Rick Adams (internet pioneer)

Richard L. "Rick" Adams, Jr. is an American Internet pioneer and the founder of UUNET, which, in the mid and late 1990s, was the world's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Adams was responsible for the first widely available (SLIP) implementation and founding UUNET, thereby making the Internet widely accessible. In 1982 he ran the first international UUCP e-mail link at the machine seismo (owned by the Center for Seismic Studies in Northern Virginia), which evolved into the first (UUCP-based) UUNET. He maintained B News (at that time the most popular Usenet News transport).

In 1996, he donated one million dollars U.S. to the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) to be used as the basis for its One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. He is the JREF's treasurer.

Adams co-authored the O'Reilly book !%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks with his wife Donnalyn Frey. He is a co-author of RFC 1036, the Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages.

He obtained a master's degree in computer science from Purdue University.

He is thought to be the probable buyer of the Archimedes Palimpsest, because of a blogpost by Michael Shermer where he describes seeing it at a birthday party for James Randi in the collector's home in Falls Church, Virginia, where Adams is known to live.

As of July 2012^[update], he resides in Northern Virginia with his wife Donnalyn and their two sons.

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