Dewayne Hendricks RIP

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Dewayne Hendricks, my friend of nearly four decades, passed away last Friday at age 74. His mentors were Buckminster Fuller and Paul Baran. He was a pioneer of wireless Internet connectivity, a serial entrepreneur, curator of an influential e-mail list, and for the last 30 years on the organizing committee of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop.

For someone of his remarkable achievements he has left very little impression on the Web. An example is his Linkedin profile. Below the fold I collect the pieces of his story that I know or have been able to find from his other friends. If I can find more I will update this post. Please feel free to add information in the comments.

Wayne State University

Dewayne was a student at Wayne State, where he got into systems programming for the IBM 370. They ran the Michigan Terminal System on a 512K 370/155. He tried to run the University of Newcastle's CMTS, an experimental version of MTS that didn't use dynamic address translation, and ran into performance problems. He worked with Larry Chace at the University of Illinois to get it running on their 1+2M 360/75. After Chace rewrote it to swap pages to their 2301 drum storage it ran well.

Southern Illinois University

While at Southern Illinois Univerity in the '70s he worked for Buckminster Fuller and continued his involvement in IBM systems programming, now for VM/370. Melinda Varian, historian of that era of IBM's groundbreaking SHARE user group, wrote in VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future:

Dewayne Hendricks reported at SHARE XLII, in March, 1974, that he had successfully implemented MVT-CP handshaking for page faulting, so that when MVT running under VM took a page fault, CP would allow MVT to dispatch another task while CP brought in the page. At the following SHARE, Dewayne did a presentation on further modifications, including support for SIOF and a memory-mapped job queue. With these changes, his system would allow multi-tasking guests actually to multi-task when running in a virtual machine. Significantly, his modifications were available on the Waterloo Tape.

Dewayne became the chairman of the Operating Systems Committee of the SHARE VM Project. Under his guidance, the Committee prepared several detailed requirements for improvements to allow guest systems to perform better. At SHARE XLV, in 1975, the Committee presented IBM with a White Paper entitled Operating Systems Under VM/370, which discussed the performance problems of guests under VM and the solutions that customers had found for these problems. Many of the solutions that Dewayne and others had found, such as PAGEX, made their way into VM fairly quickly, apparently as the result of customers’ persistence in documenting them. By SHARE 49, Dewayne was able to state that, “It is now generally understood that either MFT or MVT can run under VM/370 with relative batch throughput greater than 1.” That is to say, they had both been made to run significantly faster under VM than on the bare hardware. Dewayne and others did similar work to improve the performance of DOS under VM.

Amateur Radio

Dewayne was a major figure in developing and sustaining the use of amateur packet radio:

He has been involved with radio since receiving his amateur radio operator's license as a teen. He currently holds official positions in several national non-profit amateur radio organizations and is a director of the Wireless Communications Alliance, an industry group representing manufacturers in the unlicensed radio industry.

In particular:

Back in 1986, he ported the popular KA9Q Internet Protocol package to the Macintosh, allowing the Macintosh platform to be used in packet radio networks. Today, thousands of amateur radio operators worldwide use the NET/Mac system he developed to participate in the global packet radio Internet. This system continues to be developed and deployed by the amateur radio service.

Dewayne was a member of the Amateur Radio Digital Communications Grants Evaluation Team from 2021 to his death. ARDC grants around $5M/year:

ARDC makes grants to projects and organizations that are experimenting with new ways to advance both amateur radio and digital communication science. Experimentation by amateur radio operators has benefited society in many ways, including the development of the mobile phone and wireless internet technology. ARDC envisions a world where all such technology is available through open source hardware and software, and where anyone has the ability to innovate upon it. To see examples of the types of grants we make, go to https://www.ardc.net/grants/.

Tetherless Access

One of the many ahead-of-their-time companies Dewayne started was Tetherless Access. He co-founded it with Charlie Brown in 1990 to develop wireless Metropolitan Access Networks. It went public in 1996 on NASDAQ and folded two years later. The idea was to use the 900MHz unlicensed spectrum to distribute Internet connectivity from a base station via point-to-point links, in contrast to Metricom's Ricochet service, started by Dewayne's mentor Paul Baran, which four years later used mesh network technology in the same spectrum.

