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Mark P. McCahill

Mark P. McCahill (Mark Perry McCahill)
Born (1956-02-07) February 7, 1956 (age 68)
NationalityAmerican
OccupationProgrammer/systems architect
Employers
Known forInventing the Gopher 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 developed and popularized a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s, including the Gopher protocol, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), and POPmail.

Career

Mark McCahill received a Bachelor of Arts 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 as a programmer.[1]

Internet pioneer

In the late 1980s, McCahill led the team at the University of Minnesota that developed POPmail, one of the first popular Internet e-mail clients.[2] 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 are still used in modern-day e-mail clients.[3]

In 1991, McCahill led the original Gopher development team, which invented a simple way to navigate distributed information resources on the Internet.[4][5][6][7] Gopher's menu-based hypermedia combined with full-text search engines paved the way for the popularization of the World Wide Web and was the de facto standard for Internet information systems in the early to mid 1990s.[2]

Working with other pioneers such as Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, Alan Emtage and Peter J. Deutsch (creators of Archie) and Jon Postel, McCahill was involved in creating and codifying the standard for Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).[8]

In the mid 90s, McCahill's team developed GopherVR, a 3D user interface for the Gopher protocol to explore how spatial metaphors could be used to organize information and create social spaces.[9]

He is said to have coined or popularized the phrase "surfing the Internet".[1] However, prior to McCahill's first use of the phrase in February, 1992, the analogy was used in a comic Book, The Adventures of Captain Internet and CERF Boy, published in October, 1991 by one of the early Internet Service Providers, CERFnet.[10]

Later work

In April 2007, McCahill left the University of Minnesota to join the Office of Information Technology at Duke University as an architect of 3-D learning and collaborative systems.[1] A major focus of his later work has been virtual worlds, and he was one of six principal architects of the Croquet Project.[11]

Virtual worlds

In February 2010, Mark McCahill was revealed by the philosopher Peter Ludlow (also known by the pseudonym Urizenus Sklar) to be the Internet persona Pixeleen Mistral, a noted "tabloid reporter" covering virtual worlds who was the editor of Ludlow's newspaper The Alphaville Herald.[12] In a 2016 interview with Leo Laporte, McCahill said that his involvement with developing the Croquet Project had led him into contact with Second Life and that he had become interested in the sociology of virtual worlds. As Pixeleen Mistral, he was a prominent reporter on Second Life, and a celebrity inside the game, although his real identity was not known by anyone for many years.[13]

References

  1. ^ a b c Tosto, Paul; Ojeda-Zapata, Julio (14 November 2015) [1 April 2007]. "University Of Minnesota / Internet pioneer making move to Duke faculty". St. Paul Pioneer Press. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
  2. ^ a b Gihring, Tim (11 August 2016). "The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol". MinnPost. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
  3. ^ Thomas, Jo (21 January 1997). "For Inventor of Eudora, Great Fame, No Fortune". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
  4. ^ "Internet Pioneers – Lost in Cyberspace". The Economist. 18 December 1999. Archived from the original on 27 November 2021. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
  5. ^ Carlson, Scott (5 September 2016). "How Gopher Nearly Won the Internet". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
  6. ^ Gihring, Tim (11 August 2016). "The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol". MinnPost. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
  7. ^ Kirscht, Kay (8 March 2017). "The Gopher Project: Early Internet and U of M Libraries | Minitex News". news.minitex.umn.edu. Archived from the original on 21 March 2020. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
  8. ^ McCahill, Mark P. (13 September 2001). "Oral History Interview with Mark P. McCahill". Charles Babbage Institute. Retrieved 23 December 2024 – via University Digital Conservancy, University of Minnesota.
  9. ^ Chen, Chaomei (2013). Information Visualisation and Virtual Environments. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 187. ISBN 978-1-4471-3622-4.
  10. ^ Lamont, Steve (October 1991). The LAN that time forgot. The Adventures of Captain Internet And CERF Boy. Illustration and layout by Rick Wilkins. CERFnet.
  11. ^ "Mark McCahill, Collaborative Systems Architect". Open Cobalt. Archived from the original on 29 November 2022. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
  12. ^ Ludlow, Peter (6 February 2010). "Pixeleen Mistral Files Legal Response to Venkman's DMCA Abuses". The Alphaville Herald. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
  13. ^ "Mark McCahill". Triangulation. Episode 264. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21 – via YouTube.
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