Okay hold onto your hats, our final list is now ready: here are the All-Time Top 150 i-Technology Heroes according to SYS-CON's globe-girdling network of editors, columnists, commentators, and (above all) readers. Between them, these individuals conceived, created, built out, and maintained the Internet and indeed, before that, created modern computing as we know it today -- without which the Internet would never have been possible in the first place. Enjoy!
[The hyperlinks are to brief potted biographies of some of these luminaries...to which I will add in coming days as time permits. JG]
Gene Amdahl: Implementer in the 60s of a milestone in computer technology: the concept of compatibility between systems
Marc Andreessen: Pioneer of Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the WWW; co-founder of Netscape
John Atanasoff: "Forgotten Father of the Computer"; inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer
Bill Atkinson: Author of the "Quickdraw" graphics layer in Macintosh, proving that advanced bitmapped graphics was possible on a low-end processor
Charles Babbage: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1828; inventor of the 'calculating machine'
John Backus: Inventor (with IBM) of FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) in 1956
John Bardeen: Winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the transistor (with Walter Brattain and William Buckley)
Kent Beck: Creator of JUnit and pioneer of eXtreme Programming (XP)
David Bell: Developer (with Len LaPadula) of the Bell-LaPadula Model of security
Steve Bellovin: One of the originators of USENET
Bob Bemer: One of the developers of COBOL and the ASCII naming standard for IBM (1960s)
Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web
D J Bernstein: Author of qmail
Gerrit Blaauw: Principal designer of first system to implement the VM (virtual machine) concept
Joshua Bloch: Formerly at Sun, where he helped architect Java's core platform; now at Google
Grady Booch: One of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language
Adam Bosworth: Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; then BEA, now Google
Don Box: Co-author of SOAP
David J. Bradley: Inventor of the three-finger salute, Ctrl.-Alt-Del
Stewart Brand: Cofounder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board
Walter Brattain: Co-inventor (with John Bardeen and William Shockley) of the transistor.
Tim Bray: One of the prime movers of XML, now with Sun
Dan Bricklin: Co-creator (with Bob Frankston) of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet
Larry Brilliant: Co-founder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board
Sergey Brin: Son-of-college-math-professor turned cofounder of Google
Fred Brooks: Co-creator of OS/390, helping change the way we think about software development; winner of the1999 Turing Award
Vannevar Bush: Electrical engineer and physicist who designed (1928) the "differential analyzer"
Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace: First female geek in recorded history
Luca Cardelli: Implementer of the first compiler for ML (the most popular typed functional language) and one of the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors
Vint(on) Cerf: "The Father of the Internet," co-inventor with Robert Kahn of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP
Ward Christensen: Founder of the first BBS ever brought online (built by Randy Suess)
Ward Cunningham: Father of the wiki
Alonzo Church: Co-creator with Alan Turing of the "Church-Turing Thesis"
Alistair Cockburn: Helped craft the Agile Development Manifesto
Edgar (Ted) Codd: "Father of Relational Databases," inventor of SQL and creator of RDBMS systems
Larry Constantine: Inventor of data flow diagrams; presented first paper on concepts of structured design in 1968
Bram Cohen: developer of BitTorrent
Brad Cox: Father of Objective-C
Dave Cutler: The brains behind VMS; hired away by Microsoft for Windows NT
Ole-Johan Dahl: Developer (with Kristen Nygaard) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language
Miguel de Icaza: Now with Novell, cofounder of Ximian
Tom DeMarco: A principal of the computer systems think tank, Atlantic Systems Guild
Theo de Raadt: Founder of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects
Edsger W. Dijkstra: One of the moving forces behind the acceptance of computer programming as a scientific discipline; developer of the first compilers
Presper Eckert: Co-inventor (with John Maunchly) of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC)
Brendan Eich: Inventor of javascript; Chief Architect of the Mozilla Project
Robert Elz: University of Melbourne Department of Computer Science
Doug Engelbart: Invented while at SRI in the 60s the idea of a mouse, overlapping windows, hypertext, outlining, and video collaboration
Don Ferguson: Inventor of the J2EE application server at IBM; now with Microsoft
Richard P. Feynman: Legendary physicist and teacher, teacher of Caltech course 1983-86 called "Potentialities and Limitations of Computing Machines"
Roy T. Fielding: Primary architect of HTTP 1.1 and a founder of the Apache Web server
David Filo: Co-founder of Yahoo!
Martin Fowler: Famous for work on refactoring, XP, and UML
Bob Frankston: Co-creator (with Dan Bricklin) of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet
Bill Gates: Chief Software Architect (and Lord High Chief Everything Else) of "the world's #1 company" (Hoovers.com)
Jon Gay: The "Father of Flash"
Adele Goldberg: Developer of SmallTalk along with Alan Kay; wrote much of the documentation
James Gosling: "Father of Java" (though not its sole parent)
Anders Hejlsberg: Genius behind the Turbo Pascal compiler, subsequently "Father of C#"
Andy Hertzfield: Eazel developer and Macintosh forefather
Daniel W. Hillis: VP of R&D at the Walt Disney Company; cofounder, Thinking Machines
Grace Murray Hopper: The so-called "Mother of COBOL," she created FLOW-MATIC that later inspired COBOL, the first compiled high-level programming language
Jordan Hubbard: One of the creators of FreeBSD
Jean D Ichbiah: Principal designer, Ada language (1977)
Jonathan Ive: Principal designer of the iMac and iPod
Ken Iverson: Inventor of APL, later J
Steve Jobs: Business genius at the core of Apple; co-founder (with Steve Wozniak) and currently CEO
Bill Joy: Co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun; main author of Berkeley Unix
William Kahan: "The Old Man of Floating-Point;" primary architect behind the IEEE 754 standard for loating-point computation
Robert Kahn: Co-inventor with Vint Cerf of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP
Mitch Kapor: Designer of Lotus 1-2-3, founder of Lotus Development Corporation
Mike Karels: System architect for 4.3BSD
Alan Kay: Inventor of SmallTalk
Jack Kilby: Inventor of the microchip
Gary Kildall: Author of the archetypical OS known as CP/M (control Program for Microcomputers)
Brian Kernighan: One of the creators of the AWK and AMPL languages
Mitchell Kertzman: Former programmer, founder, and CEO of Powersoft (later Sybase)
Klaus Knopper: Prime mover of Knoppix, a Linux distro that runs directly from a CD
Donald Knuth: "Father of Computer Science" - author of The Art of Computer Programming; inventor of TeX, allowing typesetting of text and mathematical formulas on a PC (and thus also the Father of Word Processing.)
Butler Lampson: Architect of Cedar/Mesa; Implementer of Xerox Alto
Jaron Lanier: Popularizer of the term "virtual reality" (in the early 1980s)
Len LaPadula: Developer (with David Bell) of the Bell-LaPadula Model of security
Leon Post: Developer of a Post-Turing machine
Rasmus Lerdorf: Creator of the PHP scripting language
Ada Lovelace: see Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace
Craig McClanahan: Of Tomcat, Struts, and JSF fame
Robert C. Martin: Agile software development proponent; CEO, president, and founder of Object Mentor
Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"): Creator of Ruby
John McCarthy: Creator, with his graduate students, of Lisp
Doug McIlroy: Head of department at Bell Labs where UNIX started
John Maunchly: Co-inventor (with Presper Eckert) of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC)
Bob Metcalfe: Inventor of the Ethernet
Chuck Moore: Inventor of Forth, a high-level programming language
Gordon Moore: Co-founder of Intel; author of Moore's Law (1965)
Andrew Morton: Linus's No. 2 in the Linux kernel group
Michael J. Muuss: Author of the freeware network tool Ping.
