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Heroes of the Computer Age 136

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Roofus writes "Troubleshooters.com has an awesome article on the Heroes of the Digital Age. Its got just about all the big names you can think of, and some you'd rather not think of :) " (CT:Back to hauling couchs for me. Ugh)
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Heroes of the Computer Age More

Heroes of the Computer Age

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  • You're pretty much right about the PC issue (although RMS is not particularly a PC guy).

    How about the founders of Sun? (I forget exactly who they were.) The way I've always heard the mythology, they graduated college and immediately started up this company...and at the time, no one understood their slogan, "The network is the computer." Only years later did people see what they were talking about. Overall, a good article, though. Every culture needs heroes.

  • A comfy thought about bill (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here's a very comforting thought. If the Bill Gates and Paul Allen of the 1970s were around today, they'd be using Linux. Put THAT in your crack pipe and smoke it!

  • One of Bill's first heroic acts (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From the official Microsoft time line:

    2/3/76 Bill Gates is one of the first programmers to raise the issue of software piracy. In his "An Open Letter to Hobbyists," first published in Computer Notes, Gates accuses hobbyists of stealing software and thus preventing "...good
    software from being written." He prophetically concludes with the line, "...Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software."

    It was a deluge alright - more like a mudslide.

  • Re:A comfy thought about bill (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ah yes, without Bill & Paul we'd all be blissfully running our S-100 machines in the basement. Writing bootstrap code with diode arrays and our soldering irons.

    All evil does not emanate from commercialization. In fact, without the tremendous bloat that commercial software evolution has produced, there wouldn't be the market incentive to produce cheap powerful hardware good enough to run complex OSes like Linux.

    Think of it this way: Every time a new OS from Microsoft comes out and orphans another generation of powerful hardware, it's more free MIPS for Linux. In fact, if Windows 2000 won't run on anything less than a 400 MHz Pentium II, that means there will be TONS of cheap hardware on the used market to run Linux on. Go bloatware, go!

  • Yes, Bill Gates *was* a hero. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Are there people more power mad than Bill Gates?
    Yes, ther were: Steve Jobs of Apple and the Brooks Brothers suited clones who ran IBM. If you didn't have the pirated source code to unix, which wouldn't compile on any machine that you could afford, then getting an 8086 assembler and the BIOS listings to the original PC was a truly revolutionary act.

    I confess, under the guise of Anonymous Cowardice, to have once rooted for Microsoft and the destruction of Apple and IBM. I renounced my allegiance with the arrival of Windows and the bullsh** "your code ain't going nowhere else" compiler mentality shoved down our throats by Mr. Gates.

    Take your MFC and keep 'em, Bill. The now and future development models are now common property.
  • K&R didn't work much on PCs, which is the focus of this article.


    ...phil
  • Tim Berners-Lee gets my vote. He invented the WWW out of nothing.

    Actually, if you look, you'll find lots of similarities between early versions of www and Gopher. WWW is Gopher, rev 2.


    ...phil
  • "Fire in the valley". It was written somewhere pre 1990, actually, probably pre 1985, and does have a good deal of info about Apple.
  • Posted by bSMfh (bastard ScoutMaster fro:

    yup. i'm one of them, thanks to leor.

    BDS C, Z80's, CP/M, don't you wish it was still
    that simple?

  • How could they leave off the inventor of the Internet? :) Without Al Gore we wouldn't have e-business, or online kiddie porn, or even /.!

    For the clueless, this is meant completely toungue in cheek.

  • You forgot Tommy Flowers. But then so does everybody else. Tommy designed and built Colossus, the first electronic computer in 194?.
  • Did you catch the link in the URL section at the bottom to Microsoft's computer history timeline [microsoft.com]? Still hasn't loaded for me yet, so I can't say anything about it, but it oughta be interesting to compare what Microsoft considers worthy of inclusion to what we would consider worthy of inclusion...
    -----
  • Jeez, this article makes *me* feel old, and I'm only 25.

    Where's Don Knuth (*the* book on programming *and* TeX, how cool is htat?) ?

    Leslie Lampton? (LaTeX, sure, but he also invented the Lampton Clock, and much more)

    Marvin Minski.

