We’d like to introduce you to another member of our team — IT whiz Carl de Cordova. Carl’s resume is long enough to wrap around the UT Tower several times and rich enough to buy the Tower and dip it in liquid gold.
Carl and Julie first met in the mid-nineties when he was running an Internet special interest group back when he worked at Apple. Now, when we say Carl worked at Apple, that’s like saying back when Henry Ford worked on cars. Well, okay, not exactly. But Carl was hired by Apple in ’92 to deal with TCP/IP and web issues, before everyone and their mother was on the Internet. (Rumor has it Carl heard of the Internet before Al Gore did.)
Carl put together Apple’s first web site (you read that right—first web site!) While he was at Apple, he put together the aforementioned Mac group and people would come by and use machines and projectors set up for web surfing. That’s where Julie first caught up with him.
Their friendship grew into collaboration, yielding a conference called Web Edge that the two put together.
After a couple of more jobs post-Apple, Carl’s settled into doing Google analytics stuff and working for LaunchPad Coworking. He’s putting together the provisioning of the IT, getting the Internet into the space (fiber!), putting together the routers and wifi, designing where the cables go, and handling technical procurement issues from cabling to servers to VOIP phones. Or, as he likes to put it, “I’m the IT monkey for LaunchPad.”
He’s psyched that Julie’s giving him the trust and freedom he needs to follow his vision. “Julie has a different take on coworking than a lot of people do,” he says. “She’s uniquely capable of creating a comfortable space unlike anyone else I know. She has this design sense and sense of humor. She’s not a flaky artist who does wild stuff. She does comfortable things. And she’s really into collaboration. She’s doing this with a level of quality that makes it so much better than your run-of- the-mill cyber café.”
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Drew // Feb 27, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Glad to see the team at Launchpad growing with such intensely capable people. Can’t wait to plug in and experience the fruits of all of ya’lls labor-
2 WebEdge Blog » Blog Archive » LaunchPad Coworking - Cool stuff in Downtown Austin // Mar 1, 2008 at 11:05 pm
[…] New Project I am working on. […]
3 Carl de Cordova // Mar 3, 2008 at 3:48 pm
A couple of people have asked me to clarify the claim in this article about the “first web site at Apple”.
There are 4 different people that I know of that can make this claim: I put up a website in March of 1993
Eric Fair
Martin Haeberli
Carl de Cordova
Mike Erwin
Mike was Root on the Spark 10 in the DRC and he actually installed the httpd on the Sun and I wrote the HTML for drc.support.apple.com a couple of days (a week?) after I got an email from Tim Brenders-Lee of CERN in the first weeks of March 1993. I got that mail because I was on a mailing list run by Tim that I joined after meeting him at the Super Conducting Super Collider Labratory Libary in Desoto Texas in 1991.
Martin was Chief Scientist for the Internet for the Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino and wrote MacTCP. He thinks he may have had a site up around this time.
Eric Fair registered 90.x.x.x and was root on apple.com at this time and he may have a claim also. He worked for IS&T, Apples IT department during this period.
Antonio Ordenez was in the Technical Communications Group and may have put up a site in April or May 1993.
The first machine to answer to http://www.Apple.com was run by Mary Wisnewski in the Apple Library and didnt come online until spring 1994.
drc.support.apple.com went on to become support.apple.com and launched in early 1994 with Charlie McCabe and Preston Gregg in charge. Today it is Apples biggest web site and contains the Tech Info Library which is now known as the Apple Knowledge Base. The machines that ran support.apple.com were in Austin Tx until early 2002 or so at the Apple Assistance Center in the Anderson Building on highway 183 in Austin, Texas.
I moved to Cupertino in 1995 and wrote the standards, policies and proceedures document that became a major web site refresh in the winter/spring of 1996. That document dictated the look and feel of all Apple websites until 1998 when Apple.com moved off of Macintoshes running WebStar and onto Suns that the new NeXT people put into the Valley Green building in Cupertino.
As far as I know, all Apple Websites today are run by IS&T out of Cupertino.
4 Austin Coworking - LaunchPad Coworking under the hood - LaunchPad Coworking Blog // May 12, 2008 at 11:53 am
[…] in the 70s. Since then much of it has been sliced and diced, but a little sleuthing on the part of Carl De Cordova, our IT guru, revealed that 800 Brazos is […]
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