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Tetherless Access launched a testbed network which:

• Started in Fall ‘96
• Covered 35 mi area in south bay
• Delivered from ISDN to 30 Mbps bandwidth
• Used both licensed and unlicensed equipment (Part 15 and 97)

NSF Projects

Dewayne was involved in a number of NSF funded experiments in using wireless to connect remote communities:

Prior to forming Dandin Group, he was the General Manager of the Wireless Business Unit for Com21, Inc. He joined Com21 following an opportunity to participate as the Co-Principal Investigator in the National Science Foundation’s Wireless Field Tests for Education project. The project sucessfully connected remote educational institutions to the Internet. The test sites ranged from rural primary schools in Colorado, USA to a University in Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia.

Com21 was founded by Dewayne's mentor Paul Baran.

The PI for connecting Mongolia to the Internet for the first time in 1996 was the "Cursor Cowboy" Colonel Dave Hughes, an equally remarkable character who was a pioneer of bulletin boards starting in 1981!. The NSF funded a 256Kbit/s satellite dish, the State Department shipped it to the US embassy in Ulan Bator via the "diplomatic pouch", and Dewayne and Glenn Tenney travelled via Beijing to deploy 900MHz links across the city.

The Dandin Group, Dewayne's next company was:

a partner in the Advanced Networking Project with Minority Serving Institutions (AN-MSI) an EDUCAUSE project funded by the National Science Foundation. The project's purpose is to provide improved communication services, including Internet access, to underserved minority and tribal-nation institutions. Because these institutions are frequently in remote locations which currently lack communication infrastructures, Internet-linked services delivered by wireless networks offer the most appropriate and cost-effective approach to connecting their communities to the world and to each other.

The project description is here. NSF Awards $6 Million to Help Minority Schools Prepare for Advanced Computer Networks is EDUCAUSE's press release:

National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Rita Colwell announced last week at EDUCAUSE '99 that the foundation has awarded almost $6 million over four years to help institutions of higher learning that traditionally serve minority communities prepare for the next generation of information technology and computer networks. The grant will be administered by EDUCAUSE.

Developing Countries

Dewayne was not just active in getting Internet service to under-served communities with the NSF. The bio on his website states:

Tetherless Access was one of the first companies to develop and deploy Part 15 unlicensed wireless metropolitan area data networks using the TCP/IP protocols. He has participated in the installation of these networks in other parts of the world including: Kenya, Tonga, Mexico, Canada and Mongolia.

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Amara Angelica reported that Tonga first to go wireless for telecommunications:

"We’re replacing the entire existing telecom infrastructure with a wireless IP [Internet protocol] network," says Dewayne Hendricks, CEO of Fremont-based Dandin Group and former general manager of Com21’s wireless business unit. "Since the country is a monarchy, there was only one guy to convince, Crown Prince Tupouto’a, and then we just went for it."

Hendricks’ firm plans to replace Tonga Telecom’s aging landline system—which still uses mechanical relays—with a broadband wireless network for data, video and telephony (using voice over IP). It will run at 30Mbps with user access at 2Mbps and 10Mbps by the end of next year. "We can get all the spectrum we want," Hendricks says.

The prince’s objective, Hendricks says, is to convert the country’s largely agricultural workforce, which has an astonishing 95 percent literacy rate, into knowledge workers, such as programmers. The government launched the Royal School of Science for Distance Learning last year, using Internet connections to allow students to take courses at international universities. There are just fewer than 100,000 people in Tonga scattered across 170 islands.

"We’re going to an Internet-style mesh network," says Hendricks. MMDS, which some carriers are using to deliver broadband services, won’t scale well for an IP network, he says. Hendricks, a technical advisor to the FCC on ultrawideband (UWB) technology, is considering UWB for the network.

Tonga had about 11,000 households and 6,500 phone customers, with an 8-year wait to get a phone. The goals of the project were to deliver 30Mbit/s IP to each home for a customer end budget of $450.

FCC Technological Advisory Council

Dewayne was one of the inaugural members of the Federal Communications Commission's Technological Advisory Council, launched on April 30^th 1999, together with luminaries such as Vint Cerf, AT&T CTO David Nagel, CERFnet founder Susan Estrada and many others. He remained a member through the fourth TAC formed in 2005.

