John A. Murphy is an American inventor and computer engineer credited with inventing ARCNET, the first commercial networking system, in 1976. He was working for

Datapoint Datapoint Corporation, originally known as Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC), was a computer company based in San Antonio, Texas, United States. Founded in July 1968 by Phil Ray and Gus Roche, its first products were, as the company's initial ...

Corporation at the time. His biography appeared in the

IT History Society The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

website.

Background and career

Originally from

Tulsa, Oklahoma Tulsa ( ) is the List of municipalities in Oklahoma, second-most-populous city in the U.S. state, state of Oklahoma, after Oklahoma City, and the List of United States cities by population, 48th-most-populous city in the United States. The po ...

, Murphy graduated from the

University of Notre Dame The University of Notre Dame du Lac (known simply as Notre Dame; ; ND) is a Private university, private Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, United States. Founded in 1842 by members of the Congregation of Holy Cross, a Cathol ...

in 1965 with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering. He first worked at

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

, then

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...

Telex Telex is a telecommunication Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communica ...

, and Singer Business Machines before joining

, where he led design of the computer networking system ARCNET.

Victor Poor Victor "Vic" Poor (July 12, 1933 – August 17, 2012) was an American engineer and computer pioneer. At Computer Terminal Corporation (later renamed Datapoint Corporation), he co-created the architecture that was ultimately implemented in th ...

had established the R&D function at Datapoint as industry leading: with Harry Pyle, Poor co-created the architecture that was ultimately implemented in the first successful computer microprocessor, the Intel 8008.

ARCNET

Developed in 1976, ARCNET (Attached Resource Computer NETwork) was the first widely available networking system for microcomputers. Datapoint had pioneered microprocessors; the challenge ARCNET addressed was how to facilitate the efficient transmission of information between different machines. In an interview with Len Shustek for the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

, Murphy notes that

took ARCNET from concept to reality in "under a year and probably very much under a year." As the first commercial local area network, ARCNET found early success, but corporate struggles at Datapoint led to slower adoption in the 1980s, relative to other commercial alternatives like Ethernet. According to Techopedia, "ARCnet was the first simple networking based solution that provided for all kinds of transmission regardless of the transmission medium or the type of computer."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Murphy, John 1943 births American inventors American computer programmers American electronics engineers People from Tulsa, Oklahoma 21st-century American engineers Computer hardware engineers University of Notre Dame alumni Living people