Name: Lou Montulli   

Email: lou at montulli dot org 

Short Bio

  • In 1991, while at The University of Kansas, I started writing a program that eventually became known as Lynx. (One of the first web browsers)
  • While working on Lynx, I was heavily involved with the development of HTTP and HTML, and was responsible for innovations such as web proxying. That time period was one of most exciting and fast paced periods I can remember. Innovations that are completely ubiquitous now, were proposed and implemented in incredibly fast cycles. It wasn't until the later days at Netscape that we coined the term "Internet Time". I recently came across archived messages of the original WWW-Talk mailing list and found the thread that sparked the creation of forms on the web.
  • In 1994 I moved to California to become one of the founding engineers at Mosaic Communications Corporation, which later changed it's name to Netscape.
  • At Netscape I engineered all the networking code as well as many of the back end subsystems for the first several versions of the browser, proxy and parts of other server products.
  • I'm largely to blame for several innovations on the web including, cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying,  proxy authentication, HTTP byte ranges, HTTPS over SSL, and encouraging the implementation of animated GIFS into the browser.  
  • If you remember that very first HTML interface news reader from the pre Navigator 2.0 days, that was me.  Unfortunately very few other people believed in HTML as an interface back then, so it got scrapped.  It's ironic how things have come full circle again.
  • While working on Navigator, I started The Amazing Fish Cam, the 2nd ever live camera on the web. This spawned other useful (and far more popular) camera sites.   (I recently revived and moved the fishcam to a new site)
  • As a representative to the W3C, I was a founding member of the HTML working group and helped shape innovations in HTML, style sheets, and scripting and was a contributing author of the HTML 3.2 spec.
  • In 1998 I left Netscape to became a founding engineer and Director of Server Engineering at Epinions.com, Inc., which has now become Shopping.com
  • In 2002 I was elected to the Technology Review TR100
  • In 2004 I co-founded a new company with some of the most talented engineers from Netscape and Epinions.   We were named Memory Matrix, Inc., and developed technology  to improve the consumer digital photography experience.
  • In 2005 Memory Matrix was acquired by Shutterfly.  I stayed at Shutterfly as V.P. of Client Engineering through the Summer of '07.
  • I am currently working on a new Enterprise class cloud storage service at a company named Zetta.

 

Hobbies & minutia



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