IT greats: Top 10 greatest IT people
For every world-famous name with a
world-famous fortune – think Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell – there are hundreds of other individuals who
have moved the IT industry and its technology inexorably forward.
Fame and fortune has rarely been
their immediate spur. A passion for changing the world through technology is
the hallmark of the IT greats. Sometimes they have changed technology,
sometimes they have transformed the way technology is marketed or radically
altered the way IT is perceived by society.
Some have been involved in great
leaps forward, some have made incremental changes that have stood the test of
time.
Whatever the case, our industry is
truly one where we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and we are proud to
pay tribute to some of them in the results of our IT greats poll.
Top 10 greatest IT people
1. Steve Jobs
2. Tim Berners-Lee
3. Bill Gates
4. James Gosling
5. Linus Torvalds
6. Richard Stallman
7. Arthur C Clark
8. Ted Codd
9. Steve Shirley
10. Martha Lane Fox
1. Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple Computer,
topped the Computer Weekly 40th anniversary poll due to the devoted following
he has generated through his pioneering work in personal computing and product
design.
Jobs was born in 1955 in San
Francisco, and during his high school years he showed his early enthusiasm for
computing by attending after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in
Palo Alto, California. He met fellow Apple founder Steve Wozniak during a
summer job at HP.
In the autumn of 1974, Jobs, who had
dropped out of university after one term, began attending meetings of the
Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a
manufacturer of popular video games.
At the age of 21, Jobs saw a
computer that Wozniak had designed for his own use, and convinced his friend to
market the product.
Apple Computer was founded as a
partnership on 1 April 1976. Though the initial plan was to sell just printed
circuit boards, Jobs and Wozniak ended up creating a batch of completely
assembled computers, and entered the personal computer business.
Their second machine, the Apple II,
was introduced the following year and became a huge success, turning Apple into
an important player in the nascent personal computer industry.
In 1983, Apple launched the Lisa,
the first PC with a graphical user interface (GUI) – an essential element in
making computing accessible to the masses. It flopped because of its prohibitive
price, but the followin year Apple launched the distinct, lower priced
Macintosh and it became the first commercially successful GUI machine.
Despite his success in founding
Apple, Jobs left following a boardroom row in 1985. But his influence on the
computer industry did not end there.
Jobs moved on to found Next
Computer, then in 1986 he bought little known The Graphics Group from
Lucasfilm, which achieved global dominance in animated feature films during the
1990s, after being renamed Pixar.
Much of Next’s technology had
limited commercial success, but it laid the foundation for future computing
developments. The company pioneered the object-oriented software development
system, Ethernet port connectivity and collaborative software. It was the Next
interface builder that allowed Tim Berners-Lee to develop the original
worldwide web system at Cern.
Without Jobs, Apple had stumbled.
Market share fell while it struggled to release new operating systems. Its
answer was to buy Jobs’ company Next, together with its innovative operating
system, and welcome back its charismatic former CEO.
On returning to Apple, Jobs drove
the company ever deeper into the consumer electronics and computing market,
launching the iMac and iPod.
Steve Jobs died on
5 October 2011 after
a long battle with cancer, but his place in computing history is
guaranteed.
2. Tim Berners-Lee
Dot coms, bloggers and Google all
have one man to thank for their place in the 21st century world. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee made the imaginative leap to combine the
internet with the hypertext concept, and the worldwide web was born.
He was born in 1955 in London.
Berners-Lee’s parents were both mathematicians who were employed together on
the team that built the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers.
After attending school in London, Berners-Lee
went on to study physics at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL
gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. While at Oxford, he was caught
hacking with a friend and was subsequently banned from using the university
computer.
He worked at Plessey
Telecommunications from 1976 as a programmer and in 1980 began working as an
independent contractor at the European nuclear research centre Cern.
In December 1980, Berners-Lee
proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and
updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype
system called Enquire.
He joined Cern on a full-time basis
in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, Cern was the largest internet node in Europe, and
Berners-Lee saw an opportunity. “I just had to take the hypertext idea and
connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas,” he said – and the worldwide web was born.
He wrote his initial proposal in
March 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision
which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall.
He used similar ideas to those
underlying the Enquire system to create the worldwide web, for which he
designed and built the first web browser and editor – called World-wide Web and
developed on Nextstep – and the first web server called Hypertext Transfer
Protocol Daemon (HTTPD).
The first website built was at http://info.cern.ch/ and was put online on 6 August 1991. The URL is
still in use today. It provided an explanation of the worldwide web, how one
could own a browser and how to set up a web server. It was also the world’s
first web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other websites.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It comprised various companies willing to create standards and recommendations
to improve the quality of the web.
Berners-Lee made his ideas available
freely, with no patent and no royalties due. He is now a professor
at University of Oxford’s department of computer science, working
alongside his long-time research collaborator Nigel Shadbolt as a member of
Christ Church college. He is also a professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, and will continue to work on shaping
the future of the web through his work with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
and the World Wide Web Foundation.
3. Bill Gates
As joint founder of the world’s
biggest software company, Microsoft, Bill Gates’ approach to technology and business was instrumental
in making technology available to the masses.
Gates was born in Seattle,
Washington, in 1955 to a wealthy family: his father was a prominent lawyer and
his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and The United
Way.
