John M. McQuillan

John M. McQuillan (born February 23, 1949, in New York City) is an American computer scientist who studied adaptive routing in the early ARPANET and the subsequent Internet. After earning a PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1974, he was employed from 1971 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he programmed the Interface Message Processor, work that fed into his dissertation on adaptive routing for distributed computer networks. In that dissertation he developed ways to reroute messages around faulty and congested areas of the network based on delay feedback, mechanisms that were used in the first link-state routing protocols from 1978. He started McQuillan Consulting in 1982 and organized the Next Generation Network conferences, and he is now director of McQuillan Ventures, which invests in network infrastructure companies.