William Yeager

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William James Yeager
William Yeager.png
Born (1940-06-16) June 16, 1940 (age 83)
San Francisco
EducationBachelor's degree in mathematics
Master's degree in mathematics
Doctoral course
Alma materUniversity of Washington
San Jose State University
University of California, Berkeley
Occupation(s)American engineer
software programmer
Employer(s)Stanford University
NASA Ames Research Center
Sun Microsystems.
Known forIMAP protocol
Inventor of packet switched devices and router
Network OS programmer
Notable workPatents

William "Bill" Yeager (born June 16, 1940, San Francisco) is an American engineer. He is an inventor of a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night", multiple-protocol router in 1981. [1] [2]

Contents

Education

He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964; his master's degree in mathematics from San Jose State University in 1966; and completed his doctoral course work at the University of Washington in 1970.

Career

From 1970 to 1975 he worked at NASA Ames Research Center where he wrote, as a part of the Pioneer 10/Pioneer 11 mission control operating system, both the telemetry monitoring and real time display of the images of Jupiter.

He joined Stanford University in August 1975 as a member of Dr. Elliott Levanthal's Instrumentation Research Laboratory. He was responsible for a small computer laboratory for biomedical applications of mass spectrometry. This laboratory in conjunction with several chemists, and the Department of inherited rare diseases in the medical school made significant inroads in identifying inherited rare diseases from the gas chromatograph, mass spectrometer data generated from blood and urine samples of sick children. His significant accomplishment was to complete a prototype program initiated by Dr. R. Geoff Dromey [3] called CLEANUP. This program "extracted representative spectra from GC/MS data," [4] and was later used by the EPA to detect water pollutants.

At Stanford in 1979, Yeager wrote the ttyftp serial line file transfer program, which was developed into the Macintosh version of the Kermit protocol at Columbia University.

During his 20-year tenure at Stanford he worked in the Knowledge Systems Laboratory as well as the Stanford University Computer Science department. Yeager's 1981 Stanford router used his custom Network Operating System (NOS). The code routed PARC Universal Packet (PUP), Xerox Network Systems (XNS), Internet Protocol (IP) and Chaosnet packets. His NOS was also used in the EtherTIPS that were used throughout the Stanford LAN for terminal access to both the LAN and the Internet. This code was licensed by Cisco Systems in 1987 and became the core of the first Cisco IOS. [5] This provided the groundwork for a new, global communications approach.

He is also known for his role in the creation of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) mail protocol. In 1984 he conceived of a client/server protocol, designed its functionality, applied for and received the grant money for its implementation. In 1985 Mark Crispin was hired to work with him on what became the IMAP protocol. Along with Mark, who implemented the protocols details and wrote the first client, MMD, Yeager wrote the first Unix IMAP server. Yeager later implemented MacMM which was the first Macintosh IMAP client. Frank Gilmurray assisted with the initial part of this implementation.

After his stint at Stanford he worked for 10 years at Sun Microsystems.

In the Summer of 1999 under the guidance of Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's CTO, and reporting directly to Carl Cargill, Sun's director of corporate standards, [6] led Sun's WAP Forum team with the major objective, "... to work with the WAP Forum on the convergence of the WAP protocol suite with IETF, W3C and Java standards." [7]

As the CTO of Project JXTA he filed 40 US Patents, and along with Rita Yu Chen, designed and implemented the JXTA security solutions. In 2002 he along with Jeff Altman, then a contributor to the JXTA Open Source community, initiated the effort to establish the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) Peer-to-Peer working group. The working group was created in 2003. Yeager was the working group chair until 2005.

As Chief Scientist at Peerouette, Inc., he filed 2 US and 2 European Union Patents. He has 20 US Patents issued, 4 of which are on the SIMS High Performance Email Servers which he invented and with a small team of engineers implemented, and 16 on Peer-to-peer and distributed computing.

During this same period of time[ when? ] he invented the iPlanet Wireless Services. The latter was a Java proxy between IMAP Mail servers and either WAP Servers, or Web Browers. It proxied the following markup languages: The Handheld Device Markup Language, HDML, the Wireless Markup Language, WML, as well as HTML. This was a one person project supported by SFR/Cegetel in France. The primary goal was to enable email service to WAP phones.

Patents

Related Research Articles

Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peer-to-peer</span> Type of decentralized and distributed network architecture

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wireless LAN</span> Computer network that links devices using wireless communication within a limited area

A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network that links two or more devices using wireless communication to form a local area network (LAN) within a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, campus, or office building. This gives users the ability to move around within the area and remain connected to the network. Through a gateway, a WLAN can also provide a connection to the wider Internet.

A network operating system (NOS) is a specialized operating system for a network device such as a router, switch or firewall.

