- Rick Adams (Internet pioneer)
Rick Adams was an
Internet pioneer and the founder ofUUNET , which, in the mid and late 1990s, was the world's largestInternet Service Provider (ISP).Rick Adams was responsible for the first widely available Serial Line IP (SLIP) implementation and founding
UUNET , thereby making the Internet widely accessible. In 1982 Rick ran the first internationalUUCP email link at the machine "seismo" (owned by theCenter for Seismic Studies inNorthern Virginia ), which evolved into the first (UUCP-based) UUNET. He maintainedB News (at that time the most popularUsenet News transport).Rick co-authored the O'Reilly book "!%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks" with his wife Donnalyn Frey. He is also co-author of RFC 1036, the Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages.
Rick currently resides in Northern Virginia with his wife Donnalyn and their two sons.
Creation of SLIP
In the early 1980s,
3Com 's UNET Unix system could exchange TCP/IP traffic over serial lines. In 1984 Adams implemented this system on Berkeley Unix 4.2 and dubbed it SLIP. The SLIP protocol was documented in RFC 1055.The SLIP protocol was superseded, years later, by the
Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), which is still in use.Founded UUNET
Rick founded a nonprofit telecommunications company, UUNET Communications Service, to reduce the cost of mail and Usenet traffic sent by UUCP, particularly for rural sites in America. (UUNET was founded with a $50,000 loan from the
USENIX Association, which was subsequently repaid.) UUNET became an official gateway between UUCP mail and Internet email, as well as between North America and Europe. It hosted many related services, such as Internet FTP access for its UUCP clients and the comp.sources.unix archives.Rick spun out a for-profit company, UUNET Technologies, which was the first ISP in the United States. The for-profit company bought the assets of the nonprofit, repaying it with a share of the profits over the years. The nonprofit has spent that money for many UNIX-related charitable causes over the years, such as supporting the
Internet Software Consortium . The for-profit ISP became a multi-billion-dollar company and made aninitial public offering in 1995. It was acquired by MFS (Metropolitan Fiber Systems, a wide-area optical-networking company), in 1996, which was subsequently acquired by Worldcom, which rose to challenge the largest telecommunications companies in America.Rick left UUNET after transitioning leadership of the company to
John Sidgmore in 1994. After leavingUUNET , Rick pursued opportunities as a partner in other ventures, including Cello and the [http://www.2941.com 2941 restaurant] inFalls Church, Virginia .References
* cite book
title=!%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks
last=Adams
first=Rick
coauthors=Donnalyn Frey
publisher=O'Reilly & Associates
date=January 1, 2001
id=ISBN 0-937175-15-3
* RFC 1036, "Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages", co-authored with Mark Horton.
* RFC 1055, "A Nonstandard for Transmission of IP Datagrams Over Serial Lines: SLIP", byJohn Romkey .External links
* [http://www.uu.net UUNET]
* [http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/05/09/lessons.html Tim O'Reilly discusses Rick Adams' creating UUNET as an open source-derived business. Includes some history.]
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