From Dial-up Modems to Post-”Social Media”: A Journey

Chris Wilson is a Developer Advocate at Google Inc.

Chris began working on the Internet in 1991 when he joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to work on the PC version of NCSA Telnet. He started working on web browsers in 1993 when he co-authored the original Windows version of NCSA Mosaic, the first mass-market WWW browser. After leaving NCSA in 1994 and spending a year working on the AIRMosaic web browser for SPRY, Inc., he joined Microsoft's Internet Explorer team as a developer in 1995.

Over the course of 15 years, Chris represented Microsoft in many standards working groups, in particular helping develop standards for Cascading Style Sheets, HTML, the Document Object Model and XSL through the W3C working groups. He also developed the first implementation of Cascading Style Sheets in Internet Explorer – the first, in fact, in any mass-market web browser. Beginning in 2001, he spent a few years working on the WPF project, but rejoined the IE team in 2004 to lead the IE Platform and Security team, then moved to work on the Javascript engine team in 2009. In 2010, Chris left Microsoft and joined Google’s Developer Relations team, and is currently working on the Google TV project.

In his free time, he enjoys photography and hiking with his wife and daughter, and scuba diving in the cool waters of Puget Sound. Occasionally he remembers to share his thoughts on his blog, but more frequently updates his Flickr and Twitter feeds.