Colin Steele was one of AOL's early employees. As the first hire in AOL's Systems and Advanced Technologies Group, he wrote AOL's first Internet gateway. Later, as Director of AOL Instant Messenger Host Development, he architected key components of the system, co-authored key pieces of intellectual property for it, implemented its original distributed account database, and led its development team. He has extensive knowledge of massively distributed client/server architectures, object-oriented design and programming, and network programming.