Glenn Ricart

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Dr. Glenn Ricart is an Internet Pioneer. He started using one of the original Internet (ARPANET) nodes in 1969.

He set up what was probably the first Internet Exchange point, the FIX (Federal Internet Exchange) in College Park, Maryland which interconnected the original federal TCP/IP networks and was extended to form MAE-East.

Dr. Ricart led the team that wrote the code for the first implementation of TCP/IP for the IBM PC. He then secured financial support from IBM for writing the code, and, in addition to its free availability to the education community, arranged for IBM to sell it as IBM's entry into the field (the product was called PC/IP by IBM).
Dr. Ricart led the team that developed the OSPF reference implementation at the University of Maryland, his team included Louis Mamakos and Mike Petry.
Dr. Ricart led the team that provided and operated the routers for the first NSFNet backbone.

The Ricart-Agrawala Algorithm was the result of his dissertation work at the University of Maryland.

From 1971-1982, he was a lead software engineer at the National Institutes of Health, developing the first e-mail program for the TOPS-10 (PDP-10) operating system in 1973. From 1982-1993, he headed academic computing at the University of Maryland. In 1984, it became the first campus to adopt TCP/IP campus-wide and use it to connect all academic minicomputers and mainframes.

From 1993 to 1995, Ricart was a Program Manager at DARPA for operating systems, middleware, and end-system security. From 1995-1999, he was Chief Technology Officer at Novell, helping to move that company from the proprietary XNS protocol to also embrace TCP/IP. In 1999, he co-founded CenterBeam, a start-up based on remote system management driven by directory services.

He currently serves on the boards of the Internet Society and the Public Interest Registry. He previously served on the boards of BITNET, CACI, and NASULGC.