At school, Gates excelled in
mathematics and the sciences, and by the age of 13 he was deeply engrossed in
software programming.
With other school mates he began
programming and bug fixing for the Computer Center Corporation, and in 1970
Gates formed a venture with fellow school student and Microsoft co-founder,
Paul Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters using the Intel 8008
processor.
In 1973, Gates enrolled at Harvard
University, where he met future business partner Steve Ballmer. Their first
venture was to develop a version of the Basic programming language for the
Altair 8800, one of the first microcomputers.
Soon afterwards Gates left Harvard
to found “Micro-Soft”, which later became Microsoft Corporation, with Allen.
Microsoft took off when Gates began licensing his MS-Dos operating systems to
manufacturers of IBM PC clones. Its drive to global dominance continued with
the development of Windows, its version of the graphical user interface, as an
addition to its Dos command line.
By the early 1990s, Windows had
driven other Dos-based GUIs such as Gem and Geos out of the market. It
performed a similar feat with the Office productivity suite.
Gates fought hard to establish Microsoft’s
dominant position in the software industry– and fought even harder to
defend it. His ability to get Microsoft software pre-installed on most PCs
shipped in the world made Microsoft the world’s largest software house and
Gates one of the world’s richest men. It also meant Microsoft found itself on the
wrong end of antitrust legislation in both the US and Europe.
Gates stood down as chief executive
of Microsoft in 2000 to focus on software development, and on 16 June 2006 he
announced that he would move to a part-time role with
Microsoft in 2008 to
focus on his philanthropic work.
Since 2000, Gates has given away
about £15.5bn – a third of his wealth – to charity. Such is his fame in the
world outside computing, fictional Gates characters have appeared in cartoons
including the Simpsons, South Park and Family
Guy.
4. James Gosling
Of your choice of the most
influential people in IT, James Gosling is the true geek. Unlike Bill Gates and Steve
Jobs, neither of whom finished college, Gosling completed a PhD in computer
science and contributed to software innovation at a technical level.
Born in 1955 near Calgary, Canada,
Gosling is best known as the father of the Java programming language, the first
programme language designed with the internet in mind and which could adapt to
highly distributed applications.
Gosling received a BSc in computer
science from the University of Calgary in 1977, and while working towards his
doctorate he created the original version of the Emacs text editor for Unix
(Gosmacs). He also built a multi-processor version of Unix, as well as several
compilers and mail systems before starting work in the industry.
In 1984, Gosling joined Sun
Microsystems, where he is currently chief technology officer in the developer
product group.
In the early 1990s, Gosling
initiated and led a project code-named Green that eventually became Java. Green
aimed to develop software that would run on a variety of computing devices
without having to be customised for each one.
Although much of the technology
developed as part of Green never saw the light of day, Gosling realised that
some of the underlying principles they had created would be very useful in the
internet age.
Sun formally launched Java in 1995.
Gosling did the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler
and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to the US National
Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other
software systems, such as Newa and Gosling Emacs.
Although some critics say Java has
not lived up to its initial “write-once-run-anywhere” claim, Gosling's success
in the Computer Weekly polls is precisely because Java has allowed the creation
of robust, reusable code which runs on devices as diverse at mobile phones, PCs
and mainframes.
5. Linus Torvalds
As the creator of the Linux
operating system, Linus Torvalds has been a driving force behind the whole open
source movement, which represents not only an ever increasing challenge to
proprietary software, but is also the inspiration for the industry to move to
open standards.
Torvalds remains the ultimate
authority on what new code is incorporated into the Linux kernel.
6. Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, an initiative
to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software.
Stallman has written several popular tools, created the GNU licence and
campaigns against software patents.
7. Arthur C Clarke
2001: A Space Odyssey writer Arthur C Clarke has consistently been
ahead of his time in predicting how technology will change the world. Most
notably, in 1945 he suggested that geostationary satellites would make ideal
telecoms relays.
8. Ted Codd
Ted Codd created 12 rules on which
every relational database is built - an essential ingredient for building
business computer systems.
9. Steve Shirley
Steve Shirley was an early champion of women in IT. She
founded the company now known as Xansa, pioneered new work practices and in
doing so created new opportunities for women in technology.
10. Martha Lane Fox
With Brent Hoberman, Martha Lane Fox created Lastminute.com in 1998, and as “the
face” of Lastminute raised the profile of e-commerce ever higher in the public
consciousness.
1955: a good year for computing
The top four people in our poll were
all born in 1955, making it a very beneficial year for the world of computing.
It may have been a good year for
computing, but 1955 was a sad year for science, as Albert Einstein died on 18
April.
It was also the year that the first
McDonald’s fast food franchise was opened: we’ll leave you to make up you own
mind about that one.
Your big names
Outside the main choices for greatest hardware, the
most popular readers’ suggestions were:
1.
Ken Olsen,
founder of Dec, who invented the minicomputer
2.
Clive Sinclair, home computer visionary
3.
Vint Cerf, one
of the internet's founding fathers
4.
Bill Joy,
co-founder of Sun Microsystems
5.
Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle
6.
Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder
7.
Dennis Ritchie,
inventor of the C programming language
8.
Donald Davies,
co-inventor of packet switching
9.
Ken Thompson,
co-creator of Unix
10.
Grace Hopper, Cobol pioneer
No comments:
Post a Comment