Peter Christy has been involved with the computer and communications industries since the late 1960s. After undergraduate studies at Harvard and graduate school at Berkeley, Peter started as a system programmer building operating systems at Computer Sciences Corporation. Next was an exploration of medical information systems at UC San Francisco. He was at DEC in the heyday period of 1975-1985, starting as technical staff to the VP of software engineering, and ending in the middle of wafer-scale systems, where he contributed early work to DECNet. Peter served briefly as manager of network architecture at HP, ran engineering for IBM/Rolm PhoneMail operations, and then was founder and VP of software engineering for MasPar Computer, where he built mid-range, highly parallel computers in the late 1980s. After MasPar Computer, Peter conducted business development and project management for Sun's object-oriented Spring operating system, and then ran much of Apple's developer tools efforts and had program responsibilities for Apple's involvement with IBM and Novell on OpenDoc. Peter learned the analysis business from Michael Slater, running the small Ziff-Davis operation that Michael had started around microprocessors and publishing the Microprocessor Report. IRG provides strategy consulting and market research services to companies whose products or services sit and the boundary between networks, applications, and systems.