Computings Top Twenty?
I doubt so.
Recently, Tim Bray (the co-inventor of XML), published a list of people who he thought were the 'names' of software history. He mentions people who are related to software - in such great ranks as Tim Berners Lee (founder of the www), James Gosling (the Java guy), Dennis Ritchie (of C and UNIX fame), Richard Stallman (founder of the GNU project), and others.
But the list is FAR from complete. I will not attempt to complete his list, for I deem not myself worthy enough to challenge his opinions, but I will point to three of my computing idols, to narrow the gap.
1. Alan Kay - Creator of Smalltalk - the under-acclaimed and one of the earliest OOP languages out there. You can get a taste of the original by using this emulator right here: Sqeak Smalltalk. He also worked intensively with GUI's.
2. Steven Wozniak - and any list would be incomplete without this _outstanding_ engineer. Designer of the Apple II - the first mass-selling personal computer which could be used by human beings! It was the first computer to ship with a monitor! His design was so revolutionary that he accomplished 10 times the power of the low-cost computers from those days with just half the parts! It set the tone for what a Personal Computer should be like, and thus computing departed from tin boxes with lights on them, to set-top boxes and towers and keyboards and monitors and mice.
3. Douglas Engelbart - Nothing said about this incredible engineer will describe in full justice the incredible ideas he put forward. He set the tone for modern computing, and his ideas have only recently been brought to the masses: email, teleconferencing, collaborative computing, hypertext, the graphical interface idea, the mouse, a one-handed keyboard, online help systems and much much more! His ideas were materialized as the NLS, an integrated idea processing system, which met an unfortunate end. His vision, however, was an inspiration for engineers at XEROX PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), which created some impressive systems such at the ALTO, and the STAR. The work at PARC was in turn an inspiration for Apple which is, today, the leading innovator in computing technology.
I know I am missing out on a lot of people, but I'd write more about them when I have more time.
Recently, Tim Bray (the co-inventor of XML), published a list of people who he thought were the 'names' of software history. He mentions people who are related to software - in such great ranks as Tim Berners Lee (founder of the www), James Gosling (the Java guy), Dennis Ritchie (of C and UNIX fame), Richard Stallman (founder of the GNU project), and others.
But the list is FAR from complete. I will not attempt to complete his list, for I deem not myself worthy enough to challenge his opinions, but I will point to three of my computing idols, to narrow the gap.
1. Alan Kay - Creator of Smalltalk - the under-acclaimed and one of the earliest OOP languages out there. You can get a taste of the original by using this emulator right here: Sqeak Smalltalk. He also worked intensively with GUI's.
2. Steven Wozniak - and any list would be incomplete without this _outstanding_ engineer. Designer of the Apple II - the first mass-selling personal computer which could be used by human beings! It was the first computer to ship with a monitor! His design was so revolutionary that he accomplished 10 times the power of the low-cost computers from those days with just half the parts! It set the tone for what a Personal Computer should be like, and thus computing departed from tin boxes with lights on them, to set-top boxes and towers and keyboards and monitors and mice.
3. Douglas Engelbart - Nothing said about this incredible engineer will describe in full justice the incredible ideas he put forward. He set the tone for modern computing, and his ideas have only recently been brought to the masses: email, teleconferencing, collaborative computing, hypertext, the graphical interface idea, the mouse, a one-handed keyboard, online help systems and much much more! His ideas were materialized as the NLS, an integrated idea processing system, which met an unfortunate end. His vision, however, was an inspiration for engineers at XEROX PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), which created some impressive systems such at the ALTO, and the STAR. The work at PARC was in turn an inspiration for Apple which is, today, the leading innovator in computing technology.
I know I am missing out on a lot of people, but I'd write more about them when I have more time.
posted by Absar Shah at 11:35 PM
1 Comments:
[from SYS-CON Media whose readers' list this was, not Tim Bray's]
Asbar, thanks for the excellent feedback. Please take a look here to see how this exercise has now been widened and deepened thanks to excellent input like yours. A second round of voting will shortly begin...on a field broadened to include all three of the suggestions you make here, along with many, many more from among the hundreds of additional suggestions we received.
Duty Editors, SYS-CON.com
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