John M. McQuillan (born 23 February 1949 in New York City[1]) is an American computer scientist who did studies of adaptive routing in the early ARPANET and the subsequent Internet.
[3] He was since 1971 employed at the computer networking equipment manufacturer Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, MA, where he programmed the Interface Message Processor,[4][5] work that in part led to his dissertation Adaptive routing for distributed computer networks advised by Jeffrey P. Buzen in 1974.
[3] In his dissertation, McQuillan developed ways to reroute messages around faulty and congested areas in the Internet based on delay feedback.
He started McQuillan Consulting in Concord, MA (1982), became a columnist to Business Communications Review as well as an annual organizer of the Next Generation Network (NGN) conferences.
[7] His father, John McQuillan (died 1984), was a communications engineer and a participant in the first trans-Atlantic radio conversation.