Systems Network Architecture (SNA) is IBM's proprietary networking architecture, created in 1974. It is a complete protocol stack for interconnecting computers and their resources. SNA describes formats and protocols but, in itself, is not a piece of software. The implementation of SNA takes the form of various communications packages, most notably Virtual Telecommunications Access Method (VTAM), the mainframe software package for SNA communications.

The Internetworking Operating System (IOS) is a family of proprietary network operating systems used on several router and network switch models manufactured by Cisco Systems. The system is a package of routing, switching, internetworking, and telecommunications functions integrated into a multitasking operating system. Although the IOS code base includes a cooperative multitasking kernel, most IOS features have been ported to other kernels, such as Linux and QNX, for use in Cisco products.

JXTA (Juxtapose) was an open-source peer-to-peer protocol specification begun by Sun Microsystems in 2001. The JXTA protocols were defined as a set of XML messages which allow any device connected to a network to exchange messages and collaborate independently of the underlying network topology.

This page provides an index of articles thought to be Internet or Web related topics.

WASTE is a peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend protocol and software application developed by Justin Frankel at Nullsoft in 2003 that features instant messaging, chat rooms, and file browsing/sharing capabilities. The name WASTE is a reference to Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49. In the novel, W.A.S.T.E. is an underground postal service.

Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used for baselining application behavior, analyzing network usage, troubleshooting network performance, ensuring that data is in the correct format, checking for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.

An authentication protocol is a type of computer communications protocol or cryptographic protocol specifically designed for transfer of authentication data between two entities. It allows the receiving entity to authenticate the connecting entity as well as authenticate itself to the connecting entity by declaring the type of information needed for authentication as well as syntax. It is the most important layer of protection needed for secure communication within computer networks.

Internet traffic is the flow of data within the entire Internet, or in certain network links of its constituent networks. Common traffic measurements are total volume, in units of multiples of the byte, or as transmission rates in bytes per certain time units.

Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is an authentication framework frequently used in network and internet connections. It is defined in RFC 3748, which made RFC 2284 obsolete, and is updated by RFC 5247. EAP is an authentication framework for providing the transport and usage of material and parameters generated by EAP methods. There are many methods defined by RFCs, and a number of vendor-specific methods and new proposals exist. EAP is not a wire protocol; instead it only defines the information from the interface and the formats. Each protocol that uses EAP defines a way to encapsulate by the user EAP messages within that protocol's messages.

The Kad network is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network which implements the Kademlia P2P overlay protocol. The majority of users on the Kad Network are also connected to servers on the eDonkey network, and Kad Network clients typically query known nodes on the eDonkey network in order to find an initial node on the Kad network.

Gene Kan was a British-born Chinese American peer-to-peer file-sharing programmer who was among the first programmers to produce an open-source version of the file-sharing application that implemented the Gnutella protocol. Kan worked together with Spencer Kimball on the program called "gnubile" licensed under the GNU General Public License. Kan graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 with a major in electrical engineering and computer science, and was a member of the student club the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF).

Decentralized computing is the allocation of resources, both hardware and software, to each individual workstation, or office location. In contrast, centralized computing exists when the majority of functions are carried out, or obtained from a remote centralized location. Decentralized computing is a trend in modern-day business environments. This is the opposite of centralized computing, which was prevalent during the early days of computers. A decentralized computer system has many benefits over a conventional centralized network. Desktop computers have advanced so rapidly, that their potential performance far exceeds the requirements of most business applications. This results in most desktop computers remaining idle. A decentralized system can use the potential of these systems to maximize efficiency. However, it is debatable whether these networks increase overall effectiveness.

Peer-to-peer caching is a computer network traffic management technology used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to accelerate content delivered over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks while reducing related bandwidth costs.

The Stanford University Network, also known as SUN, SUNet or SU-Net is the campus computer network for Stanford University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Twister (software)</span> Blog software

Twister is a decentralized, experimental peer-to-peer microblogging program which uses end-to-end encryption to safeguard communications. Based on BitTorrent- and Bitcoin-like protocols, it has been likened to a distributed version of Twitter.

References

  1. Cringely, Robert X. (1998-12-10). "Valley of the Nerds: Who Really Invented the Multiprotocol Router, and Why Should We Care?". Public Broadcasting Service. Archived from the original on 2007-10-11. Retrieved 2024-01-11.
  2. , NetworkWorld, Accessed January 12, 2024.
  3. R Geoff Dromey Biography
  4. Waller, George R, Dermer, Otis C, Biochemical Applications of Mass Spectrometry, 1980, pages 55-77
  5. Pete Carey, "A Start-Up's True Tale: Often-told story of Cisco's launch leaves out the drama, intrigue", San Jose Mercury News, December 1, 2001.
  6. Carl Cargill
  7. Press release