Nathan Myhrvold: Theoretical and mathematical physicist, former CTO at Microsoft
Nicholas Negroponte: Father of the MIT Media Lab
Ted Nelson: Creator of the Xanadu project - universal, democratic hypertext library; precursor to the WWW
Robert Noyce: a.k.a. "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", one of the inventors of the integrated circuit or microchip
Kristen Nygaard: Developer (with Ole-Johan Dahl) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language
Jarkko Oikarinen: Developer of the IRC protocol
Tim O'Reilly: Publisher, open source advocate; believer that great technology needs great books
Peter Pag: Pioneer of 4GLS (1979); developed Software AG's Natural
Jean Paoli: One of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the W3C; now with Microsoft
Bob Pasker: founder of WebLogic, author of the first Java Application Server
John Patrick: Former VP of Internet technology at IBM, now "e-tired"
Benjamin Pierce: Harvard University faculty member for 49 years; recognized in his time as one of America's leading mathematicians
Rob Pike: An early developer of Unix and windowing system (GUI) technology
P J Plauger: Chair of the ANSI C committee
Jon Postel: "The 'North Star' Who Defined the Internet"
John Postley: Developed Mark IV (1967), the first million dollar software product, for Informatics
Jef Raskin: Mac pioneer who wrote the original Macintosh specification
Martin Richards: Designer of the BCPL Cintcode System
Dennis Ritchie: Creator of C and co-inventor (with Ken Thompson) of Unix
Martin Roesch: Author of the open-source program Snort in 1998
Jonathan Rotenberg: Founder of the Boston Computer Society
Gurusamy Sarathy: Heavily involved in maintaining the mainstream releases of Perl for the past 7 years
Carl Sassenrath: Author of REBOL, a scripting language
Roger Schell: Encryption expert; founding Deputy Director of the (now) National Computer Security Center
Claude E. Shannon: Father of Information Theory and digital circuit design
William Shockley: Co-inventor (with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) of the transistor
Dave Sifry: CEO of Technorati and a founding member of the Linux International board of directors
Gene Spafford: First analyst of the Morris Worm, one of the earliest computer worms
Richard Stallman: Free software movement's leading figure; founder of the GNU Project, author of the GPL
Guy L. Steele: Author of authoritative books and papers on Lisp
Bjarne Stroustrup: The designer and original implementor of C++
W. Richard Stevens: "Guru of the Unix Gurus"; author and consultant
Michael Stonebreaker: Author of Ingres and Postgres
Randy Suess: Builder of the first BBS (programmed by Ward Christensen)
Ivan Sutherland: Considered by many to be the creator of Computer Graphics
Larry Tesler: Inventor of the modeless editor while at Xerox Parc working with Alan Kay on Smalltalk
Guy (Bud) Tribble: One of the industry's top experts in software design and object-oriented programming
Andy Tanenbaum: Professor of computer science, author of Minix
Avadis (Avie) Tevanian: Chief Software Technology Officer, Apple
Ken Thompson: Co-inventor (with Dennis Ritchie) of Unix
Bruce Tognazzini ("Tog"): Worked a lot on "understandablilty" in Mac GUI
Ray Tomlinson: Developer of the first e-mail network
Linus Torvalds: "Benevolent dictator" of the Linux kernel
Guy (Bud) Tribble: One of the industry's top experts in software design and object-oriented programming
Alan Turing: Mathematician; author of the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
Guido van Rossum: Author of the Python programming language
Patrick Volkerding: Creator of Slackware Linux
John von Neumann: Co-creator of Game Theory and designer of a computer architecture in which data and program memory are mapped into the same address space
Larry Wall: Author of Perl
John Warnock: Inventor of PostScript; CEO of Adobe Systems
Michael "Monty" Widenius: Creator of MySQL
Ann Winblad: Former programmer, cofounder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Nicklaus Wirth: Inventor of Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon
Stephen Wolfram: Scientist, creator of Mathematica
Steve Wozniak: a.k.a. "The Woz," co-founder (with Steve Jobs) of Apple; creator of Apple I and Apple II in the mid-1970s
Jerry Yang: Co-founder of Yahoo!
Jamie Zawinski: Instrumental in the creation of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs)
Konrad Zuse: Creator of the first full automatic, program-controlled and freely programmable working computer
© 2007 SYS-CON Media Inc.
初始提名名单：
Who Are The All-Time Heroes of i-Technology?
I wonder how many people, as I did, found themselves thrown into confusion by the death last week of Jean Ichbiah (pictured), inventor of Ada.
Learning that the inventor of a computer programming language is already old enough to have lived 66 years (Ichbiah was 66 when he succumbed to brain cancer) is a little like learning that your 11-year-old daughter has grown up and left home or that the first car you ever bought no longer is legal because it runs on gasoline in an age where all automobiles must run on water. How can something as novel, as new, as a computing language possibly already be so old-fangled that an early practitioner like Ichbiah can already no longer be with us?
The thought was so disquieting that it took me immediately back to the last time I wrote about Ichbiah, and indeed about Ada Lovelace for whom his language was named. It was in the context of my quest a couple of years ago to identify the Top Twenty Software People in the World.
It began as an innocent enough exercise, inadvertently kick-started by Tim Bray writing in his popular "Ongoing" blog about how he rated Google's Adam Bosworth as "probably one of the top 20 software people in the world." Already famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and Internet Explorer 4 even before he joined BEA as VP of engineering in 2001, when BEA bought Crossgain, the company he'd by then cofounded after leaving Microsoft, Bosworth went on to become BEA's chief architect before leaving to join Google. Definitely a shoo-in for the Top Twenty then. But the question naturally arose - or at least it did in my mind - who are the other 19?
I knew that it would not be easy to answer, and not because there are too few candidates but because there are too many. The names of today's leading i-technologists - whose collective smarts Internet technologies rely on for their unceasing innovation and ingenuity - trip off most people's tongues in a heartbeat: just think of Sergey Brin, Bill Joy, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, James Gosling, Anders Hejlsberg, Don Box, Nathan Myhrvold, W. Daniel Hillis, Mitch Kapor... all clear members of the "technorati" or "digerati" - call them what you will - the undisputed aristocrats of the online world.
But what about those who came before, the precursors of the current crop of talent? I wrote at the time:
"Can a list of the Top 20 i-Technologists possibly be compiled that doesn't cause the online equivalent of fistfights when published? Obviously not. But that shouldn't deter us from trying."
My inbox soon began to fill up with a deluge of nominations, and within days I was able to list forty mind-bogglingly gifted candidates, as follows (click on the name for a brief description of the individual concerned):
Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web
Joshua Bloch: Formerly at Sun, where he helped architect Java's core platform; now at Google
Grady Booch: One of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language
Adam Bosworth: Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; then BEA, now Google
Don Box: Co-author of SOAP
Stewart Brand: Co-founder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board
Tim Bray: One of the prime movers of XML, now with Sun
Dan Bricklin: Co-creator (with Bob Frankston) of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet
Larry Brilliant: Co-founder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board
Sergey Brin: Son-of-college-math-professor turned co-founder of Google
Dave Cutler: The brains behind VMS; hired away by Microsoft for Windows NT
Don Ferguson: Inventor of the J2EE application server at IBM, now with Microsoft
Roy T. Fielding: Primary architect of HTTP 1.1 and a founder of the Apache Web server
Bob Frankston: Cocreator (with Dan Bricklin) of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet
Jon Gay: The "Father of Flash"
James Gosling: "Father of Java" (though not its sole parent)
Anders Hejlsberg: Genius behind the Turbo Pascal compiler, subsequently "Father of C#"
Daniel W. Hillis: VP of R&D at the Walt Disney Company; cofounder, Thinking Machines
Miguel de Icaza: Co-founder of Ximian, now with Novell
Martin Fowler: Famous for work on refactoring, XP, and UML
Bill Joy: Co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun; main author of Berkeley Unix
Mitch Kapor: Designer of Lotus 1-2-3, founder of Lotus Development Corporation
Brian Kernighan: One of the creators of the AWK and AMPL languages
Mitchell Kertzman: Former programmer, founder, and CEO of Powersoft (later Sybase)
Klaus Knopper: Prime mover of Knoppix, a Linux distro that runs directly from a CD
Craig McClanahan: Of Tomcat, Struts, and JSF fame
Nathan Myhrvold: Theoretical and mathematical physicist, former CTO at Microsoft
Tim O'Reilly: Publisher, open source advocate; believer that great technology needs great books
Jean Paoli: One of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the W3C; now with Microsoft
John Patrick: Former VP of Internet technology at IBM, now "e-tired"
Rob Pike: An early developer of Unix and windowing system (GUI) technology
Dennis Ritchie: Creator of C and coinventor of Unix
Richard Stallman: Free software movement's leading figure; founder of the GNU Project
Bjarne Stroustrup: The designer and original implementor of C++
Andy Tanenbaum: Professor of computer science, author of Minix
Ken Thompson: Co-inventor of Unix
Linus Torvalds: "Benevolent dictator" of the Linux kernel
Alan Turing: Mathematician; author of the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
Guido van Rossum: Author of the Python programming language
Ann Winblad: Former programmer, cofounder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
It was at this point that the name of The Father of Ada was thrown into the hopper, along with that of Ada Lovelace herself. How could I possibly not have already included Jean Ichbiah, many wrote to say? Indeed the one new submission was more indignant than the next, and I soon expanded the list of candidates from forty to one hundred, by adding the following sixty:
Gene Amdahl: Implementer in the 60s of a milestone in computer technology: the concept of compatibility between systems
Marc Andreessen: Pioneer of Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the WWW; co-founder of Netscape
Charles Babbage: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1828; inventor of the 'calculating machine'
John Backus: Inventor (with IBM) of FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) in 1956
Kent Beck: Creator of JUnit and pioneer of eXtreme Programming (XP)
Bob Bemer: One of the developers of COBOL and the ASCII naming standard for IBM (1960s)
D J Bernstein: Author of qmail
Fred Brooks: Co-creator of OS/390, helping change the way we think about software development
Luca Cardelli: Implementer of the first compiler for ML (the most popular typed functional language) and one of the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors
Vincent Cerf: "The Father of the Internet," co-inventor with Robert Kahn of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP
Brad Cox: Father of Objective-C
Alonzo Church: Co-creator with Alan Turing of the "Church-Turing Thesis"
Alistair Cockburn: Helped craft the Agile Development Manifesto
Edgar (Ted) Codd: "Father of Relational Databases," inventor of SQL and creator of RDBMS systems
Larry Constantine: Inventor of data flow diagrams; presented first paper on concepts of structured design in 1968
Ole-Johan Dahl: Developer (with Kristen Nygaard) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language.
