Rick Adams (Internet pioneer)

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Rick Adams was an Internet pioneer and the founder of UUNET, which, in the mid and late 1990s, was the world's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Rick Adams was responsible for designing and implementing Serial Line IP (SLIP) and founding UUNET, thereby making the Internet widely accessible. In 1982 Rick ran the first international UUCP email link at the machine seismo (owned by the Center for Seismic Studies in Northern Virginia), which evolved into the first (UUCP-based) UUNET. He maintained B News (at that time the most popular Usenet 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-850, the Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages, which was updated to become RFC 1036 in 1987.

Rick currently resides in Northern Virginia with his wife Donnalyn and their two sons.

1 Creation of SLIP
2 Founded UUNET
3 Pioneer in Software as a Service
4 Bibliography
5 External links

[edit] Creation of SLIP

He defined the first protocol, SLIP (Serial Line IP), for running TCP/IP over ordinary serial ports (in particular, dial-up modems). Then he wrote the first implementation of SLIP.

The SLIP protocol was superseded, years later, by the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), which is still in use.

[edit] Founded UUNET

Rick founded a nonprofit telecommunications company, UUNET Communications Service, to reduce the cost of mail and netnews 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 an initial 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 leaving UUNET, Rick pursued opportunities as a partner in other ventures, including Cello and the 2941 restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia.

[edit] Pioneer in Software as a Service

Rick also played a largely overlooked role in helping to create new business models for free and open source software. As the hostmaster of the world's best connected backbone site for email and usenet news transfer, Rick realized that the voluntary USENET was becoming unworkable, and that people would pay for reliable, well-connected access. Few people understand that the commercial ISP market that Rick jumpstarted effectively began as a Software as a Service offering for free software, and that as a result Rick should be seen as a pioneer in the commercialization of free and open source software, as well as the commercialization of the Internet.

[edit] Bibliography

!%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks, with his wife Donnalyn Frey, O'Reilly & Associates, 2nd edition - January 1, 2001, ISBN 0937175153.
RFC-850, the Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages, co-author with ????.