Introduction
John Romkey, along with Donald W. Gillies, developed MIT PC/IP, the first TCP/IP stack in the industry for MS-DOS on the IBM PC in 1983 while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1986, Romkey founded FTP Software, a commercial TCP/IP stack provider. Romkey authored the first network analyzer, Netwatch, predating the Network General Sniffer (see NetScout Systems), served on the IAB, and with Simon Hackett, connected the first appliance (a toaster) to the internet. Romkey is currently one of the owners of Blue Forest Research, a consulting company.
FTP Software provided commercial TCP/IP packages for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. With the advent of Microsoft's own free TCP/IP stack, codenamed "Wolverine" and first introduced as an optional extra for Windows for Workgroups 3.11, FTP Software was driven out of business, along with all the other commercial providers of TCP/IP stacks.
Publications
- mit.edu: The desktop computer as the network participant 1985 (IEEE Journal on selected areas of communications Vol. SAC-3. no. 3, May 1985)
- ietf.org: Report of the IAB Workshop on Internet Information Infrastructure, October 12–14, 1994
- ietf.org: A nonstandard for transmission of IP datagrams over serial lines: SLIP (1988)