Summary:
Rob McCool is another of the core group of original Mosaic programmers who went on to found Netscape. Unlike a lot of the others we have spoken to, he worked more on the server side of the equation for both projects. Rob was also the original author of the NCSA HTTPd web server, later known as the Apache HTTP Server, so we can think of him as the Godfather of Apache. He was a contributor to the initial specification of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and later what became known as the Netscape Enterprise Server. Rob went on to work at both Yahoo and Onlive. He is currently at Google, where he works on structured Knowledge Bases and semantics.
Great interview, and Rob offered many interesting insights into that special time at NCSA and Netscape. I fondly remember online discussions about Mosaic, Rob, and Marc back in 1994 when I was biology grad student at U of I, and just becoming familiar with the Internet. Mosaic’s graphical approach to the WWW was simply awe-inspiring. Rob’s HTTPD server was no less amazing, but was less obvious to the end user (except for error pages!).
I recall Marc being an active participant in Usenet www-browser groups- and responding to end-user bug reports concerning early versions of Netscape.
Thanks for the insights! I really do encourage people who were there and remember this stuff to add their memories and details. I want to collect everyone’s recollections, whether they are from bold face names like Rob, or from just average users.
I knew Rob from freshman year in high school, before he transferred to IMSA. When I started working in IT back in 1999, I was surprised to see Rob’s name in Apache config files, but given him and his brother’s aptitude for all things computer-related it’s not as surprising as I thought it was.