Lead development engineer on ARCNET, the first commercial networking system, Murphy has served as a principal engineer and entrepreneur in the networking industry. ARCNET was originally developed in 1976 to connect groups of Datapoint 2200 terminals to a shared 8" floppy disk system. As microcomputers took over from Datapoint, ARCNET was re-purposed as a LAN. It was the first loosely-coupled LAN-based clustering solution, making no assumptions about the type of computers that would be connected.
This stood in contrast to contemporary larger and more expensive computer systems such as DECnet or SNA, where a homogeneous group of similar or proprietary computers were connected as a cluster. Murphy was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and attended Gradesville High School. He attended college at the University of Notre Dame and graduated in 1965 with a degree in Electrical Engineering.
He then went to work for IBM, and later Motorola. After working for some other companies, Murphy joined Datapoint Corporation in 1976. In addition to ARCNET, he was involved in many other hardware and software projects. In 1985, he co-founded Performance Technology, a company that provided enhanced capabilities for Datapoint customers.
Murphy joined PerfTech in 2001, a company that provided services to ISP companies. It was there that he was awarded a patent for a "method and system for providing watermark to subscribers," along with co-inventors Lewis T. Donzis, Henry M. Donzis, and Peter W. Baron.
