Alan Kay
Alan Kay, a Disney Fellow and Vice President of Research and Development for the Walt Disney Company, is best known for the idea of personal computing, the concept of the intimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern object-oriented programming.
His deep interest in children was the catalyst for these ideas, and it continues to inspire him. Kay was one of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he led one of the groups that in concert developed those ideas into modern workstations (and the forerunner of the Macintosh), the Smalltalk computer language, the overlapping-window interface, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, laser printing, and network "client servers".
Kay has received many awards, including ACM's Softwware Systems Award and the J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts.
Dan Bricklin
Dan Bricklin is currently president of Software Garden, Inc., a small developer of software applications that he founded in 1985.
Throughout his career, Mr. Bricklin has created innovative, cutting-edge products. Bricklin is best known for codeveloping VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, while he was a student at the Harvard Business School. VisiCalc is widely credited for fueling the rapid growth of the personal computer industry.
In late 1995, Dan founded Trellix Corporation, a provider of website publishing technology. In early 2003, Trellix was acquired by Interland, Inc., a supplier of web hosting solutions for small and medium sized businesses. Dan served as Interland's CTO through early 2004 when he returned to Software Garden to do software product development and consulting.
From 1985 through 1989, Mr. Bricklin served as president of Software Garden, Inc., where he developed a variety of software programs, including Dan Bricklin's Demo Program. The program, used for prototyping and simulating other pieces of software, won the 1986 and 1987 Software Publishers Association Award for Best Programming Tool. In 1990, Mr. Bricklin cofounded Slate Corporation to develop application software for pen computers.
Mr. Bricklin also founded Software Arts, where he served as chairman of the board and executive vice president from 1979 until 1985. Prior to forming Software Arts, he had been a market researcher for Prime Computer Inc., a senior systems programmer for FasFax Corporation, and a senior software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation. At Digital, he was project leader of the WPS-8 word processing software, where he helped to specify and develop one of the first standalone word processing systems.
Mr. Bricklin is a founding trustee of the Massachusetts Software and Internet Council and has served on the boards of the Software Publishers Association and the Boston Computer Society. Mr. Bricklin has received many honors for his contributions to the computer industry, including the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Entrepreneur Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Software Publishers Association. Along with VisiCalc co-creator Bob Frankston, he received the 2001 Washington Award from the Western Society of Engineers. Mr. Bricklin holds a BS in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from MIT and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Newbury College, and was elected to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Gary Kildall
Before the development of the IBM PC and the dominance of MS-DOS, almost all personal computers ran on CP/M, Kildall's operating system. In 1980 Kildall rejected an offer from IBM to license his operating system to run the new IBM PC. Instead, IBM bought a simple operating system from Bill Gates for $50,000, ensuring Microsoft's future prosperity.
On July 6 1994, Gary Kildall was killed in a brawl at a biker bar in Monterey.
John Backus
FORTRAN is the most successful and oldest computer language still in active use. The project began in 1954 under John Backus of IBM and the first customer’s program, which stopped with an error because of a missing comma, ran on April 20, 1957. This manual was written about 6 months before FORTRAN I was released.
Linus Torvalds
FORTRAN is the most successful and oldest computer language still Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel and oversaw open source development of the widely-used Linux operating system.
Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. Torvalds enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.
An avid computer programmer, Linus authored many gaming applications in his early years. After purchasing a personal computer with an Intel 386 CPU, he began using Minix, an Unix-inspired operating system created by Andrew Tannenbaum for use as a teaching tool. Torvalds started work on a new kernel, later to be named "Linux", in the fall of 1991 and after forming a team of volunteers to work on this new kernel, released V1.0 in the spring of 1994.
In 1996, Torvalds accepted an invitation to visit the California headquarters of Transmeta, a start-up company in the first stages of designing an energy saving central processing unit (CPU). Torvalds then accepted a position at Transmeta and moved to California with his family. Along with his work for Transmeta, Torvalds continued to oversee kernel development for Linux.
In 2003, Torvalds left Transmeta to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel, backed by the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium formed by high-tech companies, which included IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, RedHat, Novell and many others. The purpose of the consortium was to promote Linux development. OSDL merged with The Free Standards Group in January 2007 to become The Linux Foundation. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is the young co-founder and vice-president of technology of Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was founded by Andreessen and computer scientist-entrepreneur Jim Clark to develop and market an enhanced version of NCSA Mosaic, the first Internet browser, which Andreessen had helped write when he was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois.
By following the unlikely strategy of giving away the browser for free, Netscape has been able to make a lot of money. This was done by first by establishing Netscape’s browser (called Netscape Navigator) as the Internet standard, and then selling other kinds of network software for Internet and corporate use.
Netscape’s initial public offering (IPO), the most successful in Wall Street history, made Andreessen an instant multi-millionaire. As a stellar example of today’s information age entrepreneur, Andreessen has achieved a kind of celebrity status, and has made the cover of Time Magazine as the pre-eminent "super geek" of his generation.
Since its founding, Netscape has achieved a dominant share of the markets for Internet and intranet software at the same time that it has fueled the astronomical growth of the Word Wide Web and fundamentally shifted the software industry to a cross-platform, Internet-based standard. Since the end of 1995 Netscape’s share of Internet and corporate markets has come to be increasingly challenged by competitors, most notably software giant Microsoft. In one of the classic corporate campaigns in recent history, Microsoft has committed its massive resources to recapturing the Internet from Netscape.
In the midst of Netscape’s struggles for market share and survival, Marc Andreessen calmly continues in his role as long-term strategist and visionary while under close scrutiny by the business community and the media. At the same time, he lives a relatively quiet and modest life with his fiancée, Elizabeth Horn, in Mountain View, California.
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England, 1976. Whilst there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television.He spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd (Poole, Dorset, UK) a major UK Telecom equipment manufacturer, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology.
In 1978 Tim left Plessey to join D.G Nash Ltd (Ferndown, Dorset, UK), where he wrote among other things typesetting software for intelligent printers, and a multitasking operating system.
A year and a half spent as an independent consultant included a six month stint (Jun-Dec 1980)as consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Whilst there, he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information including using random associations. Named "Enquire", and never published, this program formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.
From 1981 until 1984, Tim worked at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, with technical design responsibility. Work here included real time control firmware, graphics and communications software, and a generic macro language. In 1984, he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. Among other things, he worked on FASTBUS system software and designed a heterogeneous remote procedure call system.
In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd", and the first client, "WorldWideWeb" a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. This work was started in October 1990, and the program "WorldWideWeb" first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
Through 1991 and 1993, Tim continued working on the design of the Web, coordinating feedback from users across the Internet. His initial specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.
In 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since that time he has served as the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium which coordinates Web development worldwide, with teams at MIT, at INRIA in France, and at Keio University in Japan. The Consortium takes as its goal to lead the Web to its full potential, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage. The Consortium may be found at http://www.w3.org/.
In 1999, he became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair at LCS, and is now a Senior Research Scientist within the Lab. The Lab merged with the AI lab to became "CSAIL", the Computer Science and Artificail Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.
William Henry "Bill" Gates III
Bill Gates (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, author, the world's third richest person (as of February 8, 2008), and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. Gates was the richest person in the world for 15 consecutive years. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is admired by many, a large number of industry insiders criticize his business tactics, which they consider anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.
Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January, 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June, 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates' last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008, he remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman.