Mark P. McCahill

Last updated
Mark P. McCahill (Mark Perry McCahill)
Mark McCahill in 2006 (cropped).jpg
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.

Contents

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]

Related Research Articles

The Gopher protocol is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.

The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Internet Protocol (IP). Early versions of this networking model were known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the research and development were funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Crocker</span> American computer scientist and Internet pioneer (born 1944)

Stephen D. Crocker is an American Internet pioneer. In 1969, he created the ARPA "Network Working Group" and the Request for Comments series. He served as chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2011 through 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vint Cerf</span> American computer scientist and Internet pioneer (born 1943)

Vinton Gray Cerf is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ARPANET</span> Early packet switching network (1969–1990)

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Kahn (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist and Internet pioneer (born 1938)

Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Minnesota</span> Public university in Minnesota, U.S.

The University of Minnesota Twin Cities is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. The Twin Cities campus comprises locations in Minneapolis and Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, approximately 3 mi (4.8 km) apart.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Davies</span> Welsh computer scientist and Internet pioneer (1924–2000)

Donald Watts Davies, was a Welsh computer scientist and Internet pioneer who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL).

The Croquet Project is a software project that was intended to promote the continued development of the Croquet open-source software development kit to create and deliver collaborative multi-user online applications. Croquet is implemented in Squeak Smalltalk.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Ludlow</span> American linguist and philosopher

Peter Ludlow, who also writes under the pseudonyms Urizenus Sklar and EJ Spode, is an American philosopher. He is noted for interdisciplinary work on the interface of linguistics and philosophy—in particular on the philosophical foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative linguistics and on the foundations of the theory of meaning in linguistic semantics. He has worked on the application of analytic philosophy of language to topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and logic, among other areas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GopherVR</span> Graphical Gopher client

GopherVR is an enhanced Internet Gopher client that includes a 3D visualization tool for viewing resource collections as 3D scenes. It explored how people outside of formal research laboratories could use spatial metaphors to access information. The 3D view was intended to be similar to 3D games of the time, like Spectre. The authors were interested in how this spatial representation could address the "lost in hyperspace" feeling that people using conventional Gopher clients sometimes experienced.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julian Lombardi</span> American computer scientist

Julian Lombardi is an American inventor, author, educator, and computer scientist known for his work with socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world technologies, and in the design and deployment of deeply collaborative virtual learning environments.

David Alan Smith is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and CTO of the Croquet Corporation. He has focused on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment for over twenty years.

The Patriotic Nigras were a group of griefers in the online world of Second Life.

The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, it advises historians, promotes collaboration among academic organizations and museums, and assists IT corporations in preparing and archiving their histories for future studies.

The Alphaville Herald is an online newspaper covering virtual worlds, founded by the American philosopher Peter Ludlow in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NPL network</span> Historical network in England pioneering packet switching

The NPL network, or NPL Data Communications Network, was a local area computer network operated by a team from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London that pioneered the concept of packet switching.

The International Network Working Group (INWG) was a group of prominent computer science researchers in the 1970s who studied and developed standards and protocols for interconnection of computer networks. Set up in 1972 as an informal group to consider the technical issues involved in connecting different networks, its goal was to develop an international standard protocol for internetworking. INWG became a subcommittee of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) the following year. Concepts developed by members of the group contributed to the Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication proposed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974 and the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that emerged later.

The Protocol Wars were a long-running debate in computer science that occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s, when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s when it became the dominant protocol suite through rapid adoption of the Internet.

References

  1. 1 2 3 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. 1 2 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.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.