Wired Article

In the January 2002 edition of Wired, Brent Hurtig's Digital Cowboy focused on Dewayne's work on the reservation:

At Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota, he's installing a wireless network. In its initial form, the system will meet FCC requirements governing frequency, power, and transmission technology. But not for long. Hendricks' mission is to build the best system possible - even if it's illegal - and he intends to use every tool at his disposal. Should the FCC crack down, the tribal leaders will hoist the flag of Native American sovereignty, asserting that they can do whatever they want with the sky above their reservation.

Dewayne's work on the reservation, in Tonga and elsewhere was an attempt to demonstrate the problems with the obsolete US spectrum allocation policy:

There's no sensible reason why Americans shouldn't have inexpensive, ubiquitous, high-performance broadband access, Hendricks says. Using technologies that are already available or in fast-track development, everyone could enjoy reliable, fully symmetrical wireless at T1 speed or better. No more digital divide. No more last-mile problem. No more compromises. The only things standing in the way are the FCC, Congress, and "other people who just don't get it."

EE380 Talks

Dewayne gave three talks to Stanford's EE380 symposium. The first one was apparently "in the ‘90s on wireless MANs" of which I have so far found no record.

The second was on 3^rd May 2000 entitled Wiring Tonga: From the Ground Up and the Sky Down. The abstract was:

One of the biggest barriers today standing in the way of deployment of advanced wireless communications systems turns out not to be the technology, but restrictions related to regulatory policies. This presentation will discuss the nature of these barriers and how they have affected the development of wireless data systems over the years.

The speaker will also discuss on-going work in which he is involved to use advanced wireless technology to deploy multiservice IP systems as part of infrastructure-development projects in the Kingdom of Tonga and with Native American groups in the US, and how such projects are able to deal with the limitations imposed by conventional regulatory barriers.

The slides are here.

The third was on 5^th March 2014 and entitled Inventing a New Internet: Learning from Icarus. The abstract read:

From a future historical perspective, are we descendants of Icarus? Is our Internet like Icarus' wings? Are our protocols, ciphers and codes, brilliant capabilities built on immature engineering, which like Icarus' wax and feathers, are capable of taking us to great heights, but systematically flawed? For a brief historical moment, humanity has flown high like Icarus, on a vulnerable first generation Internet platform. Which as been used for securing and using distributed ideas, arts, media science, commerce, and machines. Promising brilliant futures with the arrival of networked things, autonomous personalized services and immersive media. But, now our first generation Internet , built on a fragile global network of vulnerable codes and protocols, is falling apart, like Icarus' wings, through a triple shock from:

• Massive dotcom data stalker economy built on mining of terabytes personal data.
• Ubiquitous criminal penetration of financial and identity networks, on our devices, in the cloud.
• Pervasive state intruders at all levels and every encrypted hardware and software node.

Humans eventually conquered the barriers to flight and learned to build durable and resilient aircraft. Similarly, humans must learn to build a more reliable, private and secure Internet for communications, innovation and commerce. We will share our thoughts on how we might go about the design of a more durable and resilient Internet:

• How prepared is the Internet for future human benefit?
• What are the attributes of a future more durable internet?
• What are the existing assets that could be harnessed?
• What needs to be developed?

Dewayne's slides for this talk are here. Video of the talk is on YouTube

dewayne-net

For many years Dewayne with impeccable taste curated dewayne-net, an e-mail list to which he sent links, most he found but some contributed by his friends. A typical e-mail would have the title of the linked post, a link, and enough of the content to encourage recipients to read the whole thing. The last e-mails were two on 19^th August, as it happens both links that I had sent him earlier. I have been one of the more frequent contributors, although only perhaps 20% of my contributions passed the curatorial filter. Prof. Dave Farber's IP list is a similar and I believe even longer-standing list; he and Dewayne exchanged links fairly often.

As an example of the list in full flow, lets take April 2022. That month he sent 66 e-mails, many about the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine, obviously both top of mind at the time. But they included topics including satellite tracking of commercial aircraft, the Kessler syndrome, the problems of the US patent system, cybercrime, microplastics, banned math textbooks in Florida, and Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. I am already greatly missing this window into Dewayne's eclectic set of interests.