Lou Montulli
lou@montulli.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
FishCam, the 2nd ever live camera on the web. This spawned other
useful (and far more popular) camera sites.
- 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 aquired by Shutterfly.
I am currently working at Shutterfly as a V.P. of Engineering.
