Chip Morningstar

Chip Morningstar
Born	USA
Occupation	author, academic and developer of software systems

Chip Morningstar is an author, academic and developer of software systems for online entertainment and communication. A University of Michigan graduate, he participated in Project Xanadu, for which the word hypertext was first coined. Later, he overhauled the chat environment known as The Palace, allowing its user base to expand from 50,000 to one million users. In March 2001, the International Game Developers Association awarded Morningstar and Randy Farmer the "First Penguin Award" for their work on Lucasfilm's Habitat, the first large-scale virtual environment intended for massively multiuser operation. He is also credited with coining the term avatar for an on-screen representation and pre-Internet work in online information marketplaces.

While at Lucasfilm, he authored Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM), the basis for many Lucas titles. Morningstar was co-founder/CTO at Communities.com^[1] and later co-founded State Software, Inc., with Douglas Crockford, where he co-discovered the JSON Data Interchange format.

He is known for How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, an essay in which he presents a step-by-step procedure for deconstructing any given text. This stemmed from the 1991 "Second International Conference on Cyberspace", at which he and Farmer gave a computer science-oriented presentation but received complex and daunting "lit crit".^[2]

Morningstar currently resides in Palo Alto, California.

External links

• "Chip's site"
• "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat", by Morningstar and Farmer, presented at the First International Conference on Cyberspace (UT Austin, May 1990). Published in Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt (ed.), MIT Press 1991. ISBN 0-262-02327-X.
• Publications from the DBLP Bibliography Server
• "Making Java A Secure Programming Language", lecture Morningstar gave at Stanford University
• "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" (the version on the author's own website)
• Chip Morningstar at MobyGames

References

1. ^ Denise Caruso (October 23, 1995). "TECHNOLOGY: DIGITAL COMMERCE;An operating system to keep the wide spaces open while providing security". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/23/business/technology-digital-commerce-operating-system-keep-wide-spaces-open-while.html. Retrieved November 5, 2011. 
2. ^ Morningstar, Chip. "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything". http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html. Retrieved 2009-05-31. 

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Name	Morningstar, Chip
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