I've been involved in the Internet since 1982, when I worked on the first TCP/IP implementation for IBM PC's while at MIT, working for Dr. David Clark and Prof. Jerome Saltzer. The software was called PC/IP. MIT stopped working on it years ago; then CMU did some work on it, and Dan Lanciani last touched it, doing some work of his own and integrating in a lot of stuff that other people did as well. Dan's left a copy of it at this Harvard FTP Server. There's some really embarassing code in it. PC/IP is quite out of date at this point, and I'd strongly recommend picking up a copy of a commercial product, or one of the other free ones (such as KA9Q or NCSA telnet).
I co-founded FTP Software in 1986 and left it in 1988. FTP Software's main business is selling TCP/IP for MS-DOS and Windows (a product called PC/TCP), and it also sells a network monitor called LANWatch, based on NetWatch, the first network monitoring program for PC's, which I created as part of PC/IP. PC/TCP was first based on MIT's PC/IP, but was quite different by the time I left FTP.
While I was at FTP, I created the packet driver specification. Packet drivers are the logical equivalent of Microsoft's NDIS and Novell's ODI specifications, only packet drivers came first. I originally created them to allow users to run multiple protocol stacks (for instance, TCP/IP and NetWare) at the same time, and to allow software developers to decouple the protocol stack from the particular network card it was running over. Russ Nelson of Crynwr Software sells packet driver support and has written many fine packet drivers that he has released under the GNU copyleft.
In 1988, I moved to California and started working with Epilogue Technology for several years developing portable protocol stacks and SNMP implementations - software that was independent of the C compiler, operating system, and processor.
While I was at Epilogue I hooked up the first toaster to the Internet. The toaster was a Sunbeam Radiant Automatic (I still have one in my office). A computer running an SNMP agent implemented the "toaster MIB" and could cause the toaster to start or end toasting. It's not a very practical use of the Internet or of a toaster, but it was a cool demo.
While I was still living in California, I got involved in the creation of The Little Garden, a small cooperative network. It was originally founded by Cygnus Support, Trusted Information Systems and Epilogue Technology, on a very ad hoc basis. Today it has many members and is run by Tom Jennings of FIDONET fame. The Little Garden was named after an excellent chinese restaurant in Palo Alto.
In 1991, I moved back to the Boston area, but remained with Epilogue Technology. Epilogue is still around today (doing the same thing) but I was tired of having worked on protocol stacks for 10 years, and eventually resigned to form ELF Communications in 1992. We disbanded the partnership in the fall of 1994, although one of the partners, Glen Daniels, carries on with ELF as a corporation.
I also served on the Internet Architecture Board for two years, from spring of 1993 to spring of 1995. I decided not to allow myself to be renominated for a position on the IAB since I felt that I would make a better contribution by participating more in working groups than dealing with the problems that the IAB faces. I'm still planning on being an active IETF participant, although I'm missing the Stockholm IETF.