Tom DeMarco: A principal of the computer systems think tank, Atlantic Systems Guild
Theo de Raadt: Founder of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects
Edsger W. Dijkstra: One of the moving forces behind the acceptance of computer programming as a scientific discipline; developer of the first compilers
Brendan Eich: Inventor of javascript; Chief Architect of the Mozilla Project
Robert Elz: University of Melbourne Department of Computer Science
Richard P. Feynman: Legendary physicist and teacher, teacher of Caltech course 1983-86 called Potentialities and Limitations of Computing Machines
Bill Gates: Chief Software Architect (and Lord High Chief Everything Else) of "the world's #1 company" (Hoovers.com)
Adele Goldberg: Developer of SmallTalk along with Alan Kay; wrote much of the documentation
Andy Hertzfield: Eazel developer and Macintosh forefather
Grace Murray Hopper: Developer of the first compiled high level programming language, COBOL
Jordan Hubbard: One of the creators of FreeBSD; currently a manager of Apple's Darwin project
Jean D Ichbiah: Principal designer, Ada language (1977)
Ken Iverson: Inventor of APL, later J
William Kahan: "The Old Man of Floating-Point;" primary architect behind the IEEE 754 standard for loating-point computation
Robert Kahn: Co-inventor with Vincent Cerf of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP
Mike Karels: System architect for 4.3BSD
Alan Kay: Inventor of SmallTalk
Gary Kildall: Author of the archetpical OS known as CP/M (control Program for Microcomputers)
Donald Knuth: "Father of Computer Science" - author of The Art of Computer Programming; inventor of TeX, allowing typesetting of text and mathematical formulas on a PC
Butler Lampson: Architect of Cedar/Mesa; Implementer of Xerox Alto
Robert C. Martin: Agile software development proponent; CEO, president, and founder of Object Mentor
Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"): Creator of Ruby
John McCarthy: Creator, with his graduate students, of Lisp
Doug McIlroy: Head of department at Bell Labs where UNIX started
Bob Metcalfe: Creator of Ethernet
Chuck Moore: Inventor of Forth, a high-level programming language
Andrew Morton: Linus's No. 2 in the kernel group
Ted Nelson: Creator of the Xanadu project - universal, democratic hypertext library; precursor to the WWW
Kristen Nygaard: Developer (with Ole-Johan Dahl) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language.
Peter Pag: Pioneer of 4GLS (1979); developed Software AG's Natural
Bob Pasker: founder of WebLogic, author of the first Java Application Server
Benjamin Pierce: Harvard University faculty member for 49 years; recognized in his time as one of America's leading mathematicians
P J Plauger: Chair of the ANSI C committee
Jon Postel: "The 'North Star' Who Defined the Internet"
John Postley: Developed Mark IV (1967), the first million dollar software product, for Informatics
Martin Richards: Designer of the BCPL Cintcode System
Martin Roesch: Author of the open-source program Snort in 1998
Gurusamy Sarathy: Heavily involved in maintaining the mainstream releases of Perl for the past 7 years
Carl Sassenrath: Author of REBOL, a scripting language
Guy L. Steele: Author of athoritative books and papers on Lisp
W. Richard Stevens: "Guru of the Unix Gurus"; author and consultant
Ivan Sutherland: Considered by many to be the creator of Computer Graphics
Avadis (Avie) Tevanian: Chief Software Technology Officer, Apple
Guy (Bud) Tribble: One of the industry's top experts in software design and object-oriented programming
Patrick Volkerding: Creator of Slackware Linux
Larry Wall: Author of Perl
John Warnock: Inventor of PostScript; CEO of Adobe Systems
Michael "Monty" Widenius: Creator of MySQL
Nicklaus Wirth: Inventor of Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon
Stephen Wolfram: Scientist, creator of Mathematica
Jamie Zawinski: Instrumental in the creation of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs)
Now we all know that there are others, that this list of 100 candidates barely scratches the surface, so....have at it: who's been left out? Once I have compiled a definitive list of, say, 150, I will devise a means by which we can vote and decide once and for all which 99 should join Adam Bosworth (who, for the record, loathes the whole idea of any such exercise, as does Tim Bray - who calls such popularity contests "moronic"; both would I am quote certain wish me to record here that this entire exercise owes nothing to their actual input, only to Tim's blogged remark en passant all those years ago...)
Over to you!
Tim Berners-Lee
Brief Description: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web
Further Details:
In his book Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee tried to answer questions that had been thrown at him again and again ever since - Questions such as "What were you thinking when you invented it?" through "So what do you think of it now?" to "Where is this all going to take us?"
He didn't anticipate, even in 1999 when the book was published, that technologies like HTML, HTTP, and XML would take him just four years later to a knighthood and then to a $1.2 million award from the Finnish Technology Award Foundation, known informally as the "Finnish Nobel Prize."
"The original idea of the Web," Berners-Lee has always said, "was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information. The idea was that by writing something together, and as people worked on it, they could iron out misunderstanding."
In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) a not-for-profit forum that aims to lead the Web to its full potential. He became Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 2000 when knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and returned to the UK to take up a professorship at the University of Southampton.
"All sorts of things, too long for me to list here, are still out there waiting to be done." Berners-Lee said in his acceptance speech to the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. "There are so many new things to make, limited only by our imagination. And I think it's important for anybody who's going through school or college wondering what to do, to remember that now."
Joshua Bloch
Brief Description: Formerly at Sun, where he helped architect Java's core platform; now at Google.
Further Details:
Until very recently, when he moved - in July 2004 - to Google, Inc., Joshua Bloch was a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Bloch, an architect in the Core Java Platform Group, and very closely identified with the developer-focused "Tiger" project that spawned J2SE 1.5, known now as "Java 5."
The author of numerous articles and papers, Josh Bloch has also written a book, Effective Java Programming Language Guide, that was Runner Up in the "Best Book" category of the JDJ Readers' Choice Awards in 2000.
If James Gosling is the father of Java, then Josh Bloch nurtured Java like a mother.
Grady Booch
Brief Description: One of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language; inventor of the term "Object Oriented."
Further Details:
Grady Booch is an IBM Fellow who has served as architect and architectural mentor for numerous complex software-intensive systems around the world in just about every domain imaginable.
He is the author of six best-selling books and has published several hundred articles on software engineering, including papers published in the early '80s that originated the term and practice of object-oriented design.
As one of the planet's only inhabitants who lists, as his three main obsessions "software architecture, software engineering, and Renaissance Jazz," Booch maintains an endlessly fascinating blog.
He said of Java in 2000:
"Java is not the last language - although it may be Scott McNealy's last language."
Adam Bosworth
Brief Description: Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; then BEA, now Google
Further Details:
Possessed of one of the foremost minds in modern i-technology, Adam Bosworth was an XML guru for Microsoft Corporation, where he was a general manager in the late 90s, after which he left MS to found Crossgain - a company subsequently bought by BEA Systems.
Interviewed by SYS-CON when he was vice president of engineering of the Frameworks Division at BEA, Bosworth revealed what drives him. "I've spent my life trying to make building applications easy," he said, adding that what attracts him about i-technology is, basically, helping developers build solutions - "developing products, plumbing, or technology to help them build solutions."
He continued: "Whether it was Active Server Pages and the extent of my work at Microsoft, all of which was plumbing, or Access and working on the VB products, I helped them build the application. That's what I like doing."
Bosworth's last activity for BEA involved its mobile "Alchemy" project, which he unveiled personally at the company's 2004 eWorld conference.
He was one of Google's highest-profile new recruits in 2004, along with Joshua Bloch.
Don Box
Brief Description: Coauthor of SOAP
Further Details:
A popular blogger, Don Box was one of the original authors of the SOAP spec and is famous, among other things, for coining the term "COM is Love," as well as for calling HTTP the "cockroach of the Internet" and saying it is the root of problems for Web services.
As Microsoft's "Architect, XML Messaging" - a position he took up in January 2002 - Box has helped MS develop its XML Web services architecture.
He co-authored the original SOAP specification with Bob Atkinson, Gopal Kakivaya, and David Winer. Earlier in his career, he co-founded DevelopMentor Inc., a component software think tank aimed at educating developers on the use of the COM, Java and XML.
Microsoft claims that during his free time, Box "enjoys jamming with fellow MSDN Magazine contributors in Band on the Runtime, which performs songs on various programming topics."
Stewart Brand
Brief Description: Cofounder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board
Further Details:
Famous for coining the phrase "Information wants to be free," Stewart Brand founded, edited, and published the original Whole Earth Catalog (1968-72).
A typical Brand approach to things was demonstrated in 1971, when he designed and co-organized with Scott Beach the "Demise Party," which celebrated the end of Whole Earth Catalog with 1,500 guests at the (then) new Exploratorium in San Francisco, and turned over $20,000 in cash to the audience to do good with. Debate lasted till dawn.
The Last Whole Earth Catalog, published by Random House, sold 1.5 million copies and received a National Book Award.
Brand, who had graduated in 1960 (in Biology) from Stanford, moved effortlessly from the world of print to the world of online when in 1984 with Larry Brilliant he founded The WELL (standing for "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area that is now owned by SALON. It now has 9,000 active users worldwide and is considered a bellwether of the genre (others involved in starting The WELL were Larry Brilliant, Matthew McClure, and Kevin Kelly.)
Far from done with innovating, in 1988 he co-founded the Global Business Network with Peter Schwartz, Jay Ogilvy, Napier Collyns, and Lawrence Wilkinson. GBN explores global futures and business strategy for 90 multinationals such as Ford, Bechtel, Shell, Morgan Stanley, Hewlett Packard, Swedbank, Dupont, Federal Express, along with government clients such as DARPA.
From 1990-1994 Brand was a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media. He is currently the president of The Long Now Foundation (which is building a 10,000-year Clock and Library).
Tim Bray
Brief description: One of the prime movers of XML, now with Sun
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Described recently as "a perennial figure of the Web," Tim Bray's typical bio is almost frighteningly full of accomplishment: He was manager of the New Oxford English Dictionary Project at the University of Waterloo, a co-editor of the XML spec, co-founder of Open Text Corporation, and is the founder and CTO of Antarctica Systems. He is a member of the W3C Consortium's Technical Architecture Group, which serves an architectural oversight function for the Web. As James Horner has observed: "To put it simply, his efforts change the way we work with, and perceive, information."
Bray blogs enthusiastically, and recently joined Sun as Director of Web Technologies.
While most people regard .NET as the chief threat to Java's status as the de-facto standard basis for large-scale software development, Bray - ever the contrarian -prophetically argued that rather it is the family of dynamic or "scripting" languages such as javascript, Python and Groovy that would inevitably occupy a larger and larger piece of the software-development universe. He believed that this trend is "impossible to resist, and...is potentially a good thing for Java."
The explosion of AJAX in the past two years have proven him right on the first point; and probably right on the second, though that may only emerge over time.
Closely involved in the world's most successful XML vocabulary, "RSS", which is used for news syndication, Bray is co-chair of the IETF "Atom" project which is designed to be its future.
Other resources:
SYS-CON.TV
The Co-Inventor of XML, Sun's Tim Bray, Speaks Out On Blogging, Web 2.0, XML, and the Future
Published May. 27, 2006 - Interview at JavaOne 2006 with Jeremy Geelan
Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog
Sun's Tim Bray Discusses "AJAX Behaving Badly" and Other Misconceptions
i-Technology News Desk
"I Didn't Invent XML Dammit," Says Tim Bray
Dan Bricklin
Brief Description: Co-creator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet
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The co-creator (with Bob Frankston) of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet, Dan Franklin has been a developer, inventor, entrepreneur, and business person, with both a degree in Computer Science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard.
The idea for the electronic spreadsheet came to Franklin while he was a student at the Harvard Business School, working on his MBA degree, in the spring of 1978. Here's how he tells the story himself:
"Sitting in Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would daydream. 'Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse...' (I had seen a mouse previously, I think in a demonstration at a conference by Doug Engelbart, and maybe the Alto). And '..imagine if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and answer "10% will be fine!"' (10% was always the answer in those days when we couldn't do very complicated calculations...)
The summer of 1978, between first and second year of the MBA program, while riding a bike along a path on Martha's Vineyard, I decided that I wanted to pursue this idea and create a real product to sell after I graduated."
That's just what he did, though his vision became more realistic, and the heads-up display gave way to a normal screen. He and Bob Frankston decided to form a company under which to do business: Software Arts, Inc., incorporated on January 2, 1979.
VisiCalc was first shown to the regular personal computer press in a special room at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco in May of 1979. The first "real" release, version 1.37, shipped in mid-October 1979. In 1985, though, Software Arts' assets were sold to Lotus Development Corporation, the creators and publishers of the 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and Lotus decided not to continue publishing VisiCalc.
"If I invented the spreadsheet today, of course I would file for a patent," Bricklin says on his incredibly candid Web site documenting the rise and fall of VisiCalc. In 1979, however, when VisiCalc was shown to the public for the first time, patents for software inventions were infrequently granted. Programs were thought to be mere mathematical algorithms, and mathematical algorithms, as laws of nature, were not patentable.
His latest endeavor is wikiCalc and textCalc.
Larry Brilliant
Brief Description: Co-founder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board
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"If baby boomers had their own Faust, he'd be Larry Brilliant, a man who's found himself at the center of almost every defining moment of his generation." That was how Fast Company characterized Dr Larry Brilliant, in an article published in October 2000 that continued:
"There are people in Silicon Valley who are more successful than Larry Brilliant. And there are people in Silicon Valley who are richer than he is. But there are few who have had more impact on the world at large than he has."
In the early 1970s, when smallpox was devastating that country, Brilliant - having finished his surgical internship at Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco in 1970 - spearheaded a (successful) campaign to eradicate the disease from India. He helped run the WHO smallpox eradication program in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh; was a staff member of the WHO "Global Commission to Certify Smallpox Eradicated" in Burma, India, Nepal, and Iran; and served as the last UN inspector to visit Iran to search for hidden smallpox.
The author of two books and dozens of articles on the epidemiology of smallpox, blindness, and environmental diseases, he has worked at city, county, state, federal, and international levels. Larry is also the founder of the Seva Foundation, which has performed 2 million free sight-restoring eye operations in India and Nepal. But he has a subsequent career as a technologist.
Together with Stewart Brand he conjured up the idea of The WELL, which in 1984 became one of the first expressions of online community, a gathering place for many of the brightest minds, the fiercest pioneers, and the keenest explorers of the just-gathering new economy. "It was the first electronic community," says Brilliant. Brand ran the WELL for 10 years before he and Brilliant agreed to sell it in parts in 1993 and in 1995. It is now owned by SALON.
Brilliant was also CEO of two public technology corporations (SoftNet Systems Inc. and Network Technologies), before founding the WiFi company, Cometa, in 2003 - which soon became the premier provider of wholesale 802.11 bandwidth in the United States. Brilliant served as its vice chairman until 2003 hen he returned to the Seva Foundation as Chairman of the organization during its silver anniversary year to chart an expansion of the organization's programs into new regions and countries and strengthen its management and financial capacity to provide more life-giving care.
As it was once, aptly, said: "Larry Brilliant appears to be living two full lives simultaneously."
Sergey Brin
Brief Description: Son-of-college-math-professor turned co-founder of Google, Inc.
Further Details:
"Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page."
With these now epochal words, Sergey Brin recorded on his Stanford University-hosted Web page his passionate interest in the "Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" that has since then changed the lives of everyone who has ever used the World Wide Web.
With a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Moscow-born Brin graduated with high honors in Mathematics and honors in Computer Science in May 1993 before moving to the Computer Science department at Stanford to study for his Ph.D. - studies which have been interrupted by the rise and rise...and rise...of Google.
"To engineer a search engine is a challenging task," he wrote in a paper co-authored with Larry Page. "Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the first such detailed public description we know of to date. "
By 2004, with Google, Inc. now a public company, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. Brin's official title at Google is "Co-Founder & President, Technology."
He is currently "on leave" from the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his master's degree. So long as he continues to share responsibility for day-to-day operations with Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, he probably won't be back.
Stanford's loss is the i-Technology world's gain.
Dave Cutler
Brief Description: The brains behind VMS; hired away by Microsoft for Windows NT
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One of only 14 "Distinguished Engineers" at Microsoft, which he joined in 1988, Dave Cutler is generally considered one of the top few programmers worldwide.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Cutler worked at DEC, where he designed and delivered several successful operating systems, including VAX/VMS, RSX-11M and VAXELN. In recognition of his significant contributions to the field, he was awarded membership in the National Academy of Engineering in 1993.
After arriving at Microsoft, he launched the Windows NT group and has since then led the development of three major releases of the product, now known as Windows 2000. In addition to leading the Windows 2000 team, Cutler contributed to the architecture of all parts of the system, and even wrote the kernel himself.
After that was responsible for the design of the 64-bit release of Windows.
Originally from Dewitt, Michigan, he holds over 20 patents and is affiliate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington.
Don Ferguson
Brief Description: Inventor of the J2EE application server at IBM, now with Microsoft
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As an IBM Fellow and chief architect for IBM Software Group, Don Ferguson was the original chief architect for the WebSphere family of products. He joined IBM Research in 1985, and was the chairman of the Software Group Architecture Board, which oversees the architecture and integration of WebSphere, DB2, Lotus, Tivoli and Rational products.
"One of my goals in life," he once blogged, "is to teach my daughter (8 years old) and my wife (a dentist) to be able to build meaningful WebSphere applications."
More recently, in January 2007, he was recruited away from IBM by Microsoft, where he is now a Technical Fellow in Platforms and Strategy in the Office of the CTO.
A quality thinker and writer, here is an example of vintage Ferguson:
"I like Java for some things. I have to admit that I like PHP's associative arrays and integral support for simple string/variable behavior. I also think there are metaphors for programming that we need to give to other communities. There is a whole cadre of SQL programmers out there. They need to be able to implement and use services without throwing out what they learned. Some business professionals understand simple flow charts for decisions, decision tables/trees and sequences of if ... then ... Some business schools teach structured english. I am not sure these folks would like PHP or Java. I am struggling with how to surface lots of programming "models," with a focus on matching the concepts and tools with the pre-conceived biases of the community.
I think there is a huge role for XML over HTTP. It is ideal for many, many scenarios. We struggle with the WS-* family of specifications. I have read many of them, and helped write some of them. I do not think that they are as thick as the XML specs but I cannot dispute that the space appears to be complex. We strive for 'composability' and 'incremental consumption,' which we hope allows people to only learn the concepts their applications need."
Ferguson's interests - a refreshingly strange foursome - include "distributed systems, transaction processing, performance, and karate."
Other SYS-CON stories about Don Ferguson:
Microsoft Snags Don Ferguson, Former IBM Chief Architect – "Father of WebSphere"
Published Jan. 15, 2007
Birth of a Platform: Interview with Don Ferguson,"The Father of WebSphere" (Part 1)
Birth of a Platform: Interview with Don Ferguson, "The Father of WebSphere" (Part 2)
Birth of a Platform: Interview with Don Ferguson, "The Father of WebSphere" (Part 3)
Roy T. Fielding
Brief Description: Primary architect of HTTP 1.1 and a founder of the Apache Web server
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Co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server Project, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, all around perl guru, and MOMspider author, Roy T. Fielding has a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science, UC Irvine, and has been actively involved in the World Wide Web project since 1993.
He was the primary architect of the current Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1), co-author of the Internet standards for HTTP and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), and a founder of several open-source software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server Project that produces the software for over 64% of public Internet web sites.
In 1999, MIT Technology Review named him as one of the top 100 "young innovators of the year."
His Ph.D. dissertation, "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures," defines the REST architectural style as a model for the design principles behind the modern Web architecture.
From 1999-2002 he was Chief Scientist, eBuilt, Irvine, California. Presently he is Chief Scientist, Day Software, Irvine, California.
In 1998 he wrote:
"Life is a distributed object system. However, communication among humans is a distributed hypermedia system, where the mind's intellect, voice+gestures, eyes+ears, and imagination are all components."
Bob Frankston
Brief Description: Co-creator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet
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Bob Frankston been working with computers since 1963 and with online services since 1966. He founded Software Arts in 1979 with Dan Bricklin to develop and sell VisiCalc, the world's first electronic spreadsheet program. VisiCalc remained a widely used program for personal computers for many years.
An MIT man through and through, Frankston was an MIT Undergrad 1967-1970 and a Grad 1970-1976. He received SB Degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics in 1970 and Masters and Engineers Degrees in Computer Science (and EE) in 1974. He did graduate work at Project MAC (now the Laboratory for Computer Science), where he was involved in the Multics project. His Master's Thesis was "The Computer Utility as a Marketplace for Computer-Based Services". One area of continuing interest for Frankstonis "federated" systems - loosely coupled systems and databases as opposed to the more rigid distributed systems.
After the demise of VisiCalc he worked 1985-1990 for Lotus Development, where he created the Lotus Express product and a Fax facility for Lotus Notes and started lotus.com. In 1993 he joined Microsoft, where for 5 years he focused on the consumer use of computers, in particular, home networking, and the idea of "No New Wires Networking."
Bob's now on his own pursuing a number of projects, among them trying to explain the larger concepts of "IP everywhere."
Jon Gay
Brief Description: The "Father of Flash"
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When Jonathan Gay wrote "FutureSplash Animator" in 1995 along with Robert Tatsumi, he could hardly have imagined the impact the program would have on Web design. Rechristened "Flash" by Macromedia, the program leveraged vector graphics to deliver smooth motion in a file small enough to be distributed on the early, bandwidth-challenged Web.
For a while after the Macromedia-Adobe merger, Gay still guided Adobe's Flash's development, focusing on extending Flash to support richer communications in a networked world. But he subsequently left to launch a startup with Tatsumi.
Gay is on record as saying that Flash began with a few bits of colored plastic, namely the LEGO bricks he grew up playing with as a child (back when there were no LEGO men or whales or complicated accessory packs - just rectangular blocks and a few wheels).
"Those bits of colored plastic," Gay explains, "taught me the basics of engineering design, how to choose a design problem, and the process of iterative refinement. Even better, they helped me express my early passion for building things."
He began his career in computing writing games, then moved to building graphics editors. Here is how he and Robert Tatsumi turned their ideas into reality:
"In the summer of 1995, we were at SIGGRAPH and got lots of feedback from people that we should turn SmartSketch into an animation product. We were starting to hear about the Internet and the Web, and it seemed possible that the Internet would become popular enough that people would want to send graphics and animation over it. So we began to add animation to SmartSketch.
At the time, the only way to extend a Web browser to play back animation was through Java. So we wrote a simple animation player that used Java and was horribly slow. We stubbornly kept at it though, and in the fall, Netscape came out with their plug-in API. Finally, we had a way to extend the Web browser with decent performance (this was the ancestor of Macromedia Flash Player).
As it grew close to shipping time, we changed the name of our software to FutureSplash Animator to focus more on its animation capabilities. We also were growing tired of running a company that didn't have much money to spend, and began trying to sell our technology. After an unsuccessful pitch to Adobe and turning down a bid from Fractal Design, we shipped FutureSplash Animator in the summer (May) of 1996.
Our big success came in August of 1996. Microsoft was working on MSN and wanted to create the most TV-like experience on the Internet. They became big fans of FutureSplash and adopted the technology. I'm still amazed that they made their launch of MSN dependent on a new animation technology from a six-person company!
Our other high-profile client was Disney Online. They were using FutureSplash to build animation and the user interface for the Disney Daily Blast. Disney was also working with Macromedia Shockwave.
In November of 1996, Macromedia had heard enough about us through their relationship with Disney and approached us about working together. We had been running FutureWave for four years with a total investment of $500,000. The idea of having a larger company's resources to help us get FutureSplash established seemed like a good one. So in December 1996, we sold FutureWave Software to Macromedia, and FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia Flash 1.0."
By 2001 there were 50 people building Flash instead of 3 when they started FutureWave and it has evolved from a simple Web drawing and animation package to a complete multimedia development environment. Flash has become synonymous with animation on the Internet. Flash Player is now reputedly the most widely distributed piece of software on the Internet-ahead of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Real Player.
James Gosling
Brief Description: "Father of Java" (though not its sole parent)
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Often referred to as the "Father of Java," Gosling is the first to point out that in fact there were other parents of the language that began as "Oak," developed as part of the so-called "Green Project" at Sun started in December 1990 by Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan, and Gosling.
In May 1995, now re-named as "Java," it burst onto the technology world.
Gosling, who is now CTO of Sun's Developer Products group - which since the departure from Sun of Rob Gingell now includes the J2SE engineering organization - implemented Java's original compiler and virtual machine.
Almost always dressed in blue jeans, Birkenstocks and a t-shirt, Gosling could easily be mistaken for your typical card-carrying geek: but he's an alpha geek. He grew up in Calgary, Alberta, and shortly after he saw his first computer - aged 14, at the University of Calgary - he began breaking into the computer center to play with the computers and, in his words, "read, read, read." A year later, at 15, he began writing software for the university's physics department.
The rest, as they say, is i-Technology history.
Other SYS-CON resource featuring James Gosling:
SYS-CON.TV Java Exclusive with Sun's James Gosling @ SYS-CON.TV — Jeremy Geelan interviews the Father of Java at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City.
Anders Hejlsberg
Brief Description: Genius behind the Turbo Pascal compiler, subsequently "Father of C#"
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Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and chief architect of C#, is one of the most successful developers in the IT cosmos in recent times.
One of Borland's first employees, he was the original author of Turbo Pascal; later he worked as the chief architect of the Delphi product line. In 1996 he joined Microsoft, and played a pivotal role in the development and design of Visual J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes.
Then he worked on COM+, followed by the VS.NET Framework team.
Over the past 5 years, as one of only 20 Distinguished Engineers at Microsoft, he has distinguished himself still further, as the brains behind the creation of C# - the first component-oriented programming language in the C and C++ family to combine the power of those languages with the functional ease of modern, rapid application development tools.
Anders, who is Danish, originally studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark.
Other SYS-CON resources featuring Anders Hejlsberg:
A Talk with the Father of C#
Daniel W. Hillis
Brief Description: VP of R&D at the Walt Disney Company; cofounder, Thinking Machines
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Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer. He pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds over 40 U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices. Danny Hillis is also the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.
As Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow, he developed new technologies and business strategies for Disney's theme parks, television, motion pictures, Internet and consumer products businesses. He also designed new theme park rides, a full sized walking robot dinosaur and various micro mechanical devices.
He's now Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Minds, Inc., a research and development company creating a range of new products and services in software, entertainment, electronics, biotechnology and mechanical design.
Back in 1983, while he was finishing up his degree at MIT, Hillis co-founded Thinking Machines Corp. to produce and market the Connection Machine. The company's customers included American Express, Dow Jones, Schlumberger, Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of Tokyo, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA. He continued to lead Thinking Machines' technical team until 1995 when he left to start a small consulting company, DHSH. One of DHSH's clients was The Walt Disney Company, and it was in 1996 that Hillis joined Disney full time in the newly created role of Disney Fellow.
Thinking Machines Corp. was the leading innovator in massive parallel supercomputers and RAID disk arrays. In addition to conceiving and designing the company's major products, Hillis worked closely with his customers in applying parallel computers to problems in astrophysics, aircraft design, financial analysis, genetics, computer graphics, medical imaging, image understanding, neurobiology, materials science, cryptography and subatomic physics. At Thinking Machines, he built a technical team comprised of scientists and engineers that were widely acknowledged to have been among the best in the industry.
Willis is the author of a book, The Pattern On The Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work (ScienceMasters Series), in which he explains the basic ideas that make computers work. He is also an adviser to the U.S. government, and serves on the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee.
Miguel de Icaza
Brief Description: Co-founder of Ximian, now with Novell
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Mexican-born Miguel de Icaza, the free software programmer best known for co-founding the Gnome, Ximian, and Mono projects, joined Novell when it acquired Ximian last year. Ximian had its genesis in the GNOME project, which was initiated by Miguel and others in 1997 by de Icaza, who is now Vice President of Product Technology at Novell.
The Mono Project is an effort to build an open-source implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework using the technical documents that Microsoft submitted to ECMA (the European Computer Manufacturers Association) for standarization.
As the founder and leader of the GNOME Foundation, de Icaza is rightly deemed one of the foremost luminaries in the Linux development community. With his seemingly boundless energy, he has galvanized the effort to make Linux accessible and available to the average computer user.
He brought this same excitement to his role as CTO of Ximian, where he was instrumental in porting Linux to the SPARC architecture and led development of the Midnight Commander file manager and the Gnumeric spreadsheet. He was also a primary author of the design of the Bonobo component model, which leads the way in the development of large-scale applications in GNOME.
de Icaza was the first recipient of the prestigious MIT Innovator of the Year award in 1999 and continues to reach out globally by working with international organizations such as eMexico to introduce affordable technology alternatives, like Linux, to other nations.