    Fred Brooks (mebbe he was wrong in places, but he certainly laid foundations).

    Computer people *need* to know their history, so we can avoid repeating mistakes (and we can realise that some of the ideas we abandoned weren't mistakes after all [muttering about terminals])


    --
  • The ESR (or "RMS" as you spell it) paper is available here [tuxedo.org].

  • Borland was cool. I liked their attitude in the license they put on their software, 'Borland No-Nonsense License', where you were told to use the product like a book. And their software was cheap, and better than MS, and easier to use, with better docs and plenty of code examples. You could even buy the source code for their libraries. They were a breath of fresh air back then.

  • Geez. Kibo hasn't replied to this post yet? If this were usenet, I'd think something had gone horribly horribly right^H^H^H^H^H wrong.

  • That was awful. You'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. ;)

    I invented artificial dairy sweeteners, and for that I'm sorry.
  • Well Albequerque was where MITS was located. IIRC, Gates was at that time failing at Harvard and Allen was working for Honeywell. Gates convinced Allen to quit his job and go to Albequerque whilst Gates stayed in Cambridge. They developed a BASIC for the Altair using computers at Harvard, and managed to get some sort of deal with MITS.

    Although they had already developed some stuff (a car-counter, as Traf-O-Data, or something like that) they really weren't doing crap until the Altair came along. 4.1 seconds after deciding to sell their BASIC software, Bill decided that other people copying his software was bad. He has not yet come to the conclusion that his copying other people's software is bad. ;)
  • well, i hope so... BeOS is cute :)
    --

  • Don't forget that Steven Levy [echonyc.com] wrote one of the definitive works on the subject, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution [echonyc.com]. An excellent book, even fifteen years later.

    Schwab

  • While there are many heroes in the digital age, there is only one god. His name was Seymour Cray. Starting with Univac, then to CDC, and then to Cray, he was at the leading edge of high speed computing. We're not talking about some teeny little micro-computer. No way dude, Cray designed and built some serious heavy metal. And he was not just some stuffed shirt sitting in a corporate office; Cray was the lead designer (up to the later model Crays).

    Seymour Cray is the god of the digital age.
    (And I just know that someone is gonna mention beowolf):)
  • Hi All....

    I just sent this letter to Steve Litt (editor of the magazine this list came from) and thought you might all be interested in it. I've just read through your "Where have all the heroes gone?" article (via SlashDot). Good job! I wonder though, why you started at so late a year.

    My mind suggests a candidate I feel your list is sorely lacking: Ken, Dennis, and Brian (as one).

    Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, together, in 1969-70, created an operating system known as UNIX that forms the formation of many later operating systems today (certainly of Windows and Linux).

    Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan designed a language that made many things possible. This language, called "C" was later used to rewrite the UNIX kernel (until then in assembler). For the first time (ASAIK) it was possible to develop operating systems in 3rd Generation code, rather than in machine language. By far the vast majority of software available today was either written or C (or in C derivatives, like C++), or in languages written in C (the source for Perl, VB etc is C/C++). C is truly the closest thing to a common language in computing today. If a platform can't compile C, it isn't really viable.

    As for tomorrows heroes, heroism is only decided in hindsight. However, two candidates suggest themselves easily to me: Eric S. Raymond, and Jamie Zawinski.

    Eric Raymond (ESR) is leading the popular front of envangelism for the free software community. This is a position that draws a lot of fire from all concerned.

    Jamie Zawinksi (jwz) is the prime instigator (albeit armed with ESR's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay) of Netscape Corp.'s recent push to release their flagship product as open-source.

  • I emailed the author and informed him of this error.

    But hey most NeXT innovations have been as quickly forgotten... which is always the case in the computer field.
    ---
    Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...

  • hah (Score:1)

    by prok ( 8502 )
    "The Homebrew Computer Club quickly formed in Silicon Valley. Bill Gates and Paul Allen dropped what they were doing and moved down to Albuquerque to be part of the action."

    What was so hot about Albequerque? Oh why does it matter... whats so hot about Redmond?
  • He explains why it's such a shoddy job... He did it in one day doing his research on the web. Do you believe everything you read on the web?

