Born: 1946
Died: February 16, 2023
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, April-June 2023
Obituary for James Pelkey
James Lee Pelkey was a unique combination of entrepreneur, investor, and historian at a pivotal time in the evolution of early networking technologies. A business executive who led both hardware and software startups and later managed funds investing in early networking startups, Pelkey turned a passion for discovering emerging markets for new technologies into a lifelong pursuit of documenting the early history of computer communications. He died on February 16 on his home island of Maui, Hawaii at the age of 77.
Many may know Jim from the oral history collection at CHM that bears his name. These interviews are a remarkable resource, both because they document the perspectives of many leading Internet pioneers— J. C. R. Licklider, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Paul Baran, Louis Pouzin, Robert Metcalfe, Jon Postel, and others—and because Pelkey conducted these interviews in the late 1980s, before the social and commercial significance of their work was well-understood.
Born in Saranac Lake, New York in 1946, Jim graduated from Saranac Lake High School in 1964. He attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, graduating with a BS in mechanical engineering in 1968. The following year he attended Harvard Business School, receiving his MBA in 1970. After moving to San Francisco, Jim worked as a financial director for Sunset Designs, eventually helping the company launch operations in Canada, England, and France. He served as president of Digital Sound and later Sorcim before joining Montgomery Securities in 1984 to oversee its venture capital operations, becoming a general partner in 1985. From 1990 to 1992, he served as chairman of the Santa Fe Institute. He later held board positions with Prediction Company and Blue Sky Research.
It was during his time at Montgomery Securities that he conducted the series of 85 interviews of engineers, academics, government regulators, and startup founders in the growing fields of data communications and computer networking. These interviews formed the basis of a decades-long project to document the birth of new industries critical to the evolution of the Internet.
Initially published online in 2009, Jim’s website, HistoryofComputerCommunications.info, is an extraordinary resource: it has links to the interview transcripts, as well as Jim’s own personal story and his analysis—in the shape of hundreds of hypertext pages—of the formative years of computer communications. The site includes some valuable and underutilized primary sources, such as market research about the companies that made modems, routers, and other devices that facilitated computer communication.
Jim’s work was published by ACM Press in 2022, coauthored by Andrew L. Russell and Loring G. Robbins, under the title Circuits, Packets, and Protocols: Entrepreneurs and Computer Communications, 1968–1988.
It was Jim’s sincere wish that scholars in computing, computer history, business, and related fields would grapple with his work and the underlying source material, perhaps draw different conclusions, and uses the work to inform teaching and knowledge about entrepreneurship, market dynamics, and technological change in the late 20th century and beyond.
Publications by James Pelkey:
1. Circuits, Packets, and Protocols: Entrepreneurs and Computer Communications, 1968–1988 (ACM Press, 2022), https://circuitspacketsandprotocols. com/.
2. “The business of internetworking: Standards, start-ups, and network effects” Business History Review 96.1, Spring 2022, pp 109–144.
3. “The do-or-die moments that determined the fate of the Internet,” IEEE Spectrum, May, 2023, https://spectrum.ieee.org/computer-networking
Loring G. Robbins Freelance writer, Ashland, OR, 97520, USA
Andrew L. Russell SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Albany, 12203, NY, USA and Utica, NY, 13502, USA
Santa Fe Institute, May 26, 2023
In Memoriam: James Pelkey
James Pelkey, former member of the SFI Board of Trustees, passed away on February 16, 2023, at the age of 77 in Maui, Hawaii. A committed supporter of the research carried out at SFI, Pelkey served on SFI’s Board of Trustees for a decade, and became the Chair of the Board from 1990-1992. He was instrumental in acquiring the property on Hyde Park Road for SFI’s Cowan Campus, and one of the building’s Pods – a collaborative research working space – has a plaque in his name.
An early witness to the transformation that was taking place in the computer communications industry and the resulting information-based economy, Pelkey was driven by questions of how technological innovation could become economic growth. He wanted to understand if there was a general principle underlying the emergence and evolution of information-based companies and if the process could be made more efficient and effective. Pelkey’s search led him to the work in economic theory carried out at the Santa Fe Institute, and eventually to joining its Board.
“Jim loved SFI. He recruited me while he was Chair of the Board and added a number of others from the tech industry, changing the composition of the Board by adding non-scientists,” says SFI Trustee Bob Maxfield, who has served since Pelkey was Chair. The two met during the Symposium of 1992 and grew to know each other through their shared interests in artificial economy models and artificial stock markets. “He led the idea of acquiring the Hyde Park property, enhanced the capabilities of the board, and created wider visibility for the scientific research carried out at SFI.”
Pelkey enjoyed attending SFI’s research workshops. He engaged closely with the scientists, took great interest in the ideas they pursued, and often hosted long discussions at his Santa Fe home. “He was intellectually and emotionally invested in the Institute, approaching his time as Chair like a quintessential entrepreneur: a pragmatic alchemist who binds together human and economic capital through vision for the purpose of creating reality,” says Walter Fontana, Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Fontana met Pelkey during his postdoctoral fellowship at SFI in the early 90s. Pelkey, he says, provided him with significant moral support and connections.
Paralyzed from the waist down as a result of an injury suffered in 1989, Pelkey was wheelchair-bound. However, more than the loss of the use of his legs, the constant neuropathic pain he felt was debilitating. As the years progressed, the pain grew worse and he eventually withdrew from the SFI Board and moved to Hawaii. He was one of the early donors to the Neuroscience & Regeneration Research Center at Yale University; his connections with the lab helped to alter the course of research on spinal cord injury to include the study of pain that accompanies the condition. Throughout it all, Pelkey continued to work on his decades-long project of documenting the birth of industries, interviewing people who were pivotal in the internet’s evolution. First published online in 2009, his project launched in 2022 as the book “Circuits, Packets, and Protocols: Entrepreneurs and Computer Communications.”
“Jim had a deep enthusiasm for SFI’s mission and people at a critical time in SFI’s history. He also had an amazing thirst for both gaining and contributing to knowledge, which resulted in him writing a history of the earliest days of the internet and computer communication,” says John Miller, External Faculty and Chair of SFI’s Science Steering Committee. “He was driven in this quest by an act of pure scholarship as he wanted to chronicle this history for future generations.”
“At SFI we have been extraordinarily fortunate in our board members and chairs. Jim was deeply committed to the ideas and the institutions supporting complexity science. We are direct beneficiaries of Jim’s drive to acquire a campus, and his focus on fundamentals, from simulated markets through to the theory of computation. The last email I got from Jim was in July of 2022 asking for a copy of Phil Anderson’s 1972 "More is Different" paper. We shall miss him very much,” says David Krakauer, President of SFI.