Other SYS-CON reasources featuring Miguel de Icaza:
Keynote Report: Web Services Edge 2003 East Conference & Expo in Boston
Martin Fowler
Brief Description: Famous for work on refactoring, XP, and UML
Further Details:
Martin Fowler started working with software in the early 80s and in the mid 80s he started getting interested in the then new world of object-oriented development.
He started to specialize in bringing objects to business information systems, first with a couple of companies and then as an independent consultant. In the early days this was using Smalltalk and C++, now it's Java, C# and the Internet. Every year I learn something new, but he also finds that many of the lessons from the past still apply. This work has led him into taking a leading role in OO analysis and design, the UML, patterns, and agile development methodologies.
An author, speaker, consultant and self-described "general loud-mouth on software development," Fowler concentrates on designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design. He has pioneered object-oriented technology, refactoring, patterns, agile methodologies, domain modeling, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Extreme Programming (XP).
In March 2000 he gave up a long and successful career as an independent consultant and joined a company that he believed was truly world beating, ThoughtWorks - where he is Chief Scientist.
He's written five books on software developmen and speaks at many international conferences on software development. He's served on program committees for OOPSLA, Software Development, UML World, XP 2001, and TOOLS.
Fowler believes the biggest impact on successful software development is "motivated, talented developers."
"If you don't have that all the technology and methodology in the world can't help you."
He maintains a lively and regularly updated bliki.
Bill Joy
Brief Description: Co-founder (and former chief scientist) of Sun; main author of Berkeley Unix
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Co-founder of Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy spent 21 years at Sun before leaving it in September 2003.
Once called the "Edison of the Internet" by Fortune Magazine, while at UC Berkeley Joy was the designer of the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system, now known as BSD, which became a foundation of the Internet.
At Sun he was leading designer of some of its key technologies, including Solaris software and Sparc microprocessors, and was a guiding light for the development of Java and Jini technologies.
"Bill will continue to be an inspiration to all innovators," said Scott McNealy, co-founder, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Sun, in a statement when Joy departed. "Bill's many contributions...have helped define Sun as one of the most innovative and inspired places on the planet. We thank Bill for the strong legacy of innovation that he leaves in the hearts and souls of every Sun employee."
Joy earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1975 and received a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. He also served as co-chairman of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee, appointed by President Clinton in 1997.
In April 2000, he published a much-debated article in Wired Magazine, called "Why the future doesn't need us." The article argued that some new technologies, including robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, could make humans an endangered species.
Other SYS-CON stories about Bill Joy
Sun Microsystems' Chief Scientist Bill Joy to Leave Company
Mitch Kapor
Brief Description: Designer of Lotus 1-2-3, founder of Lotus Development Corporation
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Mitch Kapor, founder of the Open Source Application Foundation, is best known for founding Lotus Development Corporation in 1982 and designing Lotus 1-2-3 - the "killer app" credited with making the PC ubiquitous in business.
He was also the co-founder and former Chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization working in the public interest to protect privacy and free expression on the Internet.
In other words Kapor has worn different hats over the past 25 years: software designer, entrepreneur, and social activist, among them.
The OSAF is a non-profit organization working to create and gain wide adoption for software applications of uncompromising quality using open-source methods. OSAF is designing a new application called "Chandler" to manage email, appointments, contacts, and tasks, and easily allow information to be shared with friends, family, and colleagues. Chandler will be free of charge and will run on the Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms.
Brian Kernighan
Brief Description: One of the creators of the AWK (from the initials of Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger) and AMPL languages; coauthor with Dennis Ritchie of the 'bible' of C, The C Programming Language.
Further Details:
Although he had no part in the birth of C - which is entirely the work of Dennis Ritchie - Brian Kernighan wrote a tutorial on how to use C for people at Bell Labs, and Ritchie's arm into writing a book with him. Just about every respected C programmer learned C from this book, The C Programming Language.
He worked in Bell Labs alongside Bjarne Stroustrup, Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie - all four were all friends and close colleagues for many years, all in the same small group at Bell Labs.
He once told an interviewer: "There are only two real problems in computing: computers are too hard to use and too hard to program. We've made enormous progress on both of these over the past fifty years, but they are still the real problems. And I predict they still will be problems 50 years from now."
The AWK langauge was a joint effort among Al Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Kernighan (the name is their initials) - the three were pretty equal in their contributions, though Kernighan has maintained and modified it on his own since about 1980.
AMPL - a language for specifying optimization problems such as linear programming - is joint work with Bob Fourer and David Gay. It acts as a sort of compiler, converting a natural and convenient mathematical notation into whatever a particular solver program needs.
After several years as visiting professor in the CS department at Princeton, Kernioghan eventually accepted a permanent faculty position and retired from Bell Labs to become a full-time professor.
Mitchell Kertzman
Brief Description: Former programmer, founder, and CEO of Powersoft (later Sybase)
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Mitchell Kertzman, now a Partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, has over 30 years of experience as a CEO of public and private software companies and rose to i-Technology fame as founder and CEO of Powersoft, which became the leading provider of client-server development tools with its flagship product, PowerBuilder.
In February 1995 Powersoft merged with Sybase - at the time, the most valuable mergers in the history of the software industry. Later he was chairman of the board and CEO of Sybase, Inc., and even more recently than that he was Chairman and CEO of Liberate Technologies, a provider of platform software for the delivery of digital services by cable television companies.
A former programmer, Kertzman founded Powersoft in 1974 as Computer Solutions. He renamed the company and became a member of the Hummer Winblad family in 1991 when Hummer Winblad invested in the company.
Kertzman served as President of the Massachusetts Software Council from 1994 to 1996 and was 1990 chairman of the American Electronics Association. He is founder and former chairman of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassINC), a think tank focused on issues related to the standard of living and quality of life of America's middle class. He served on the New York State Commission on Industrial Competitiveness and chaired its task force on industrial policy.
He was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and is currently a Director of CNET - he became a director of CNET Networks in May 1996 - as well as a board member of Bridgestream, Sapias, Five9, and ActiveGrid.
Klaus Knopper
Brief Description: Prime mover of Knoppix, a Linux distro that runs directly from a CD
Further Details:
Born in Germany in 1968 where he's lived ever since, Klaus Knopper has a diploma in electrical engineering, and has been a self-employed IT-consultant since 1998.
Knoppix was started about 3 years ago as an experiment for personal use (learning how el torito boot works, and how to get access to a whole CD from a minimal ramdisk system). His friends from the LinuxTag association convinced him to make it an open project, and provided mailing lists and a forum for this purpose.
Without touching the hard drive, Knoppix can boot practically any PC into Linux complete with multiple GUI environments, a ton of applications, and utilities while grabbing an IP address from a DHCP server.
in other words, unlike other Linux distributions, Knoppix does not need to be installed on a computer's hard disk - it runs directly from the CD. All you need to do is to place it into your CD-ROM drive and restart the computer. A few minutes later you will have a fully working Linux workstation with all major desktop environments, server software, multimedia, office and productivity applications you can think of.
This amazing product is Klaus Knopper's very own brainchild.
Currently, there are about 3000 downloads per day, and there are quite a few project forks in different languages maintained by independent groups.
Knopper works on Knoppix alone with occasional help from people on the mailing lists, mostly in the form of translations or patches for shell scripts. The offical Web site for Knoppix is on his personal Web site, at
http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html.
"So far, Knoppix boots fine on about 95% of all tested desktop PCs," Knopper says, "and roughly 75% of notebooks (some of them have exotic graphics or sound/pcmcia chipsets, sometimes you have to use boot options to get them working)."
Craig McClanahan
Brief Description: Of Tomcat, Struts, and JSF fame
Further Details:
Craig McClanahan was the original creator of the Struts Framework, and was the co-specification lead for JavaServer Faces 1.0 (JSF).
Struts grew out of a personal need (open source developers often call this scratching your own itch) to support the development of an application that McClanahan was responsible for, prior to joining Sun in 2000. His task was to take a US-centric application to Europe, initially in four languages, and make it available (among other delivery channels) on the Web. At the time, there was lots of discussion about appropriate architectures for on the JSP-INTEREST mailing list at java.sun.com, but there were few available implementations. Therefore, he set out to create an application framework for my own use.
The resulting framework served McClanahan's needs quite well. As it became obvious that his needs were not unique, he began the process of open sourcing this idea of a Web application framework at the Apache Software Foundation. What happened next was nothing short of extraordinary: Struts quickly became the de facto standard web application architecture in the J2EE space.
The number of significant Internet applications built with Struts is substantial, but is dwarfed by the number of intranet applications that use it. Struts is now integrated into nearly all the major app servers and tools, supported by a rich ecosystem of knowledgeable proffesionals and skilled developers, backed by significant documentation in the form of books and articles, and the basis for a large user community centered around the Struts User mailing list. (To subscribe, send an empty message to user-subscribe@struts.apache.org).
After Struts was released, and was beginning to demonstrate its popularity, an increasing number of other frameworks and component implementations were becoming available. While a large amount of innovation occurred, it was difficult to forsee the development of a common standard API for user interface components - one that would enable the creation of a component marketplace where tools vendors could support one component API instead of 50, and where component developers could count on interoperation with many tools instead of one or two. So JavaServer Faces (JSR-127) was introduced - with the goal of solving this problem by providing a common base level API for building user interface components for Web applications, with the specific goals of being both accessible to developers writing applications by hand, but also easy to integrate into tools.