    (I know a web page [newmedianews.com] where a supposedly knowledgeable person tells a reputable interviewer that the Gavilan was the first laptop computer. (Not even close.))

    And contrary to popular opionion, the MITS machine was not the first PC [blinkenlights.com]. (Not even close.)

    Furthermore, he left out all kinds of important milestones:

    • Doug Englebart [stanford.edu] and co's work with the mouse, user interfaces, and more (1969)
    • The Xerox Parc [xerox.com] innovations [spies.com], including GUI's, ethernet, laser printers, and more (mid-70's)
    • Dynalogic, Kyocera, GRiD, Sharp, and more, who gave us portable computing as we know it (early 80's)

    There are plenty of others, of course. Some of the names he left out -- Englebart, Metcalfe, Kay, Berkeley, Sutherland, and so on, are equally, if not more, important than the names on his list.

    To find out more [plug:] check out the Vintage Computer Festival [siconic.com] or my site [sinasohn.com].

    This guy did a bad job of research resulting in another incomplete and misleading web page.

  • It's late, I'm tired, I hit the wrong button. This [xerox.com] is the correct link for Xerox's PARC [xerox.com].

    Perhaps there should be at least one mandatory preview of each comment? (I meant to preview it, honest!)

  • Alan Kay is my personal hero too (and can you believe I went and left the digital camera behind when I knew I might have a chance to get a picture with him? (Let alone have him autograph my Xerox PARC [xerox.com] Frisbee [sinasohn.com]!)!) but you may want to check out a little more history [siconic.com] before giving him all the credit. 8^)

    Some of the ideas and innovations you mentioned should rightly be credited to Douglas Englebart [kzoo.edu]. They worked together, and Englebart wasn't the only one on the team, but the work at PARC came after the work done in the late 60's at the Stanford Research Institute [stanford.edu].

  • You got most of my uber-heroes -- Grace Hopper, Alan Kay, and Doug Englebart. Not saying they are the most important or anything, (though they're all pretty damn important!), they're just the ones who were/are significant to me personally.

  • For that matter, what about Bushnell and Tramiel? (hey, if billgates is a hero, why not Jack? 8^) Seriously, woefully inadequate from all aspects.

  • The difference being that in this country (in theory, at least) the psychotics are free to go on being as psychotic as they like, so long as they don't infringe upon the rights of others to be non-psychotic.

    (I'm a psycho, he's a psycho, wouldn't ya like to be a psycho too? be a psycho, yes be a psycho...)

  • XBase didn't die any more than Cobol did. Many, many applications still run on top of it.
  • "They" missed it because there's no "they", it's just my good buddy Steve Litt.

    He did pretty good for one overworked guy, IMHO.
  • Tim Berners-Lee gets my vote. He invented the WWW out of nothing. Andresson should get credit too, but heck, he had something to start with, and basically gussied up the WWW with a graphical interface.
  • Here's my proposed list of heroes who should have made the cut but didn't:

    - Alan Turing
    - Eckhart and Mauchly, Atanasoff
    - Doug Englebart (the father of mouse based computing)
    - G.M. Hopper (laugh all you want, she saved you from doing machine code the rest of your life)
    - Thompson and Ritchie
    - Ted Nelson (invented concept of hypertext)
    - Tim Berners-Lee
    - Alan Kay, Bob Metcalfe and the Xerox Star Team

  • Others have mentioned these guys, and I'll do so again. I saw at least one comment about K&R earlier (something silly about not belonging on the list, and yes, I know Brian Kernighan isn't Ken Thompson), and all I have to say about that, is you were WRONG.

    What I really found fascinating is that the linked article includes a blurb like this:

    Of course, C and Unix had formalized the chicken and egg development model years before, so he was on firm ground.

    Hmmm... let's see... 'he cribbed an idea from two guys who had basically invented the predominant O/S kernel and language development model for the next several decades, but we'll ignore them...'. Christ, besides Kildall, several others on his list mentioned in conjunction with O/S's freely lifted ideas from Unix as well. Let's face it, if Unix and C don't exist, then Linux, Perl and Python likely don't exist either.

