John A. Murphy is an American inventor and computer engineer credited with inventing ARCNET, the first commercial networking system, in 1976.
[3] Originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Murphy graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1965 with a B.S.
[4][3] He first worked at IBM, then Motorola, Telex, and Singer Business Machines before joining Datapoint, where he led design of the computer networking system ARCNET.
[1] Datapoint had pioneered microprocessors; the challenge ARCNET addressed was how to facilitate the efficient transmission of information between different machines.
"[7] As the first commercial local area network, ARCNET found early success, but corporate struggles at Datapoint led to slower adoption in the 1980s, relative to other commercial alternatives like Ethernet.