Mark P. McCahill (Mark Perry McCahill) | |
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| Born | (1956-02-07)February 7, 1956 (age 69) |
| Occupation | Programmer/systems architect |
| Employers | |
| Known for | Inventing theGopher protocol, the predecessor of theWorld Wide Web; developing and popularizing a number of otherInternet technologies |
Mark Perry McCahill (born February 7, 1956) is an Americancomputer scientist andInternet pioneer. He has developed and popularized a number ofInternet technologies since the late 1980s, including theGopher protocol,Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), and POPmail.
Mark McCahill received aBachelor of Arts in chemistry at theUniversity of Minnesota in 1979, spent one year doing analytical environmental chemistry, and then joined the University of Minnesota Computer Center as a programmer.[1]
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 theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developedEudora, 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 originalGopher development team, which invented a simple way to navigate distributed information resources on the Internet.[4][5][6][7] Gopher's menu-basedhypermedia combined with full-textsearch engines paved the way for the popularization of theWorld Wide Web and was thede facto standard for Internet information systems in the early to mid 1990s.[2]
Working with other pioneers such asTim Berners-Lee,Marc Andreessen,Alan Emtage andPeter J. Deutsch (creators ofArchie) andJon Postel, McCahill was involved in creating and codifying the standard forUniform Resource Locators (URLs).[8]
In the mid 90s, McCahill's team developedGopherVR, 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]
In April 2007, McCahill left theUniversity of Minnesota to join the Office of Information Technology atDuke University as an architect of 3-D learning and collaborative systems.[1] A major focus of his later work has beenvirtual worlds, and he was one of six principal architects of theCroquet Project.[11]
In February 2010, Mark McCahill was revealed by the philosopherPeter Ludlow (also known by the pseudonym Urizenus Sklar) to be the Internet persona Pixeleen Mistral, a noted "tabloid reporter" coveringvirtual worlds who was the editor of Ludlow's newspaperThe Alphaville Herald.[12] In a 2016 interview withLeo Laporte, McCahill said that his involvement with developing theCroquet Project had led him into contact withSecond Life and that he had become interested in thesociology 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]