    Let's see... the 2 guys directly responsible for the playground that 90% of the innovations in the article were born on don't rate a mention in the article... wow, that makes sense.

  • Good list just remove Negroponte. What has he done other than self-promotion and vapid speculation?

    Ok, so the desktop quantum computer is pretty cool, even though only 2(?) bits, but I bet the guy from Harvard did all the real work.
  • Borland was da bomb!

    I still use Turbo C++ v.2.0 for DOS for a lot of my development. Too bad it pushes me to like 100% CPU cycles in Win98. Some funky DOS thing.

    Too bad Borland was raided by MS a while ago.

    Of course I do spend most of my time in Emacs/gdb
    ( Yes, I have to flaunt my manliness lest you all think me a girly man for devloping in windows )
  • Yeah, didn't he build it at the same time that the turing et al were doing computer stuff at Blechly( is that where they were doing enigma decoding stuff or am I delusional) and Aiken was working on ENIAC?
    It seems like a case of the proper foundations in technology & science being in place thus making an invention almost inevitable.

    But one must also remember that there were tons of mechanical, and I believe electro-mechanical machines to do specialized calculations like solving differential equations.
  • ``I confess, under the guise of Anonymous Cowardice, to have once rooted for Microsoft and the destruction of Apple and IBM. I renounced my allegiance with the arrival of Windows and the bullsh** "your code ain't going nowhere else" compiler mentality shoved down our throats by Mr. Gates.''

    Pansy! I won't hide behind the AC moniker. I was an MS advocate but gave up on old Bill "Thulsa Doom" Gates et. al. back about '88-'89. Too many bugs were found in their compilers even back then. Windows 2.x was a joke, 3.0 wouldn't run on any of our PCs (hell, it wasn't even stable enough to run Solitaire on our standard '286), and all of your products got too expensive. It was easy to leave them behind in those days since we were a PDP and VAX shop (That was one of the reasons that I pushed for the MS compiler was that it supposedly supported (the industry standard) VAX FORTRAN code -- it didn't for us and it sure wasn't easy to go into a staff meeting and say:

    ``You guys remember all those comments we had you put in your code? Yah, that's right, all those inline comments. Well, you're going to have to convert them to the old style. Oh, and here's a list of all the other VAX FORTRAN things that aren't going to compile. Sorry.''

    Then the damned Macro assembler couldn't even generate correct fsin instructions. (Or was it fcos? I can't remember now. All I know was that it screwed up my FFT results royally and I never knew whether MS fixed the problem or not. Such is their superb support system.)

    Sorry, Bill. MS products began departing my PCs over ten years ago thanks to your overreaching greed. My '386 switched over to Coherent. My '486 ran Consensys's SVR4.2, and now my PPros run Linux. Yes, now and again Windows made it back onto one of my systems (to support work brought home) but it was in as small a partition as I could make for it. Since purchasing Applixware I have no more use for you and your poorly written software.

    And by the way, Bill, using PCs is FUN AGAIN!

  • I don't know about Ted Nelson, he seems to be sort of a crackpot in the stuff of his I've read with all his Xanadu crap. But, I give a big "Amen!" to Alan Turing. That guy had mad flava.

    Cody
  • Jean-Louis kicks out the jams! He'll soon be incredibly rich since Be is officially going public, too.
  • Oh my *gosh* , how could they miss this ??????
  • Then why the heck are these two listed ???
    I'd wager there are more PC programs written in C than PC programs written in Phyton and Perl combined (and multiplied by 10,000 taken to the power of 5)!!!!
  • Where do we report moderator abuse. I see no reason why this comment has to be moderated down !!!
  • My last post was refuting the idea posted that the list was only for "PC luminaries" (see the comment before my response). So I don't know what your reply means in that context.

    My first post was just expressing a little disbelief that these 2 guys could be missed, since in my world view they are about the foremost contributors to computer science. Of course, I understand the list is not supposed to be complete, but that doesn't negate the fact that I'm surprised nobody mentioned them.
  • ...telling him I was pretty dismayed by his implications that Marc alone invented the WWW and wrote Mosaic. Should we consider lucky that he didn't write about Marc creating Windows, MacOS and Linux?

