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Top 10 Most Important Tech People of the Decade
KarmaWhore writes "For it's 10th anniversary Network Computing has put together what they consider to be the top ten people of the decade. Linus is number three. Gates is number two. " I dunno - lists like this are certainly useless - but it's always a fun debate.
But who gets the credit for sand?
Atoms?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Yes, but another attempt to copy the Mac OS is hardly that innovative. Besides, it's just one more Windows version.
How about Windows NT? Granted, not the most stable, secure products ever made, but come on, almost everyone (including half the Slashdot population) uses them! Granted, he did not write every single line of code, but he did lead the company that did. Without his leadership, who knows what would have happened.
The easy response would be: "Uh, innovation?" But the less-flippant response is that there were plenty of companies (mine included) who were doing Wide Area Networking long before NT was viable. My guess, if Gates has decided to cash in at the start of the 90s, is that Ballmer would have done many of the same things. Even if he had failed where Gates had success, what makes you think that all those companies M$ crushed along the way wouldn't have provided the needed technology?
Without Windows 95, where would we be? 90 % of us would be out of a job. Computers would not have hit it off 'really big,' because they would still be too hard to use for the idiots who sit at home (yes, those same people who call tech support)
I guess they would have had to buy Macs or something else easy. Or they could have learned to use Win 3.1. In my experience, those who couldn't figure out Win 3.1 never bothered to learn Win95 either.
If BillG left Microsoft 10 years ago, would any of this come around?
Probably. Maybe not at the same speed, or with the same number of casualties along the side of the road, but probably the other tens of thousands of M$ employees would have done something without Gates around.
Or would you be running DOS or Windows 3.1? ( which was also innovative)
Actually, both were derivative, not innovate, but yes, business could and did run on those.
Would 99% of offices have a computer in them?
Absolutely.
Or, would you be flipping burgers at BurgerKing? (which runs NT, last time I checked)
I wasn't flipping burgers before Gates came along, nor was I doing so before those 90's 'innovations' you cite. So why would I be flipping burgers now had Gates retired in 1990?
Look, M$ as a company has done tremendous things and, by virtue of most folks being too lazy to care, or by virtue of their predatory ways, most of us use M$ software today. But what innovative things has Gates done in the 90s? Another respondant suggested the turnaround of M$ to embrace the Net. That was impressive, but hardly innovative. It was imitative in the extreme.
I mean, governments have a temendous influence on our lives. That influence doesn't mean they are innovative, however.
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Yes Bill did something....he didn't really make anything personally but he did put market an OS that put a PC in over 75% of the homes in America. Like it or not technology NEEDS marketing and deployment to live.
/. reader between 18 and 25 to prove to me that they didn't get their start on PC's using one of Bill's OS's. I kinda doubt at age 19 many of the readers gunning on Bill now were compiling and hand bootstraping thier linux boxes.
And I challange any
And to futher torpedo your argument...Linus did do something......he ripped off Andrew Tannebaum.
Do you really think that you'd have a computer on your desk for such a small price if it weren't for Bill Gates and Microsoft bringing PC's to the market with Windows? Perhaps he didn't invent Windows, but it was definitely Microsoft who got it out to the people.
It seems everyone here just wants to hate Microsoft purely for the fact that they aren't Linux. Let's not forget how PC's got onto everyone's desktop to begin with.
No, Jamie Zawinski did enough work that I'd say he'd be the best Netscape candidate there. Marc was just a lawyer who got VC.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
But if you look at the new focus on making a computer more than a beige box, that has to be attributed to Jobs, or at least his company. Sure to a true geek the color of your hardware makes no difference, but to an everyday user, it makes a lot of difference. That's why you can buy your car in more colors than just black.
Nate
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
This would be funnier if Gore actually said that. He didn't. What he did say was an exaggeration but evidently not enough of one that his opponents could refrain from exaggerating his exaggeration. And their spin seems to have worked really well -- every gullible sucker in the US (of which there are evidently tens of millions) thinks that AL Gore said that he invented the internet.
for C and Unixes in general.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Surely anyone as "important" as Hitler is going to affect everything, including technology? Besides, the computer was not a direct result of Hitler's actions: it was a response to them. The credit still lies with the mathematicians and engineers who were directly involved.
Sorry as I am not a fan of his OS I still must defend Bill Gate's position on the list. I've read the article and it's titled: "The 10 Most Important People of the Decade", not "Top 10 Most Important Tech People of the Decade" as /. has it listed. If it were the argument could be made that since Bill is a CEO and not really a "tech" person he shouldn't be there but as the article is titled he should be. So many readers are quick to gun on the M$ OS's but they are so quick to forget and deny that they probably got their start on PCs running a M$ OS. Do we still run them, no most likely not but as poor as we may think his product is, Mr. Gates did get most of us started on the path we're on.
