ROBERT CAMPELL
‘In the late ’70s,
not only did
I fall under the
spell of email.
I just thought it
was the greatest
thing on the
planet. And it
was. I made it
my job to go
around campus
and tell people
to use email.’
ened with demotion within his group for
“trying to do this new Ethernet network
communications thing instead of the main-frame,” recalls Judd Knott, who was hired
as the head of OIT’s Academic Computing
Services’ research and development group
in 1988.
“Paul was being very innovative and
pushing new technology, which got him
into a lot of trouble,” Knott says. “But I
admired it. I respected him for it. Rather
than punishing him for it, I felt he should
be rewarded. So I pulled him over to our
group, and we went from there.”
Newly allied, Jones waded deep into
the primordial ooze of the digital informa-
tion era. By the early 1990s, UNC already
had become a pioneer user of the early
Internet and of wide-area information sys-
tems linking searchable databases, when
Jones won a grant from software giant Sun
Microsystems to host a site where the
company could distribute free software for
education and research.
Opposite page:
Jones’ high school
yearbook photo.
Above: Jones in a
1998 photo, six
years after he created the landmark
SunSITE, now known
as ibiblio, a digital
library in which contributors from all
over the world distribute information
for free.
