Ed Krol

Ed Krol was the network manager at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the former assistant director of Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet and The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog.

Krol was born August 21, 1951, and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He received his B.A. from the University of Illinois and spent his entire career there.

In 1985, he began working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Indeed, "Ed Krol was the network manager for the NCSA when the contract was received to establish the NSFNet, and led the team in the network development". During this time, he published (through funding by the National Science Foundation), the 1987 popular user's guide Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet. In 1989, he became the assistant director for Network Information Services, Computing and Communications Service Office, University of Illinois.

In 1992, he published the popular user's guide to the Internet, The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, which was noted by the New York Public Library as one of its Books of the Century in 1995.

In 2002 Krol retired from the University of Illinois after 29 years service.

• Conner-Sax, Kiersten; Krol, Ed (15 November 1999). The Whole Internet: The Next Generation (3 ed.). O'Reilly Media. p. 556. ISBN 978-1565924284. 
• Ferguson, Paula; Krol, Ed (8 November 1995). The Whole Internet for Windows 95. Nutshell Handbooks (1 ed.). O'Reilly Media. p. 644. ISBN 978-1565921559. 
• Krol, Ed; Hoffman, Ellen (May 1993). FYI on "What is the Internet?". IETF. RFC 1462. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1462. 
• Krol, Ed (1992). Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog (1 ed.). O'Reilly Media. ISBN 9781565920255. 
• Krol, Ed (September 1989). Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet. IETF. RFC 1118. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1118. 
• Krol, Ed (1987). Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet.