Paul Kunz

Paul Kunz, who lived from 20 December 1942 to 12 September 2018, was an American particle physicist and software developer who initiated the deployment of the first web server outside of Europe. After a meeting in September 1991 with Tim Berners-Lee of CERN he returned to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) with word of the World Wide Web, and by 12 December 1991 an active web server was operating there, the first in the United States, connected to the SPIRES High Energy Physics database, thanks to the efforts of Kunz, Louise Addis and Terry Hung. He was also the originator of GNUstep, the free and open source implementation of the NeXTSTEP framework, was at the basis of the idea for objcX, Objective-C for the X Window System, and was the chief developer of HippoDraw, a statistical analysis program for particle physics and astrophysics data at SLAC.