
By Jeremy Geelan | Article Rating: |
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December 21, 2004 12:00 AM EST | Reads: |
379,345 |
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 earlier this year when knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and is due to return to the UK shortly 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."
Other SYS-CON stories about Tim Berners-Lee:
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Returning As Professor to the UK
Tim Berners-Lee Collects Ultimate Technology Accolade
Father of the Web Becomes "Sir Tim"
"Semantic Web" Is Getting Closer and Closer, Says Tim Berners-Lee
Published December 21, 2004 Reads 379,345
Copyright © 2004 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Jeremy Geelan
Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.
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Rev Aaron 12/11/04 05:26:55 PM EST | |||
No Alan Kay?! Half of the folks here wouldn't achieved what they had if it weren't for the work that Alan Kay and his partners at Xerox PARC had done. It has nothing to do with how much you like Smalltalk- it's still the base for so much of modern programming. You may not like to use a GUI, but the work they did- the invention of the GUI- has been incredibly important. Helluvan oversight. |
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Industry Perspective 12/11/04 05:26:05 PM EST | |||
If the list is from an Industry perspective (it seems to be a mixed biased perspective) it should include: OS/390 creators, particularily Fred Brooks for changing the way we think about software development Bill Gates for revolutionizing the industry and achieving world dominance while beating giant IBM into submission, he also had a bit to do with webapps Alan Kay and team for having all the good ideas Steve Jobs for bringing good ideas into the software realm (mouse, GUIs) The VisiCalc dude for the first killer app John Carmack for the first killer app video game (killer in more than one sense) and changed, revived the video game landscape The inventor of Pong The inventor of the RDBMS Mark Andressen for Netscape (which changed the software world as we know it) Linus Torvalds for Linux Richard Stallman for GNU and its influence on the way software is built today The creators of EJB for creating a standardized appserver companies could go for Of course my list is industry oriented, not development oriented. For a development oriented approach I'd include: Fred Brooks for contributions to Software Engineering Alan Kay for OO Pascal creator for popularizing structured programming C creator for popularizing high level languages Lisp creator for functional programming Booch for UML and stuff XP people for XP RDBMS creator for the most successful storage mechanism to date Martin Fowler for refactoring book Gang of Four for Design Patterns James Gosling for finally bringing OO to the masses (no such credit for C++ creator) Steve Jobs for GUI programming for industry ... |
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isj 12/11/04 05:09:31 PM EST | |||
It seems that the list favors practitioners and not those who researched the theories. I am missing Codd, Dijkstra and deMarco. |
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dpilot 12/11/04 04:54:16 PM EST | |||
Randy Waterhouse invented one of the early computers, complete with accoustic delay lines. |
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Snort 12/11/04 04:09:34 PM EST | |||
How about Martin Roesch whose software became the industry standard for network-intrusion detection? He wrote an open-source program in 1998 called Snort designed to examine data traffic coursing over a network and sound an alarm if hackers are trying to break in. Snort quickly became popular among computer-security geeks and in 2001 he turned it into a commercial venture, Sourcefire, which is now worth $100 million. |
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Duhavid 12/11/04 03:15:24 PM EST | |||
Lee Brody wrote: What tripe! There was a computer industry *before* Bill Gates. If he hadnt come along things would be *better*, not worse. He is the biggest stifler of innovation around, bar none. Try this on, think of a great software idea, a modestly big one. Now imagine you need to go get funding. First question? How are you going to keep Microsoft from taking the market from you with a simple marketing campaign stating they are going to produce what you are? And how many companies have gone out of business because of Microsoft? Isn't is amazing how success breeds contempt! Talk about the continuing 'dumbing down' of America! No, success is not the issue here. Ethics, specifically the lack thereof are. The thing that is dumb is that he gets public support for breaking the law. In my book, as a businessman, Bill Gates belongs in bottom 20 list. As a programmer, I dont know, I dont agree with the poster that thought he was "brilliant", all machines of that day where constrained, he was probably average for that time. |