    Regarding the WWW idea, a (probably reliable) account can be found at http://www.w3.org/WWW/ [w3.org]. I also found out some design documents dated 1989 (how old was Marc our hero then? 14?).

    Don't get me wrong: Marc is a VIP. It's just that what I've read sounded plain wrong.

    Many, many bright people contributed to build the computers and tools we use today. Some of them are remembered of, some of them are not, that's life. But I would feel more comfortable reading an history that doesn't look like it has been somehow rewritten...

  • Uhh... someone moderated my post *down*? It wasn't score 2 material, but it didn't deserve that.
  • Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie!
  • Don't forget Al Gore also invented the algorithm !

  • Marc, but not Jon or Tim? (Score:3)

    by Industrial Disease ( 16177 ) on Thursday May 06, 1999 @02:47PM (#1901716) Homepage
    It's obvious that their list had a PC bias, but it's obvious from their comments about Marc Andreessen (sp?) that they do consider the net significant. So, why no mention of Jon Postel or Tim Berners-Lee?
  • Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the Windows/DOS era? IMO the people doing a Clipper port aren't heros they are idiots. XBase died let it rest in peace.
  • I'd rather write SQL then the pages and pages of code required to do anything relational in XBase. I've seen more poor examples of databases based on XBase than I care too.
  • >sorta like maybe Anakin Skywalker I guess...
    how very true

    >Just can't imagine Bill sacrificing everything to
    >redeem himself, but then, who would have after
    >the first film.

    yep, i beleive he *was* a hero of the 70's and some of the 80's (but def not the 90's)
    but as a businessman i think hes spot on. i mean, hey if noone likes ya anyway why not increase the billions apon billions of net worth...

    if only he had decided on pride of good programming than what is more profitable he would have many more freinds (or a freind)

  • Good old days...Hmmm... (Score:5)

    by evilpenguin ( 18720 ) on Thursday May 06, 1999 @03:53PM (#1901720)
    I think, when you take a look at where this article was published, that the lack of a Unix focus makes sense. This person has a background similar to mine. My father was an electrical engineer and I was interested in programming (I had done some BASIC and some assembly on timesahre systems). My dad and I started building an S-100 bus based Z80 system from scratch (anyone here ever build a wire-wrap computer component?). From 1976 to 1978 we were designing, building, and testing.

    Late in 1978 we started trying to boot the system. Failure after failure ensued as I debugged by boot BIOS code (Z80 assembler) and we debugged the hardware. (Tip for anyone who decides to build a computer from scratch: No tin sockets! Gold only!).

    Finally, sometime late in 1978 we booted up CP/M 1.4 and ran a program. I think the only people who could ever have had a thrill just like that were the people who built the first computers in the 40's and 50's.

    The fact that another, perhaps ulimately more important revolution involving Unix, C, and networking was going on at the same time does not make the pioneers of the "home computer" less important. In fact, when you hear the old timers of networking and Unix talk (and I've been using Unix of one sort or another since 1983 -- my old man came home with an Altos running [eek!] Xenix and said "this is important. Learn C." I sure as heck don't regret that!), they never imagined an Internet like the one today. The ubiquity of computing devices and their low cost is due to folks like Kildall as much as the power of internetworking is due to folks like Jon Postel and Ritchie and Thompson's Unix.

    If you just view the "Heroes" list as coming from the hobbyist bias, the list makes a whole lot of sense.

    On the negative side, I must admit that I cringed at "Mosaic, the first web browser" too... I used viola and cello before I ever heard of Mosaic.

    I guess I just think that rather than flame this one for its bias, let's just keep listing the Net and Unix heroes.

    Here are a few of mine (in no particular order and in no way meant to be complete):

    Jon Postel
    Tim Berners-Lee
    Phil Karn
    Brian Kernighan
    Dennis Ritchie
    Ken Thompson
    Doug Comer & W. Richard Stevens (for explaining it all to the rest of us)

  • Guys, why do you think only of hacking when you hear 'computers'? I seem to be the only one that would add these names:

    Alexei Pozhitnov
    Syd Meier
    John Carmack
  • Much like the two Steves did in California, Dennis spent his garage time building devices that let computers talk over phone lines. Sure, it had been done before, but now the devices were "intelligent." The Hayes command set is completely taken for granted every time your modem picks up the line and makes a call. I certainly think the company that single-handedly supported R&D for the entire modem industry through 1994 deserves a bit of credit. :)

    -Chris
  • ...that people who make Kaa's Law work do not like to be reminded of it.

