Mark Crispin (born 1956) is best known as the father of the IMAP protocol, having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He is the author or co-author of numerous RFCs; and is the principal author of UW IMAP, one of the reference implementations of the IMAP4rev1 protocol described in RFC 3501. He also designed the mix mail storage format.
Mark earned a B.S. in Technology and Society from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1977.
In the late 1970s, he developed the first production PDP-10 32-bit address ARPAnet NCP for the WAITS operating system; prior to that time most systems only supported the original 8-bit addresses. During that time, he wrote the infamous RFC 748, the only document specifically marked in the RFC index with note date of issue; and a series of Telnet implementations for the Incompatible Timesharing System, WAITS, and TOPS-20 operating systems whose escape behavior was playfully immortalized by Guy Steele in the April 1984 Communications of the ACM as The Telnet Song.
In the early 1980s, he became interested in electronic mail software and systems; ever since that has been his primary focus.
From 1977 to 1988, he was a Systems Programmer at Stanford University, writing the first 32-bit address network implementation and most of the ARPAnet protocol suite for the PDP-10 system during his time there. While at Stanford, he was also the principal developer of the TOPS-20 mailsystem, and reportedly still runs TOPS-20 systems at his residence.[1] In 2005, he wrote RFC 4042, his second April Fools' Day RFC describing UTF-9 and UTF-18, encodings of Unicode optimized for the PDP-10.
Mark was a Software Engineer in Distributed Systems Engineering, Networks & Distributed Computing, Computing & Communications at the University of Washington from 1988 until he and 65 of his colleagues [2] were laid off in May 2008.[3]
Mark Crispin joined Messaging Architects [4] as a Senior Software Engineer in August 2008. At Messaging Architects, he wrote an entirely new IMAP server based upon a distributed mail store, and extended the mix format to support stubbing (via a mechanism called virtual mailboxes) and metadata.
References
- ^ "Panda Programming TOPS-20 Home Page" (in English). http://panda.com/tops-20. Retrieved 2009-06-24.
- ^ "UW Lays Off Technology Workers" (in English). http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004429972_webuwlayoffs22m.html. Retrieved 2009-05-24.
- ^ "so long, and thanks for all the fish!" (in English). http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/pipermail/imap-protocol/2008-May/000866.html. Retrieved 2009-05-24.
- ^ "IMAP's Inventor Joins Messaging Architects" (in English). http://www.messagingarchitects.com/en/press/08142008/IMAPsInventorJoinsMessagingArchitects.asp. Retrieved 2009-05-24.
See also
External links
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