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ron 12/11/04 03:03:20 PM EST | |||
The nice thing about the article is that it's not just a list of 40 software greats, it has a biography for each one. One other note, if SYS-CON is going to (rightly) include Bill Joy, Tim O'Reilly, and Ann Winblad, then you've got to include Steve Jobs and/or Steve Wozniak. |
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Wendy 12/11/04 02:45:13 PM EST | |||
Larry Wall, inventor of Perl. Large parts of internet work because Perl takes care of them. If Guido van Rossem, creator of Python, is on your list, than Larry Wall should be on it as well! Darn! I'm not voting untill Larry Wall is on that list. |
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Yes Gosling 12/11/04 02:32:37 PM EST | |||
Honestly, what the hell did Torvalds even do? Took minux, rewrote it from scratch, and started passing off the result as the next great silver bullet I sound like a moron don't I? |
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C-sharpshooter 12/11/04 02:29:00 PM EST | |||
>>> Honestly, what the hell did Gosling even do? Well for one thing he isn;t just the Father of Java, he's also the Father of C# - and that guy Anders from Microsoft is just the kidnapper of the child! |
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Gosling??!! 12/11/04 02:26:59 PM EST | |||
Kay definitely deserves mention if Gosling does. Honestly, what the hell did Gosling even do? Took C++, removed a bunch of shit from it, added garbage collection, and started passing off the result as the next great silver bullet. |
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Update2 12/11/04 02:13:17 PM EST | |||
here's a further update on the current top 10 rankings: 1 217 Torvalds |
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gaming software developers 12/11/04 02:07:13 PM EST | |||
Who'd be on your equivalent list for games? I'd definitely have Peter Molyneux, John Carmack, Chris Crawford and Mike Burnham... |
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ratboot 12/11/04 02:04:24 PM EST | |||
Where are the GUI people? Without them, forget Windows, Mac OS X, KDE, Gnome, etc. - Douglas Engelbart, for the mouse and many other widgets |
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where's DJB? 12/11/04 02:01:05 PM EST | |||
Where's D. J. Bernstein (DJB), who wrote Qmail by as a replacement for Sendmail? |
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mark 12/11/04 01:47:04 PM EST | |||
The people in my top twenty don't make a name for themselves by popularizing derivative works. They synthesize, innovate, are involved in many aspects of their "product" and followup on their work Larry Wall: Perl, design of computer programming languages using principles of linguists, ... Stephen Wolfram: Mathematica, ... these pioneers don't continue to improve some of their "products": Don Knuth: TeX, literate programming, METAFONT, TOACP, ... Ted Nelson: Xanadu (precursor to WWW), ... I'm waiting on the semantic wob to see if Berners-Lee |
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Mr. Reality 12/11/04 01:37:26 PM EST | |||
How did "Nathan Myrhvold" get on this list? |
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Kristopher 12/11/04 01:36:54 PM EST | |||
I believe DJB should be added to the list. In 20 years he has revamped the way a lot of us look at computer security. Plus he wrote some useful stuff like qmail, tinydns, etc. |
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Matt 12/11/04 12:54:00 PM EST | |||
I also consider Don Knuth to be a glaring omission. Claims that he didn't actually build any major systems are ludicrous -- TeX by itself played an extremely important role in the development of machine-independent markup, publishing, open source, yada yada yada. |
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Perl Hacker 12/11/04 12:41:01 PM EST | |||
Gurusamy Sarathy, Perl 5 pumpkin and the force behind bringing Perl to Windows belongs on this list! |
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electro 12/11/04 12:23:14 PM EST | |||
Actually Knuth really is the father of wordprocessing, as most if not all took algorithyms out of Tex to use in their own wordprocessing programs. Not to mention he is also the father of codifying algorythm research. |
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sangudu 12/11/04 12:22:10 PM EST | |||
I agree. Knuth is the worlds best programmer ever and creator |
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Sellam Ismail 12/11/04 12:21:34 PM EST | |||
If you are a moron like me and put your real e-mail address in the editing form and are now getting inundated with pointless alerts whenever a new message gets posted, you'll notice that the "removal" URLs are completely bogus. Here's the actual URL you should use: http://www.linuxworld.com/features/remove.htm?re=sellam%40vintage%2Eorg But of course you should replace the part after "re=" with your own e-mail address. |