As an everyday computer user: "I thank Mr. Gates for giving me a fairly easy to use operating system to cut my teeth on"
As an educated software engineer: "Mr. Gates we need to talk about that pile you call an OS...."
hatless wrote:
> Steve Jobs would undoubtedly earn a spot in the
> top 5 in a list covering the 1970s or the 1980s.
> But in the 1990s?
> Jobs turned Apple around,
Perhaps not in the 1990s. Though bringing Apple back from near death and thus giving customers a viable commercial alternative to the Wintel monopoly is nothing to be sneezed at. I think, that with OS X coming next year, we really haven't seen the full impact of Jobs' return. Yet. He may well be flying high on next decade's list.
> but Apple isn't really important to computing as
> a whole anymore, not with an 8% market share.
Neither is Linux, if we are going by market share, as the two are in the same neighborhood, with the one in the lead depending on who you talk to. If you want to go by CompUSA floor space, Linux is a distant third, with Apple #2 and MS #1 (and still idiotic). And I'm writing this on a Linux box, so don't think me a MS troll.
> but with the exception of case design,
> Apple--and Steve Jobs--don't shape computing
> anymore.
No, MS shapes it, by ripping off Apple, Next, and now their own viruses! But wait till OS X comes out. If Apple doesn't seriously drop the ball, they will have a stable, easy to use, modern OS. On top of really cool hardware, and a bunch of well known apps, it will be seriously attractive to the masses. Then, the only things that will save Linux is that Apple is *not* out to rule the world, and Linux is free and runs on anything. It isn't impossible that OS X will be able to make some serious dents in both Linux and Windows, especially at the end user level. That is Linux' weak point, and MS is too busy with their five year old strategy of merging Win 9.x with Win 2000/NT to notice.
> Palm should get props for making the handheld
> computer into something for the masses back in
> '97.
Indeed. However, it would be nice if Palm continued to innovate, rather than just multiplying its models.
Perhaps Jobs does deserve his place, not for what he did at Apple, but for what he did at NeXT
If Tim B-L deserves 1st for knocking together a web-browser, then maybe Jobs deservers his place for producing the box that Tim insisted was a neccessary tool to develope his hypertext system.
Of course Tim's real motivation may not have been the objective C RAD platform, or the UI, but because, like the rest of us, he found those black cubes and their laser disks rather sexy
Whatever you say you cant escape it, the WWW was invented on a Jobs machine.
Whether you like BillG or not, he was personally involved in creating IE and IIS - regardless of what you thin of those products, he was more than a figurehead in relation to their development
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I also vote for Larry. He synthesized the "Unix way of doing things" and added a number of optimized commonly required library functions and wrapped it in package called Perl. Almost all early internet dynamic content was driven by Perl code. And Perl is still relevant to today and used by many large and small internet installations either for serving dynamic content or in the backend for content and source maintenance and prototyping.
Yes, now there are other options Python, php, asp, Java Servlets, etc. but Perl was the first and is still one of the best ways to develop applications for the web.
Yeah. I'll bring the KoolAid. Now, where's that comet?
Seriously, neither of these two congressmen were that useful - they were both a lot of talk and not much work. Al Gore, strange as it may sound, actually did a lot this decade to make the Net (or the Information Superduperexpressway as he calls it) what it is. Both in popularization and making sure the administration followed through on his earlier work which helped create it. And, if you're going to mention Rick White, why not mention Rep. Maria Cantwell, who did much more work on this than he ever did, and was responsible for goading him into proposing ideas like these? She's running for US Senate now, but Rick merely cloned (badly) her prior work and carried it on. Partisanship be darned, credit should lie where it's due - it's not the followers who made it what it is, it's the forerunners, those who fought against what were almost immovable and immutable odds to get the ball rolling. That's like saying that Bill G popularized the Net when he was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. If he had had his way, the Net would still be FTP and IRC only.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The article's title could have been reported as 'Top 10 people who helped technology" . You
could not call some of them in there as "tech people".Tech people would mean developers/scientists not CEO's.
Interestingly the article's real title at the homepage "The 10 Most Important People of the Decade ".Just to grab attention
Where would gcc be without Linux?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Wishing for a UI as good as Windows seems to me like wishing for a good swift kick in the nuts.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Won't you join in?
and drink the Kool-aid?
