John F. Shoch

Contributor to the development of computer networking — particularly the PARC Universal Protocol (PUP), an important predecessor of TCP/IP — Shoch 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". Shoch 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, was on network worms; although the most famous incident involved 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, Shoch 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. Shoch has also taught at Stanford University, has been a member of the ACM and the IEEE, and has served as a trustee for the Computer History Museum.

His publications included: "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.