Board of Trustees
Glenn Ricart
Glenn Ricart is the founding Managing Director of the
PricewaterhouseCoopers Center for Advanced Technology. Dr. Ricart has been
a change agent in a career which has spanned private enterprise, academia,
medical research, and military technology. In private enterprise, he was
EVP and CTO at Novell and founder or co-founder of 3 successful
startups. In academia, he was associate professor, associate vice
chancellor, and CIO of the University of Maryland College Park, the 8th
largest campus in the United States. For nearly a dozen years he developed
and provided computer technology services to aid medical research at the
National Institutes of Health. He also served as Program Manager at DARPA
(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) with programs in advanced
networking, end-system security, operating systems, and middleware, and he
was technology liaison to the Clinton White House and The Library of Congress.
Glenn broke into computer networking in the 1970s by implementing DECnet in
nontraditional environments and by networking the IBM 2741 communicating
typewriter. Later, in the early 1980s, he used PDP-11s running the
Fuzzball code to implement the first campus TCP/IP network and the original
NSFnet backbone before commercial routers existed. He won the first grant
from the U.S. National Science Foundation in networking and used it to
create the first operational regional TCP/IP network, SURAnet. SURAnet
also established the first internet exchange point, the FIX (later FIX-East
and later still MAE-East). SURAnet was the first TCP/IP network of any
kind to accept fully commercial traffic for a fee and therefore can be
regarded as the first ISP. Other networking firsts included managing the
first implementation of TCP/IP for the IBM PC, the first Internet
connections to South America, and the first reference implementation of OSPF.
Dr. Ricart has served on the boards of several public companies as well as founded or co-founded the Common Solutions Group, the Bay Area CTO Forum, Edupage, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Federation of American Research Networks. He is a frequently requested speaker on the future impacts of technology.