JSF 1.0 was released in March 2004, followed by a maintenance release (1.1) in May, and is being rapidly adopted by tools vendors, component writers, and application developers alike.
McClanahan now blogs, often offering comments on Java technologies (especially in the Web tier).
Nathan Myhrvold
Brief Description: Theoretical and mathematical physicist, former CTO at Microsoft
Further Details:
Nathan Myhrvold was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University and worked with Professor Stephen Hawking on research in cosmology, quantum field theory in curved space time and quantum theories of gravitation. Then, in 1986, his company Dynamical Systems was acquired by Microsoft.
A period of 13 years working for Microsoft followed; he ended up as CTO.
"I have the best job in the world - combining technology, strategy and business - in the most exciting industry and company in the world," said Myhrvold in June 1999, when Microsoft announced that after 13 years he was taking what it called a "leave of absence to turn his attention to scientific pursuits and enjoy his family."
"Working directly with Bill Gates has been an incredible experience," he explained. "The only drawback is trying to fit my broad range of interests into very little spare time. As great as Microsoft has been for me, it's the right stage in my life to address some other interests."
Myhrvold's personal commitment and vision had enabled him to build Microsoft Research into one of the world's premier computer science research institutions, reporting to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates as a member of the Executive Committee, the group responsible for the broad strategic and business planning for the entire company. As head of the Advanced Technology and Research Group, he was responsible for an R&D budget of more than $2 billion a year.
The same commitment and vision led him in 2000 to found Intellectual Ventures. Myhrvold himself holds 14 patents and has numerous patents pending, and at Intellectual Ventures he focuses on a variety of business interests relating to the funding, creation and commercialization of inventions.
Other SYS-CON stories about Nathan Myrhvold
Former Microsoft CTO: "Intellectual Property is the Next Software"
Tim O'Reilly
Brief Description: Publisher, open source advocate; believer that "great technology needs great books"
Further Details:
Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., Tim O'Reilly isn't just a publisher, he has also been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet.
O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web.
O'Reilly has been an activist for internet standards and for Open Source software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key internet technologies, helping to block Microsoft's 1996 limits on TCP/IP in NT Workstation, organizing the " summit" of key free software leaders where the term "Open Source" was first widely agreed upon, and, most recently, organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents. He received Infoworld's Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for his advocacy on behalf of the Open Source community.
A Harvard College graguate (B.A. cum laude in Classics, 1975) he has also co-written numerous books on computer topics, most notably UNIX Text Processing (with Dale Dougherty; Howard Sams, 1987), Managing UUCP and USENET (with Grace Todino; no longer in print), The X Window System Users' Guide (with Valerie Quercia), and The X Toolkit Intrinsics Programming Manual (with Adrian Nye), UNIX Power Tools (with Jerry Peek and Mike Loukides) and Windows XP in a Nutshell (with David Karp and Troy Mott).
Jean Paoli
Brief Description: One of the cocreators of the XML 1.0 standard with the W3C; now with Microsoft
Further Details:
Currently a senior director of XML architecture at Microsoft and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Jean Paoli has long been a strong and passionate advocate of XML and open standards, and specializes in building end-user markup editing tools.
Paoli jump-started the XML activity in Microsoft, creating and managing the team that delivered MSXML, the software that XML-enabled both Internet Explorer and the Windows operating system. He helped architect the XML support in the Microsoft Office System and was instrumental in creating the Microsoft Office InfoPath program.
Until 1996, when he joined Microsoft, Jean was based in Paris, where he worked in collaboration with European research institutes, including INRIA in France. Jean has been a significant player in the worldwide XML and SGML community since 1985.
"Jean helped lead the movement to make XML a core component of many Microsoft products, such as Office and Windows, as well as the foundation for integration between systems with XML-based Web services," said Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, when Paoli recently won the XML Cup 2004 for services to the XML community.
Other SYS-CON stories about Jean Paoli
Gates: "We're Delighted" - As Microsoft's Jean Paoli Wins Industry Plaudit
John Patrick
Brief Description: Former VP of Internet technology at IBM, now "e-tired"
Further Details:
John Patrick was vice president of Internet Technology at IBM Corporation, where he worked for 34 years until he "e-tired" at the end of 2001. Widely described as a leading Internet visionary, Patrick believes the next generation of the Internet is about to make today's Internet seem primitive.
During his IBM career, Patrick helped start IBM's leasing business at IBM Credit Corporation, and was senior marketing executive during the launch of the IBM ThinkPad. It was in the early 1990s, that he bagn dedicating his time to fostering Internet technologies.
His blog is one of the most-read in the industry, and here he not only continues to expound on his theory that only 4-5% of the Internet's potential is being used, but also packs it full of other observations and insights too.
"Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could," he has said, adding:
"I think this blog phenomenon is one of those things that comes along every decade or so and gets completely underestimated by just about everybody. It's very much like what's going on with Wi-Fi now, and very much what happened with the Web ten years ago. Blogs are a whole new Internet channel, yet another example of how the Internet has made it possible for new ideas to come along and change the status quo."
Rob Pike
Brief Description: An early developer of Unix and windowing system (GUI) technology
Further Details:
From 1980 until 2002 when he joined Google, Rob Pike was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
In 1980 too he won an Olympic silver medal in Archery.
In 1981 he wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix systems, and has since written ten more. With Bart Locanthi he designed the Blit terminal; with Brian Kernighan he wrote The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. A shuttle mission nearly launched a gamma-ray telescope he designed. He is a Canadian citizen and has never written a program that uses cursor addressing.
He is now a member of the Systems Lab at Google, Inc. "The Web is too large to fit on a single machine," he says, "so it's no surprise that searching the Web requires the coordination of many machines, too. A single Google query may touch over a thousand machines before the results are returned to the user, all in a fraction of a second."
"With all those machines, the opportunities for parallelism and distributed computation are offset by the likelihood of hardware failure. If one machine breaks on average every few years, a pool of a thousand machines will have machines break on a daily basis. A key part of the Google story is that by designing a system to cope with breakage, we can provide not only robustness, but also parallelizability, efficiency, and economies of scale."
Other SYS-CON stories about Rob Pike
"OO Isn't Everything," Says Unix Veteran Rob Pike
Dennis Ritchie
Brief Description: Creator of C and coinventor (with Ken Thompson) of Unix
Further Details:
Here's how Ritchie describes the creation of C:
"Early in the development of Unix, I added data types and new syntax to Thompson's B language, thus producing the new language C. C was the foundation for the portability of Unix, but it has become widely used in other contexts as well; much application and system development for computers of all sizes, from hand-held to supercomputer, uses it. There are unified U.S. and international standards for the language, and it is the basis for Stroustrup's work on its descendant C++."
Nowhere is the career of Dennis Ritchie better summarized than at the Bell Labs Web site, where it is distilled in the following few lines:
1941 -- Born in Bronxville, N.Y.
1963 -- Graduates from Harvard University with a B.S. in Physics
1968 -- Receives from Harvard University a Ph.D. in mathematics
1967 -- Joins Bell Labs, following his father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there
1968 -- Joins the Bell Labs team working on Multics, a joint effort of Bell Labs, MIT and GE to develop a general computer operating system
1972 -- Creates C language
1989 -- Receives with Ken Thompson the NEC C&C Prize for significant contributions to computer technology
1983 -- Named Bell Labs Fellow
1988 -- Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering
1990 -- Appointed head, System Software Research Department in the Computer Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, N.J.
1995 -- Heads the effort to create the Plan 9 operating system
1996 -- Heads the effort to create the Inferno(TM) operating system
1998 -- Awarded with Kenneth Thompson the U.S. National Medal of Technology for the development of the UNIX system
Other SYS-CON stories about Dennis Ritchie
You've Come a Long Way, Unix
Richard Stallman
Brief Description: Free software movement's leading figure; founder of the GNU Project
Further Details:
Best known for his role as "The saint of free software," Richard M. Stallman - who prefers to be known as RMS - is rumored to have walked in off the street, while he was an undergraduate at Harvard, and got himself a job at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971.
In the 1980s Stallman left MIT's payroll but continued to work from an office at MIT. Here he created a new operating system called GNU - short for GNU's Not Unix - that would give computer users the freedom that most of them had in his view lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small.
Stallman is the principal or initial author of GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, the GNU Debugger GDB and parts of other packages.
An extremely full life has seen RMS receive a $240,000 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, and has also seen him found the Free Software Foundation - of which he is President.
Other SYS-CON stories about Richard Stallman
The Free Software Community After 20 Years
Richard Stallman: The Free Software Movement *Is* Politics
Java Viewpoint: Free But Shackled - The "Java Trap"
Linux, GNU, and Freedom
Bjarne Stroustrup
Brief Description: The designer and original implementor of C++
Further Details:
Danish-born Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of C++, one of the most widely used languages that allows object-oriented programming. He also authored The C++ Programming Language and The Design and Evolution of C++.
Until recently he headed AT&T Labs's large-scale programming research department in New Jersey, though now he is the College of Engineering Chair Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University.
He retains a link with AT&T Labs Research as a member of the Information and Systems Software Research Lab.
Stroustrup was elected member of The National Academy of Engineering in 2004 and was given the IEEE Computer Society's 2004 Computer Entrepreneur Award. He is an AT&T Bell Laboratories Fellow and an AT&T Fellow. He is actively involved in the ANSI/ISO standardization of C++.
Born in Aarhus, Denmark, in 1950, he went on to study for a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cambridge University in England (1979).
