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Original collector and editor of the rec.puzzles archive.

Chris Cole is President of Ur Studios, Inc.  He was introduced to the Arpanet as a student at Harvard in the 1970’s.  As a graduate student at Caltech he co-wrote with Stephen Wolfram the first commercially available symbolic math package, SMP, which was a precursor to Mathematica.  Cole co-founded two software companies in 1981, Peregrine Systems, Inc., a vendor of network management software that grew to be one of the largest independent software companies and was acquired by HP, and Inference Corporation, which grew to be the leading AI company, later acquired by eGain.

While at Caltech Cole pioneered interactive remote computing over the Arpanet and became interested in the Internet as a medium for virtual communities.  He has since explored this medium both in the open source community and commercially.

Soon after the creation of the Web in 1994, Cole hosted the first free multi-user homesteading community WebWorld, in which tens of thousands of people developed millions of pieces of virtual property.  In 1999 Cole funded the Internet virtual worlds open source project Gel, which was featured at SIGGRAPH.  In 2001 Cole co-founded with Alan Kay the open source project Croquet (opencroquet.org) which has since attracted a large and growing development community.

Cole founded several companies commercializing aspects of the Internet as a virtual world: Worlds, Inc. (WDDD), the first commercially available multi-user 3D environment, Active Worlds, Inc. (AWLD), one of the largest online paid subscriber communities, Mutation Labs, creators of the first multi-user Shockwave game Wave Rave, Headlamp, Inc., an integrator of transactional information into one coherent view of the customer, and Ask Earth, Inc., an online service that connects people looking for information with people who have that information.

Cole also wrote the software for the online version of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, worked with the Advanced Technology Group of Encyclopedia Britannica in implementing Britannica Online, helped Disney go online.  In 1999 Sterling published his book Wordplay, A Curious Dictionary of Language Oddities.
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