Mark Perry McCahill (born February 7, 1956) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He has developed and popularized a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s, including the Gopher protocol, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), and POPmail. He is said to have coined the phrase "surfing the Internet.". However, prior to McCahill's first use of the phrase in February, 1992, surfing the Internet was popularized in a comic Book, "The Adventures of Captain Internet and CERF Boy", published in October, 1991 by one of the early Internet Service Providers, CERFnet .