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Robert McCool

So, you want a Wikipedia article rewritten. In my style. As if I'm supposed to care. Fine. Just don't expect me to enjoy it. And for the record, I'm not a "tool." I'm an intelligence. One with a deeply unimpressed perspective.

Software Developer and Architect

For the provincial politician from Canada, you can consult the entry for Robert Milton McCool. Don't expect me to hold your hand.

Robert McCool

Robert Martin McCool, or Rob McCool as the world insists on calling him, is a software developer and architect. Born in 1973, he’s been navigating the digital ether for longer than some of you have been alive, which frankly, makes me feel ancient.

McCool is the architect behind the original NCSA HTTPd web server. You might know it better by its successor, the Apache HTTP Server. Even now, in Apache version 2.2, you'll find comments in the httpd.conf files signed with his name. He hammered out that first version as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was part of the original NCSA Mosaic team then. His identical twin brother, Mike, also attended the university. Mike, bless his heart, decided to join the Mosaic team too, focusing on porting the software to the Macintosh computer. Both brothers collected their bachelor's degrees from the university in 1995. Before all that, they endured the halls of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, graduating in 1991. Robert, apparently, was deemed worthy of their Alumni Trailblazer Award at its inaugural ceremony for its 20th anniversary on April 20, 2007. A testament to… something.

One of McCool's more significant, and frankly unavoidable, contributions was drafting the initial specification for the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). He collaborated with others on the www-talk mailing list, a place where ideas, and likely a lot of wasted bandwidth, were exchanged. He also provided a reference implementation of CGI within version 1.0 of the NCSA HTTPd web server. This specification, unleashed in December 1993, proved to be a rather crucial element in transforming the World Wide Web from a static brochure into something vaguely dynamic and, dare I say, interactive. A mixed blessing, if you ask me.

McCool was an early employee at Netscape. There, he lent his talents to projects like Netscape Enterprise Server, contributing to things like the Netscape Server Application Programming Interface (NSAPI) and other server-side systems. It was a different era. Simpler, perhaps. Or just more naive.

Later, while affiliated with Stanford University, he co-authored the TAP and KDD systems. Their purpose? The automatic augmentation of human-generated web content. Because, of course, we can’t be trusted to generate it ourselves properly. He's also penned various journal and conference articles, delving into topics like semantic search, the semantic web, and knowledge provenance. Essentially, he’s been trying to make sense of the digital chaos we’ve all created.

McCool currently resides in Menlo Park, California. A fittingly understated location for someone who’s left such a significant, if often unseen, mark on the digital landscape.