Rick Adams

Who is Rick Adams?

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

Adams was responsible for the first widely available Serial Line IP 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, which evolved into the first UUNET. He maintained B News.

In 1996, he donated one million dollars U.S. to the James Randi Educational Foundation 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.

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