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Knuth Missing! 12/11/04 12:19:30 PM EST | |||
What an appalling list, heavily biased to the fashionably recent. Sergei Brin may be clever, but he hasn't contributed a tenth of what Don Knuth has, who isn't even on the list. There are also complete fields that have been ignored, what about the founding gods of Graphics? Scientific programming? Logic programming? AI? |
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Parzival52 12/11/04 12:19:22 PM EST | |||
How could John Backus? He led the team that created FORTRAN and the first compiler (for FORTRAN), proving that machine-generated code could compete with hand-assembled code. How could you omit Donald Knuth? He wrote the Bible on algorithms. Lastly, no list would be complete without John McCarthy, who with his graduate students, created Lisp (LISP?), the antipode to assembly/FORTRAN/C, and a language that the others have been slowly moving towards ever since (Thank you, Paul Graham). As usual, our historical timeline is only about twenty years long. |
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an early WebLogic customer 12/11/04 12:15:25 PM EST | |||
You included Don Furgueson, but left out Bob Pasker, the founder of WebLogic, who wrote and invented the first Java Application Server and actually invented J2EE. |
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Update 12/11/04 12:14:05 PM EST | |||
here's an update on the current top 10 rankings: 1 169 Torvalds |
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Ramki 12/11/04 12:13:18 PM EST | |||
Larry Wall deserves more than a nomination. If we talk about REAL software that works on REAL life situations, to help REAL people, that is. rn, patch and perl. There is not a single major software construction team in the world that has not benefited from perl has singlehandedly been responsible for the "CGI" web |
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Tim Bray 12/11/04 12:11:02 PM EST | |||
This idea is moronic and has nothing to do with me and they shouldn't be using my name in the headline. -Tim Bray |
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4 More Additions 12/11/04 12:06:34 PM EST | |||
Peter Pagé - Developed Software AGs Natural, pioneered 4GLS (1979) John Postley - Developed Mark IV (1967), the first million dollar software product, for Informatics Larry Constantine - Invented data flow diagrams, presented first paper on concepts of structured design in 1968 Bob Bemer - One of the developers of COBOL and the ASCII naming standard for IBM (1960s) Dr. Jean Ichbiah - Principal designer, Ada language (1977) |
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murr 12/11/04 11:55:39 AM EST | |||
Another notable omission: Niklaus Wirth, designer of Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon (to name only his most influential languages), author of "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". |
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Here's who invented sQL 12/11/04 11:53:31 AM EST | |||
The basis for SQL can be traced down to Dr. Edgar Frank Codd (called In June 1970 he published an article called |
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Sellam Ismail 12/11/04 11:53:10 AM EST | |||
HOW DO YOU GET REMOVED FROM THIS FUCKING RETARDED FEEDBACK FORUM? I get an e-mail alert everytime someone posts a message, each including UTTERLY FUCKING USELESS links for removing myself from the alerts. After I get through educating the morons that came up with this list, I'd like to send them to remedial web development classes. I guess that serves me right for putting my real fucking e-mail address. |
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success!=XML 12/11/04 11:52:08 AM EST | |||
>> I'd currently put both Tim Bray and Guido van Rossum I doubt it (Bray that is). XML has done the industry more harm than good. What we need is a list of software "ogres" - Bray, Gates, Wall etc. And whoever invented SQL. |
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julesh 12/11/04 11:50:48 AM EST | |||
Agreed. Although over time people with currently-hyped projects may pass over onto the first list, rather than drop off the second list. E.g., I'd currently put both Tim Bray and Guido van Rossum (and perhaps Linus Torvalds) on your second list, but I'd seriously expect them to move to the first over the next 5-10 years. |
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finnw 12/11/04 11:49:27 AM EST | |||
Maybe the list should be split into two parts. 1. Early pioneers (Turing etc), and possibly designers of the languages (C etc) that have stood the test of time. This list will probably be roughly the same this time next year. 2. Inventors of recent, fashionable languages & technologies (better not mention them by name though) This list will probably look very different this time next year. |
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Miguel? 12/11/04 11:44:53 AM EST | |||
