCP/IP suite.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer network</span> Network that allows computers to share resources and communicate with each other

A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies.

David Reeves Boggs was an American electrical and radio engineer who developed early prototypes of Internet protocols, file servers, gateways, network interface cards and, along with Robert Metcalfe and others, co-invented Ethernet, the most popular family of technologies for local area computer networks.

The International Network Working Group (INWG) was a group of prominent computer science researchers in the 1970s who studied and developed standards and protocols for interconnection of computer networks. Set up in 1972 as an informal group to consider the technical issues involved in connecting different networks, its goal was to develop international standard protocols for internetworking. INWG became a subcommittee of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) the following year. Concepts developed by members of the group contributed to the Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication proposed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974 and the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that emerged later.

The Protocol Wars were a long-running debate in computer science that occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s, when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s when it became the dominant protocol suite through rapid adoption of the Internet.

References

  1. Shoch, John F. "Design and performance of local computer networks". ACM Theses Library. ACM. Retrieved 29 November 2022.
  2. Taylor, Bob (October 11, 2008), "Oral History of Robert (Bob) W. Taylor" (PDF), Computer History Museum Archive, CHM Reference number: X5059.2009: 27–8
  3. 1 2 "Computer History Museum - Trustee - John Shoch". Archived from the original on September 5, 2015. Retrieved April 4, 2011.
  4. "General Partners: John Shoch". Alloy Ventures web site. Retrieved April 4, 2011.

Further reading