    But really, I'm almost sure I've been moderated both up and down only because of my .sig.

    Kaa

  • All UNIX, PARC people are missing :( (Score:3)

    by Kaa ( 21510 ) on Thursday May 06, 1999 @01:34PM (#1901724) Homepage
    The article is a journalistic take on the pure PC world. All UNIX notables (except for Linus, who happened to be flavor-of-the-day) are missing. All PARC people who invented modern computing (mouse, bitmapped screen, object-oriented languages, etc.) are missing as well. Hardware people, Internet people, etc., etc. -- none present.

    Kaa
  • He would be on my list. He wrote a great C compiler (BDS C) for CP/M and sold it at a very reasonable price. The alternatives at the time were assembler, various dialects of BASIC and bloatware from Microsoft. Many people got their start in C and HLL programming with BDS C.
  • As an Acorn kiddie I'm loath to admit this, but Clive Sinclair was pivotal in bringing affordable computers to the masses. His little plastic door wedges (the ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum) introduced a whole generation to programming.

    If that's not important enough...
  • I understand your sentiment, but in all fairness Bill and Paul played a huge part in the computer industry's history. While what has grown today can be seen more like a cancer to some, its the early days of Dos -> windows 3.1 that has really pushed the PC market (after apple), integrating home and office PC's into one.

    Unfortunately this led to casualties of good systems ( I was a apple freak after the commadore days), and a 800 pound gorilla who doesn't play well with others, but still they have made an important mark in the computer revolution. And as we usher in the new millenium, we to shall play an important part in fueling the development of an even better os, whose motives derives from the the love of computing rather then the power of the buck.
  • No list of computer heroes could be complete without:

    John McCarthy: creator of Lisp, the first programming language that didn't suck.

    Ken Thompson: creator of the first operating system that didn't suck.

    Dennis Ritchie: creator of a programming language that's good enough for most purposes. Not perfect, not great, but good enough.

  • I mean... Well, the people they feature are the ones that really deserve to be featured - always have deserved and always will. I hate to admit it, but this is one of the places where both Gates and Stallman fit quite nicely together... But they left out a big amount of important people: Everyone before 1975. Everyone working for bigger computers. Maybe I misunderstood something, but I didnt see anywhere specified it was about personal computer history...
  • Well..Do you Americans know who Konrad Zuse was? He built the very first computer!
    But he didn't build it in the U.S. ... he built it in Germany, and it was mechanic.
    It was a programmable electro-mechanic computer. Unfortunately lots of it got destroyes during WW II. He even started building computers and calculators before WW II.

    I think he started it all,
    ENIAC was after him..

  • Wow, I'm surprised that there isn't more of a discussion going on about this book. Steve Litt's artice seems to be a very brief synopsis of Steven Levy's 430+ page book. Those of you looking for Kernigan and Ritchie to be included will still be disappointed, but the people/machines this book does cover, it covers well.

    From Levy's page, linked [echonyc.com] to above:

    The book is in three parts, exploring the canonical AI hackers of MIT, the hardware hackers who invented the personal computer industry in Silicon Valley, and the third-generation game hackers in the early 1980s.

    Having been written in 1984, the more recent heros aren't included. However if you want to know what life was like at MIT, from what they ate, to where they slept, to their ethics (winners and loosers), to the TMRC. Or, if you want to know about the Homebrew Computer Club, or what life was like at Sierra-Online and the sinful history of it's founders. If you want info on Richard Garriott (Lord British), Steven "Woz" Wozniak, Steve Russell (creator of the first arcade game, written on the PDP-1), David Silver (not from 90210), Richard Greenblatt and Tom Knight, Lee Felsenstein, John Draper (Captain Crunch), and a slew of others. Or if you're interested in a bit of history on the early machines such as the IBM 704, Altair 8800, Apple II, PDP-x, TX-0, Atari 800, plus some more.

    This isn't a text book, but rather a non-fiction story about "a unique new breed of American hero."

    Barnes and Noble have the book for online ordering [barnesandnoble.com] for $10.36.
  • for a description and picture of these guys, go to http://jonathanclark.com [jonathanclark.com] and click on Heros at the top.
  • I would add John von Neumann (sure is convenient to store your program in memory) and whoever should be credited for the transitor and its continuous miniaturization.
  • i found it pleasant to know that Bill wasn't always evil. (maybe he was just hiding it, who cares?)

    *chuckle* I'm not saying Altair BASIC wasn't a significant feat -- it was -- but Litt glosses over a couple things: it was written with stolen computer time (the "larger computer" vaguely mentioned was a Harvard PDP-10) and conceived with an outrageous lie about its delivery status, ironies which delight me to this day. See: http://exo.com/~wts/mits0014.HTM

  • George Gilder
    Carver Meade
    Gordon Bell
    Gordon Moore
    Andy Grove
    Nicholas Negroponte
  • Well I had him last :-) Actually, he did put together the Media Lab at MIT which in addition to extracting money from suits has an impressive list of alumni (Danny Hillis, Martin Minsky, etc.)
  • You obviously don't have a clue. Jay Miner was responsible for creating the Amiga and the Atari, both major players in the early days of personal computing. Jay Miner was a true hero of the digital age. If you want to read more about Miner, you can take a look at the memorial site of the Jay Miner Society [jms.org]

    By the way, I really can't understand why Gates is on this list. His efforts has only gone in to making personal profit (not that there's anything wrong in that, but it doesn't make you a hero), not improving computing. If anything, Microsoft probably have been one of the most limiting factors of the computer revolution.

    And what's this about Windows 3.0 multitasking? That was task-switching, and not very good either :)

  • I'm a Debian user in a RedHat house.
    Gotta hand-edit files to configure my mouse.
    Oh, I hate RPMs and I love dselect
    And FVWM95 can just go to heck.

    /* Thank you and good night! :) */
  • Gates' efforts went into 'popularizing' the personal computer. Which he has made a huge amount of money doing. Partially it was the result of being in the right place at the right time. And partially it was the result of being the right person at the right place at the right time. The article isn't a treatise on morals or ethics or being-a-nice-guy. It's intended to be a piece on history. (with all the weaknesses that anything of that sort has when written so soon after the fact)

  • The Lisa was bloatware.


    Apple ][c with the 80 column card.
    My first commercial app was deployed on a ][c. (Sigh) the good old days when (in at least one BASIC implementation) you would replace literal number references with concatenated variables because the variables tokenized to fewer bytes then the literal occupied...

    (sigh)(smile)
  • My Bust....My Bust....

    Writing w/ out thinkin'

    Sorry....

    ESR wrote it.....NOT RMS

    anyways...thanks for the link!!!!
  • I felt the same way. In fact, I wrote the author Steve Litt about it. He response was along the lines of "I had no idea the same person was
    responsible for both those wonderful machines." (Amiga 1000 & Atari 800), and he offered to put my letter in the "Letters to the editors" section of the next issue. If you'd like to see it earlier, I could post the letter here.
  • Yes, it is a SLAP in the face of our esteemed father of the internet. Without him and his catch phrases of the Information SuperHighway, we would only have 26 websites on the planet. (Bill Clinton said so, so it HAS to be true!)
    *Carlos: Exit Stage Right*

    "Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

  • Out of necessity came invention.

    Corporations like Oracle and IOmega provided much of that invention. Oracle was Big Blue's biggest competition in the initial haydays of the personal computer. Sure there was some "sneaky bastard" techniques being done, like the ROM chip fiasco, but all in all, the PC that you are using is a result of those early cutthroat tactics.
    *Carlos: Exit Stage Right*

    "Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

  • This is conjecture, right? Can anyone actually verify that this is what took place?

    It Certainly sounds believable.
  • Leslie Lampton? (LaTeX, sure, but he also invented the Lampton Clock, and much more)

    I thought it was Leslie Lamport who is connected to LaTeX?
  • My dad and I started building an S-100 bus based Z80 system from scratch (anyone here ever build a wire-wrap computer component?).

