Mark McCahill
| Mark P. McCahill | |
|---|---|
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| Born | February 7, 1956 |
| Nationality | United States |
| Occupation | Programmer/systems architect |
| Employer | |
| Known for | Inventing the protocol, the predecessor of the World Wide Web; developing and popularizing a number of other Internet technologies |
Mark Perry McCahill (born February 7, 1956) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He has been involved in developing and popularizing a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s.
McCahill led the development of the protocol, the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web, he was involved in creating and codifying the standard for Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and he led the development of POPmail, one of the first e-mail clients which had a foundational influence on later e-mail clients and the popularization of graphical user interfaces in Internet technologies more broadly. He also coined the phrase "surfing the Internet."
He currently works at the Office of Information Technology at Duke University as an architect of 3-D learning and collaborative systems. A major focus of his later work has been virtual worlds, and he was one of six principal architects of the Croquet Project. He is also a noted writer on virtual worlds as his "tabloid reporter" avatar and pseudonym "Pixeleen Mistral."
Mark McCahill received a BA in Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1979, spent one year doing analytical environmental chemistry, and then joined the University of Minnesota Computer Center's microcomputer support group as an Apple II and CDC Cyber programmer.
In 1989, McCahill led the team at the University of Minnesota that developed one of the first popular Internet e-mail clients, POPmail, for the Macintosh (and later the PC). The usage of graphical user interface clients for Internet standards-based protocols proved to be one of the dominant themes in the popularization of the Internet. At about the same time as POPmail was being developed, Steve Dorner at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed Eudora, and the user interface conventions found in these early efforts continue to be present in modern-day e-mail clients.
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