Bill LeFebvre: Unix, Open Source, and the World Wide Web

At age 12, William "Bill" LeFebvre was a bit of a bookworm with a nondiscriminatory palate. So when he found a text about computers on his dad’s bookshelf, he naturally began reading it.

“That was about 1973, and it was primarily about FORTRAN, but also included the basic concepts of how computers worked, like compilers and assembly language,” said the Rice University Computer Science alumnus (B.A. ’83, M.S. ‘87).

“I was fascinated by it, even though I had no access to computers at the time. It would be another two years before I had access to a real computer, and that was a teletype terminal in my high school --connected to the server in a science center on the other side of the county. It was intended for general education use, but a few of us who were interested could also use it in our own time.”

He arrived at Rice in 1979 as a music major and was looking into a class called the Introduction to Computer Science and Engineering. His student advisors attempted to dissuade him, saying it would be too challenging for a freshman. LeFebvre replied he’d already been working with computers for four years and signed up.

“That was ELEC 220, taught by Prof. Dan Hirshberg. We had to write on punch cards, batch processing in the ICSA lab on an IBM 370 clone made by Itel. I was fascinated by computers after that and sensed it was what I really wanted to do. Then Ken Kennedy drove the establishment of a new degree program for Computer Science, and I switched my major," he said.

The rest of this story is condensed from the original article on the CS.rice.edu website.

The Internet rolled out for public use when LeFebvre was working in Northwestern University’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department. When he came across his first website, LeFebvre said he pulled back the curtain to see what HTML looked like.

“I thought, ‘that will never fly,’ because it looked too complex. Boy was I wrong. Now, it is obvious how much of a game changer the Web was. It changed how everyone used the Internet and it changed the direction of my career, because I went to work for one of the biggest websites. I ended up at Turner as part of the team that ran CNN.com.”

At the time, CNN.com was simply another avenue for getting news out. It was considered an alternative to the cable channel. The network realized that their high traffic points for the site were on weekdays. When people were at work and had no access to television, they turned to the Internet to get news off the CNN website.

LeFebvre said, “The website was an easy outlet for getting the news, and became a vital tool for keeping people informed. That became extremely important on September 11. So many people tried to access our site that the stampede swamped our servers.

“Everyone in the department was on a conference call, batting ideas back and forth. How could we get our site back online and responding? So many people were making requests for the page, the typical user was getting no response at all. We didn’t have the caching techniques that are commonly used today. It was harder to keep up with high fluctuations in traffic.

“We put more machines behind the site and also reduced the displayed content to get the critical news out to as many people as possible. We eventually got things working again, and our people felt wrung out. The whole week was like that, traffic stayed extremely high.”

Read the rest of the story in the original article on the CS.rice.edu website.