    I did! I was hand-building prototypes and short-run production units. We even had a hacked-up X-Y plotter as a wire-wrap guide, to take you from one pin to the next. Our company's claim to fame was "Pascal in a Prom".

    On the negative side, I must admit that I cringed at "Mosaic, the first web browser" too... I used viola and cello before I ever heard of Mosaic.

    I had nearly forgotten those ones, but yeah...

    I guess I just think that rather than flame this one for its bias, let's just keep listing the Net and Unix heroes.

    My favorite forgotten Computer Pioneer was the real father of computer graphics, John Whitney. This guy started making computer graphics before the CRT. He used a custom X-Y plotter and a light source to draw patterns directly onto film, using Army surplus analog computers! And his stuff still looks amazing.

  • What a pile of crap! Tim had a web browser running on NeXT long before Marc started screwing up the web with random, poorly-conceieved crap like the IMG tag. It's taken years of work to fix some of Marc's bad ideas. It's taken more years to rid the Netscape browser of Marc's "tag soup" method of rendering HTML (closer to the "rendering" done in a slaughterhouse than a method of display.)

    For him to get credit for "writing the first web browser" is so deeply offensive on so many levels. Hell, I remember using the "www" text browser long before Mosaic appeared. It was cooler than Gopher, but not as useful.

    Revisionist history is a game played by those who are not even in Redmond.

  • Of course this is so. A number of brilliant people were parties to that work, ergo the "Alan Kay and company" comment. No attribution of all right, title and interest in and to the GUI to Mr. Kay was intended.

    By the way, a fairly decent account of the PARC and pre-PARC days can be found in a facinating read entitled "Fumbling the Future."
  • Kaa made this point in a prior comment which was (IMHO)unduly moderated downward. I think in this modern age, we should not forget that a significant heritage was gifted to us by Alan Kay and company (indeed mice, GUI, modern oops and perhaps even the fundamental notion of a dedicated personal computer).

    I confess that I did not truly appreciate the scope and quality of this work (though I did understand from a textbook point of view the substance and historical importance of it) until I saw how virtually complete was even a slavish recreation of the bare naked Smalltalk 80 system (found among the superb work at Apple and now Disney with the open source Squeak Smalltalk project [uiuc.edu].

    Following Squeak's development made me appreciate more and more the significance of the building blocks for which these guys had poured the mortar.

  • /me bites the bait

    I don't think the author intended to provide a _complete_ history that suits _everybody's_ tastes. they did it to the best of their ability, time allowing. and included whom they thought deserved mention.. i found it pleasant to know that Bill wasn't always evil. (maybe he was just hiding it, who cares?)

    damn trolls. gawk gawk gawk

  • Just wondering if one can possibly find one of these around? Where and how much?

  • sorta like maybe Anakin Skywalker I guess...

    Just can't imagine Bill sacrificing everything to redeem himself, but then, who would have after the first film.
  • Or, as a less comfy thought, consider that Bills & Pauls of 70s are around today, that they are using Linux, and that they are just waiting to do to it what Bill & Paul did to the early PCs (copy, clone, fuck over till they bleed).
  • I don't think the "home computer" branch was mentioned at all. It simply was the IBM-PC branch. Have you ever heared about Commodore C64? Amiga? Millions of machines (C=64) sold? Preemtive multitasking and multimedia for home users since 1985 (Amiga)? This was the "home computer" branch back then.

    And of course, the article does not mention any of the people whose ideas made all the technology described there possible, like Niklaus Wirth (Pascal, the first programming language for which less than 10 people could write a working compiler in less than 10 years), the inventors of microprocessors, RISC, and so on.
  • Where would the internet be today if it wasn't for Vint Cerf (the co-father of the internet along with Al Gore), and Bolt, Baranec, and Neuman (I probably slaughtered the spelling of those names). I had dinner with a BBNNet guy the other night, and he said that BBN also made the frist router, and had it sitting on the shelf until someone came along to buy it. Not realizing what they had, they sold it. The people that it was sold to later formed Cisco. NG


    +--
    Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare.

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