About John S. Quarterman

Quarterman recently co-founded InternetPerils, Inc. Control Your Internet Business Risk.

John S. Quarterman's most recent book is Risk Management Solutions for Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 IT Compliance ISBN 0-7645-9839-2. Beyond SOX. Beyond the firewall, into the Internet, where nobody controls everything, and security must become risk management.

He wrote The Matrix, a comprehensive book on the history, technology, and people of computer networks worldwide, as well as six other books.

He writes and speaks extensively, for example at the Next Generation Networks conference in October 2002 in Boston and at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference in Virginia in September. He presented at the workshop in March 2002 in DC on the Internet under Crisis Conditions by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Sciences. Many of his texts are collected in Matrix News. which he started in 1991; it was the earliest continuing commercial newsletter published over the Internet.

Quarterman published the first maps of the whole Internet; conducted the first Internet Demographic Survey and started the first continuing series of performance data about the entire Internet in 1993, on the web since 1995 in the Internet Weather Report, and also visible as Internet Average, plus comparisons of ISPs visible as ISP Ratings.

He first used the ARPANET in 1974 while attending Harvard, and worked on UNIX ARPANET software at BBN (the original prime contractor on the ARPANET) from 1977 to 1981. He was twice elected to the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association, a professional association related to the UNIX operating system. While on that board, he was instrumental in its vote in 1987 to approve the first funding received by UUNET, which in 1991 became one of the first two commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

He has consulted for organizations including AT&T, Digital, HP, IBM, InterCon, MCI, Nortel, QUALCOMM, SIA, XEROX, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as preparing reports for the Office of Technology Assessment and the General Accounting Office of the U.S. government. He co-facilitated the Internet Y2K Roundtable of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion.

He co-founded the first Internet consulting firm in Texas (TIC) in 1986, and co-founded one of the first ISPs in Austin (Zilker Internet Park, since sold to Jump Point). He was a founder of TISPA, the Texas ISP Association.

He was a founder and Chief Technology Officer of Matrix NetSystems Inc., established as Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS) in 1990.

Quarterman has been quoted or written about in the Austin American-Statesman, the Austin Business Journal, Boardwatch, the Boston Globe, CBS, ComputerWorld, Data Communications International, the Economist, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, Network World, Newsweek, NPR, the New York Times (twice on the front page; twice on the front page of the business section), the San Jose Mercury News, Science Scientific American, Service Networks Talk Radio, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Yahoo Internet Life, and numerous other news and trade periodicals.

He has given talks or tutorials for APRICOT (Hong Kong), ASCII of China (Beijing), BUUG (Brussels), The Digital Commerce Society of Boston, EARN (Pisa), El Foro (Caracas, Lima), EUUG (Florence, Munich, Tromso, etc.), Federal Communications Commission (FCC, DC), GURU (Bucharest), Harvard Club (Austin), Harvard University Kennedy School of Government (Cambridge), Institut Pasteur (Paris), Internet Society (Prague, Warsaw), Japan UNIX Society (Tokyo, Osaka), MALNIX (Kuala Lumpur), MIT Wireless Forum (NYC), Networld+Interop (San Jose, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Tokyo), Next Generation Networks (Boston), NLUUG (Netherlands), NUUG (Oslo), OTA (DC), President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion (DC), Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (VA), Texas ISP Association (TISPA, Austin), UKUUG (Edinburgh, London), UniForum (various), University of Texas (Library School and Business School), and USENIX (numerous).

He wrote a comprehensive book on the history, technology, and people of computer networks worldwide, The Matrix.

He is a co-author of the authoritative text, The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System, describing a system which has been very influential on the TCP/IP protocols; this book has recently been released in a new edition as The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System.

UNIX, POSIX, and Open Systems: The Open Standards Puzzle relates UNIX programming standards to computer networks. More recently, Practical Internetworking with TCP/IP and UNIX describes the workings of the Internet in some detail, The Internet Connection: System Connectivity and Configuration tells you how you can connect to the Internet, and The E-Mail Companion: Communicating Effectively via the Internet and Other Global Networks tells you how to use electronic mail throughout the Matrix. .

Columns: MicroTimes, SunExpert Magazine,

He has published articles about networks or network protocols in Communications of the ACM, ComputerWorld, ConneXions — The Interoperability Report, Datapro Reports, First Monday, Forbes, Sun Expert, Telegeography, UNIX Review, and UNIX/World.