Interviewed by LinuxWorld.com in 2001, Stroustrup was candid:
LinuxWorld.com: It seems that C++ has failed in one important frontier: language advocacy. Many people still mistakenly believe that C++ is inherently slower than C, and the media, often failing to acknowledge that C++ is the most widely used general-purpose programming language, focuses on other overhyped languages instead. Where did we go wrong and what can be done to fix this?
Bjarne Stroustrup: C++ succeeded spectacularly in advocacy where it initially mattered most: getting millions of programmers to use it. Amazingly, this was achieved with no organization and essentially no resources. This may have made the C++ community complacent, definitely fragmented, and vulnerable to hostile propaganda. I suspect that the real problem is that good code is invisible -- even to its users. Consider C++ programs such as Netscape and Internet Explorer. Corporations that produce software for real-world tasks -- such as telecommunications management, engine control, and simulations -- don't advertise which languages they use. Unfortunately, that leaves the image-making to software tools vendors and academics.
C++ never had the backing of a major vendor. Every major vendor pushes -- and always pushed -- some proprietary language over C++. C++ never had marketing clout; where marketing was done, it was mostly done by organizations selling something else (such as a software development environment) that happened to include C++. Also, the C++ community suffers from the very success of C++: It is clearly "the one to beat" and in today's heavily commercialized world, a fair fight is a rarity.
Other SYS-CON stories about Bjarne Stroustrup
An interview with Bjarne Stroustrup
An interview with Bjarne Stroustrup
Andy Tanenbaum
Brief Description: Professor of computer science, author of Minix
Further Details:
Andy Tanenbaum - Andrew S. Tanenbaum in full - is professor of Computer Science in the department of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands.
In his own right the "Father of MINIX," he is perhaps best known for the so-called "Who wrote Linux?" kerfuffle, in which an anti-Linux lobbyist - Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution - twisted his words to make it sound as if he'd denied that Linus Torvalds was the true author of Linux.
MINIX (now in v 2.0) is a free UNIX clone that is available with all the source code. Due to its small size, microkernel-based design, and ample documentation, it's well suited to people who want to run a UNIX-like system on their personal computer and learn about how such systems work inside. "It is quite feasible for a person unfamiliar with operating system internals to understand nearly the entire system with a few months of use and study," says Tanenbaum.
Since its introduction in January 1987, there has been a large an active USENET newsgroup about MINIX, comp.os.minix. Tens of thousands of messages have been posted to this group so far. These messages have contained questions, bug reports, bug fixes, and new software. New users can ask questions and join discussions there.
Other SYS-CON stories about Andy Tanenbaum
"Father of MINIX," Andy Tanenbaum, on Kenneth Brown's Claims Re Linux
Ken Thompson
Brief Description: Coinventor (with Dennis Ritchie) of Unix
Further Details:
Ken Thompson's career is nowhere summarized better than at the Bell Labs Web site, where it is packed into just a few lines, as follows:
1943 -- Born in New Orleans, Louisiana
1943-1960 - Navy brat moving every few years
1965-66 -- Graduates with B.S and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California
at Berkeley 1966 -- Joins Bell Labs Computing Research Department, working on the Multics project
1969 -- Develops UNIX* operating system
1970 -- Writes B language, precursor to Dennis Ritchie's C language
1971 -- Moves UNIX from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11
1973 -- Rewrites UNIX in Dennis Ritchie's C language
1973 -- Rewrites portions of UNIX to include Doug McIlroy's concept of pipes
1975-6 -- Visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley
1980 -- "Belle," a chess-playing computer he developed with Joe H. Condon, wins the U.S. and World Computing Chess Championships
1980 -- Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering
1983 -- Named Bell Labs Fellow
1983 -- Receives with Dennis Ritchie the ACM Turing Award
1980 -- Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Science
1988 -- Visiting professor at the University of Sydney, Australia
1998 -- Awarded with Dennis Ritchie the National Medal of Technology for the development of the UNIX system
2000 -- Retires from Bell Labs
Other SYS-CON stories about Ken Thompson
You've Come a Long Way, Unix
Linus Torvalds
Brief Description: "Benevolent dictator" of the Linux kernel
Further Details:
Already named in 2004 one of the most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, Linus Torvalds also won one of this year's prestigious Innovations Awards, organized by The Economist.
When asked recently what makes him believe Linux will continue to gain momentum, Torvalds replied: "I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things," continuing:
"I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge."
Linux, he feels - and open source software in general - has history on its side.
When asked in August 2004 by BusinessWeek whether as leader of what BW called the Linux movement he was a "benevolent dictator" or not, Torvalds was refreshingly honest.
"I am a dictator," he conceded. "But it's the right kind of dictatorship."
The award, from The Economist magazine, was presented to Torvalds at a ceremony in San Francisco. His innovation award, for Linux, was in the Computing category.
Here is the citation in full, which in its rather dry form is more or less a History of Linux in a Nutshell:
"Computing, Linux: Linus Torvalds, Fellow, Open Source Development Lab. Torvalds originated Linux in 1991 as a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Dissatisfied with the MS-DOS (and early Windows) operating system standard prevalent on PCs, Torvalds made Linux freely available for downloading, releasing the source code so that people with knowledge of computer programming could modify Linux to suit their own needs. The software created a huge following, eventually attracting big industry players such as Oracle, IBM, Intel, Netscape and others. It also spawned several new software companies, including Red Hat, SUSE LINUX and Turbolinux. Today, there are hundreds of millions of copies of Linux running on servers, desktop computers, network equipment and in embedded devices worldwide. With the support of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), Torvalds now works exclusively on vendor-independent, neutral development of the Linux kernel."
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Linus Torvalds Reveals How He Herds the Cats of the Linux Kernel
Torvalds: "I'll Be Really Happy If Sun Ends Up Being A Good Open-Source Player"
Linus Declares "GPL is No Hippie Dream"
Software Patents: Mr Linux, Mr MySQL, and Mr PHP Appeal to the EU Council
Software & Patents: "Linus Is Wrong," Says UK Lawyer
"We Are Not Proprietary," Protests Red Hat - Torvalds Agrees
Linux Quote of the Week: From Linus Torvalds
Happy Birthday, Linus Benedict Torvalds
Linus' Top Ten SCO Barbs
Linus Takes His Turn Center Stage: 'Darl - Please Grow Up'
Alan Turing
Brief Description: Mathematician; author of the seminal 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
Further Details:
Widely deemed to be the de facto founder of computer science, Alan Mathison Turing was one of the great pioneers of the computer field. He inspired the now common terms of "The Turing Machine" and "Turing's Test." As a mathematician he applied the concept of the algorithm to digital computers. His research into the relationships between machines and nature created the field of artificial intelligence. His intelligence and foresight made him one of the first to step into the information age.
Upon graduating from King's College, Cambridge, he was made a Fellow and then moved on to Princeton University, where he explored what was later called the "Turing Machine" - essentially the same as today's multi-purpose computers. He described a machine that would read a series of ones and zeros from a tape. These ones and zeros described the steps that needed to be done to solve a particular problem or perform a certain task. The Turing Machine would read each of the steps and perform them in sequence, resulting in the proper answer.
This concept was revolutionary for the time. Most computers in the 1950s were designed for a particular purpose or a limited range of purposes. What Turing envisioned was a machine that could do anything, something that we take for granted today. The method of instructing the computer was very important in Turing's concept. He essentially described a machine which knew a few simple instructions. Making the computer perform a particular task was simply a matter of breaking the job down into a series of these simple instructions. This is identical to the process programmers go through today. He believed that an algorithm could be developed for most any problem. The hard part was determining what the simple steps were and how to break down the larger problems.
During World War II, Turing used his knowledge and ideas in the Department of Communications in Great Britain. There he used his mathematical skills to decipher the codes the Germans were using to communicate. This was an especially difficult task because the Germans had developed a type of computer called the Enigma. It was able to generate a constantly changing code that was impossible for the code breakers to decipher in a timely fashion.
During his time with the Department of Communications in Great Britain, Turing and his fellow scientists worked with a device called COLOSSUS. The COLOSSUS quickly and efficiently deciphered the German codes created by the Enigma. COLOSSUS was essentially a bunch of servomotors and metal, but it was one of the first steps toward the digital computer.
After World War II Turing went on to work for the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and continued his research into digital computers. Here he worked on developing the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), one of the first attempts at creating a true digital computer. It was during this time that he began to explore the relationship between computers and nature. He wrote a paper called "Intelligent Machinery" which was later published in 1969. This was one of the first times the concept of artificial intelligence was raised.
Turing was truly one of the great forerunners in the field of computers. Today's computer scientists still refer to his papers. The concept of the algorithm lies at the heart of every computer program for any type of digital computer.
[Biography by John M. Kowalik]
Ann Winblad
Brief Description: Former programmer, co-founder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Further Details:
Co-founding Partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners in San Francisco, Ann Winblad is a well-known and respected software industry entrepreneur and technology leader.
She began her 25-year career in the software industry as a systems programmer at the Federal Reserve Bank. In 1976 Ann co-founded Open Systems, Inc., a top selling accounting software company, with a $500 investment. She operated Open Systems profitably for six years and then sold it for over $15 million.
Prior to co-founding Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Winblad served as a strategy consultant for prestigious clients such as IBM, Microsoft, Price Waterhouse, and numerous start-ups. In addition, she co-authored the book Object-Oriented Software and has written articles for numerous publications.
She has served as a Director of start-up and public companies and currently serves as a director of Dean & Deluca, Intacct, Market Wire, The Knot and Voltage Security. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of St. Thomas and is an advisor to numerous entrepreneur groups.
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