Dr. John F. Shoch

He attended Stanford, where he earned a B.A. in political science (1971); he later went on to earn an M.S. (1977) and a Ph.D. (1979) in Computer Science from Stanford as well. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Design and Performance of Local Computer Networks". He joined Xerox in 1971, working at PARC, where his research interests included internetwork protocols, computer local area networks (in particular the Ethernet, which he helped develop), packet radio, programming languages, and various other aspects of distributed systems. His best-known work from that period, after the Ethernet and PUP, is on network worms; although the most famous incident involves one that ran out of control, they were actually early experiments in distributed computing over a network of loosely-coupled machines. In 1980, he became the assistant to the CEO of Xerox and director of the Corporate Policy Committee. In 1982, he moved on to become president of Xerox's Office Systems Division (which developed network-based office systems derived from research performed at PARC). He left Xerox to become a venture capitalist with Asset Management Associates in 1985, and then became a founding general partner at Alloy Ventures in 1996. He has also taught at Stanford University, is a member of the ACM and the IEEE, and serves as a trustee for the Computer History Museum. His publications include: "Pup: An Internetwork Architecture", (IEEE Transactions on Communications with co-authors, David R. Boggs, Edward A. Taft and Robert M. Metcalfe; COM-28(4):612-624, April, 1980); "A note on Inter-Network Naming, Addressing, and Routing", IEN-19, 1978; and with Jon Hupp, "The 'Worm' Programs - Early Experience with a Distributed Computation", Communications of the ACM, March 1982, Volume 25 Number 3, pp. 172-180