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Before you start flaming, remember: Satan comes before God, because without Satan, who would appreciate God?
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Turing contributed something. Bill bought a copy of basic and had Paul Allen work on it.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Are you nuts? He comes from a state where, unfortunately, farmers commit suicide due to droughts and what not. If you ask me, moving around with a Laptop sucks in such situations ..
Ans besides, he's all HYPE>>>>
Electrical Engineering is BORING.
Eh? Looking at our "History of Unix" chart, I see that both SunOS and HP-UX predate MacOS. Are they seriously claiming that neither Sun nor HP included networking capability in either their hardware or their software before Apple?! They don't say "personal computers", they do say "a list of networking people", and the list is full of non-PC types...
If only Al Gore knew the difference :-)
Where is Alan Cox?
True. This is obviously the view of the modern media.
...", where Network Computing titles it, "The 10 Most Important People of the Decade", and then goes on to refer within the body of the article as, "Most Influential People of the Decade"
After a second look, I notice Hemos titled it "Top 10 Most Important Tech People
3 different titles, probably better titled, "Top Ten People Whom Have Influenced Tech". We'd still have our bones to pick over them, but at least it's not as wild as assuming Steve Jobs still keeps a propeller beanie on his hatrack.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
On the other hand, where would the GNU project be without a stable, popular kernel? (It's only recently that the Hurd has become usable.) Linux has spread the GNU tools more widely than GNU itself has, now that the OS is penetrating deeper into business and personal environments -- the core of GNU proper has always been academia, which is an important but smaller field.
Bottom line, it's great for users to have a compiler like GCC and a kernel like Linux. There is no conflict, and no need for there to be one.
heehee just kidding... although you have to admit that for a while "Free Kevin" was pretty much a rallying cry around these parts...
Free music from Jack Merlot.
> But in the 1990s?
NeXT software Inc (okay, it started in the late 80's). The web have been developped on NeXT machines. NeXT have been the first Object Oriented system out there. NeXTstep have been considered "the most respected piece of software on the planet" (don't remember from who the quote was).
The influence of NeXTstep on today computing is much greater than you might suspect (and, it is not only because the close box of Windows 95 is a exact pixel copy of the NeXT one)
They had 10 years of advance. Modern operating systems (even Mac OS X) are not yet up to what NeXTstep was.
I call that a technical achievment.
Cheers,
--fred
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Without Windows 95, where would we be? 90 % of us would be out of a job. Computers would not have hit it off 'really big,' because they would still be too hard to use for the idiots who sit at home (yes, those same people who call tech support)Like it or not, NT is nearly ^H^H^H quite possibly the de facto network operating system of the small / medium sized business.
If BillG left Microsoft 10 years ago, would any of this come around? Or would you be running DOS or Windows 3.1? ( which was also innovative) Would 99% of offices have a computer in them? Or, would you be flipping burgers at BurgerKing? (which runs NT, last time I checked)
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
October 2, 2000 - Network Copmuting Corporate Headquarters - Manhasset NY. - After reviewing numerous letters, Network Computing has reconsidered the companies Top Ten individuals in the technology sector and issues this revised list. We apologize to our shareholders (and to the FTC, SEC et al) for the erroneous posting of the previous list and its inclusion of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, we had no idea that mentioning thier names here would lead to such a rapid plunge in the value of our stock. Additionally, in order to place a proper perspective on the technology sector, we will be forth coming with out new 'Meglamaniac Top Ten' as soon as the results are tabulated. The Meglamaniac Top Ten will be sure to include Mr. Gates, Mr. Jobs, Mr. Perot, Mr.Gerstner and Mr. Ellison. There's something about the computing industry that lends itself to achievements by the following individuals... 1. Tux
/. $authors)
2. Dilbert
3. Ren & Stimpy (tie)
4. Tick
5. Kenny
6. Kyle
7. Cartman
8. Stan
9. Chef
10. Brian Boitano
Disclaimer: Network computing is in no way responsible for the results, outcome or bias displayed in the Top Ten list and assumes no liability for it. Please don't email us with your questions or comments as this is out final list. This list is in no way an attempt to placate the script kiddie who has sent us 3 million emails since 10:00 AM EST voting for Dogbert.
Note to self: IF s/N ratio>=facts(old news +
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
Being a "media" list, I'm surprised Mr. Bezos did't rate. He was / is one of the few big Internet only stores, he's in the crosshairs for his patents...what else do you need?