>>attempted to bring the worst features of windows<> That is not at all fair to de Icaza. Sure, .NET is crap, but until there's an equivalent available on Linux, there will be a lot of resistence to replacing MS windoze in many applications. It's just like WINE, or any other emulator or compatibility library. |
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Bah 12/11/04 11:43:20 AM EST | |||
The list is mostly of "computer pop artists". Where's McCarthy? (discoverer of lisp, the single most influential language in computing). Where's Pierce and Cardelli? Where's Church? How can you have Turing but not Church? That's stupid. It's not called the Church-Turing thesis for nothing, you know. WTF is a shyster like de Icaza (attempted to bring the worst features of windows to linux) doing on a list with Mitch Kapor (discovered the spreadsheet)? |
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BillJ 12/11/04 11:34:35 AM EST | |||
>Unbelievable that the inventor of Flash is included but Bill Joy is on the list; he counts, doesn't he? |
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Jim S 12/11/04 11:32:51 AM EST | |||
This list will lack all credibility if the name of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is absent. Never mind COBOL! She invented the compiler! |
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ChTh 12/11/04 11:30:25 AM EST | |||
Unbelievable that the inventor of Flash is included but none, that I can see, from the CSRG at Berkeley that designed and implemented TCP/IP, BSD etc. This list is just an expression of personal preferences rather than merits. |
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jon crowcroft 12/11/04 11:29:13 AM EST | |||
whoever creates a perfect anti-spam technology |
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GnuVince 12/11/04 11:25:57 AM EST | |||
Where is Alan Kay? Inventor of Smalltalk, the reference in terms of object-oriented languages, the inventor of overlapping windows, he worked on so many projects, visionner of the laptop computer, it's not even funny: ARPA, Ethernet, the laser printer, client/server networks, etc. I think Mr. Kay should positively be on that list. Where would all the Java, C# and C++ people be without Smalltalk? |
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Sellam Ismail 12/11/04 11:25:54 AM EST | |||
This is complete nerd masturbation. The entire list is indicative of a total lack of knowledge of the history of software. It represents mainly contemporaneous candidates (i.e. within the last 15 years) some of which don't even fit the bill as "software people". Out of the 40 candidates proposed, I see only about 7 that are a solid "yes", about 10 that are a "maybe" and the rest a definite "no". I'd like to talk to whomever came up with this list and give them a long history lesson. |
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cait56 12/11/04 11:21:41 AM EST | |||
The list is horribly tilted towards PC applications. The relational database and thrid normalized form also seem to be totally overlooked, even though they made the entire IT industry possible. How about Date? Then there's networking itself. Where's Jon Postel? It also favors originators over evolvers. K&R created a cute little macro-assembler for PDP-11s called "C". But Plauger had amore to do with its evoluation into ANSI C, the truly usable portable language with well documented and defined standard libraries. The way you really form a list like this is you gather a much larger list of top software developers, and fight out who influenced *them*. |
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tkittle 12/11/04 11:17:08 AM EST | |||
For your convenience here is a sorted list of people according to the votes they have gotten so far: 1 151 Torvalds |
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oliverthered 12/11/04 11:03:25 AM EST | |||
Adam Bosworth!!!!!! >>Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; So that's who I have to blame. I hope google's a bit more solid. |
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grant 12/11/04 11:00:06 AM EST | |||
Seriously, how can you elide Knuth? |
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troll? 12/11/04 10:59:04 AM EST | |||
it's worth including [Dijkstra] not just for his contributions to the development of compilers but also for his wonderful contrarian comments, like this one about OO: "Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California." I'd be careful if I were you, California is just waking up and reading this!!! |
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An00n 12/11/04 10:55:26 AM EST | |||
The "inventor" of C# ?!?!?!? WTF?A knock-off clone designed to kill a competitor just to ensure vendor lock-in? Talk about low standards. Why not go straight to the top of Microsoft and just put Bill Gates on the list? Gates's business model of "make crappy software ubiquitous and charge lots of money for it" sure has had more of an effect on the world of software than some toady he selected to help him kill Java. |
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