Are you talking about those clamshell things with calculator-y keyboards exemplified by the Sharp Wizards, or are you talking about the Casio Zoomer?
Sorry, you're right, I was talking about the Sharp Wizard, not the Casio. I had one of the Wizards. I agree that the Palm has a better form factor than the Wizard, but I would say that the Wizard was fairly efficient at what it did.
My point is not that the Wizard is comparable to the Palm (the Palm is superior in just about every way), but that at the time it was practical and useful, and sold fairly well.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Clive Sinclair brought computing to the masses. Steve Jobs brought computing to the masses. Bill Gates bought a third rate CP/M clone and sold it to IBM, who brought computing to the masses. Let's stop the eulogising of Gates, his contribution to the popularisation of computing is close to zero. Indeed, his reluctance to improve on MSDOS until DRDOS and OS/2 forced his hand could be argued to show he hindered the popularisation of computing, not helped it.
Ok Jim Clark's claim to fame is he was able to turn 2 different multibillion dollar companies into shit in a very short span of time.
Larry Ellison - made Oracle the #1 market share DB and kept it at exactly the same proportion over a ten year period somehow making himself a billionaire even while turning his support and service organizations into complete shit.
LVG - what can you say ex RJR ex Nabisco ex McKinsy antitechnocrat who rode the greatest ecnomic bubble ever to a 'salvaging miracle' at Big Blue. How hard could it be to take a basically sound company apply textbook mgt consulting techniques to it while the rest of the tech world shot up into the stratosphere in value.
Steve Jobs - the shrinking violet permanent temp CEO watched his company go efectively nowhere in ten years. At least it didn't go toes up! (famous quote - 'all you need to make a fortune in this business is a garage and 5 million dollars').
Rick Boucher - oh yeah Congress is at the vangard of thought leadership and getting shit done at warp speed. In 10 years they'll still be debating about the shape of the bargaining table.
This list is basically a bunch of people who were either too shy to really fuck things up or just arrogant enough to fuck them up anyhow. Either way they are experts at being where the shit aint and managing to blame it all on someone else.
If you read deep enough, the list is actually Top 10 in Networking Technology. Although you got me on Ethernet.
What I meant is: they got where they are (dominant compiler, dominant word processor, dominant spreadsheet, donimant app-de-jour) by leveraring the DOS/Windows combo that they cooked up in the 80s, and of course by deftly cutting the competition out. In the 90s they haven't managed to come up with a single idea to further leverage their monopoly and are instead reacting (quite successfully so far, actually) to competitive threats.
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Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
Why, Jonathan Ive...designer of the iMac, G4 cube, etc.
Either he or Avadis Tevanian should rep Apple on that list.
But, it was Jobs who cleaned house....and made their work possible.
Cheers,
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Woz I totally agree with. He should be on the list. I also agree with the idea that Gates should be somewhere near the top. We're talking "most influential to technology" not "what's best for technology". There are, however, thousands of other technophiles creating software, chips, and hacks that deserve to be on this list. When you summarize it down to 10, you lose the work of those people.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Look at their index page. They call it the Top 10 Most Important Networking People.
Why not? Is the word "Linux" politically incorrect? I said what I meant. Linus is in the top ten for the kernel, not for the whole OS.
But he didn't do any of that stuff... he was just the boss. That's like saying the CEO of 3M is a great contributer to chemical engineering. Gates is merely a competent business man...
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
I'm anxious to see an interface that can rival the Windows interface.
You've never used a Mac, have you?
--K
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Larry Wall and Perl was nominated for the decade before this one. Everyone can do us a favor and just let perl die already.
Got Code?
I like to think of this as RMS having prepared a garden by hand starting the previous year, preparing the soil, adding compost, protecting it over the winter, turning the soil in the spring, smoothing it out, planting the plants, watering the garden when it was too dry, weeding the garden, putting in the paving stones for people to walk on, and guarding the garden at night from the rabbits and hooligans.
The next summer is when people are awed by the beauty of the garden, when the garden has fully flowered.
True, he did the work in the eighties, but his work didn't flower until the nineties. Most of us never even heard of RMS until we looked at Linux and found all the GNU tools there and wanted to know who to thank.
-- Never make a general statement.
Things have changed a lot in the last ten years. Just think...
:)
Ten years ago, there was no World Wide Web. Ten years ago, there was no Linux, and almost no one used Microsoft Windows. Ten years ago there was no MP3, and no CD burners. There was no Playstation, Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, or even SNES. An Apple II or Commodore 64 was still a decent computer, a NES was something you plugged cartridges into, and no one had heard of "roms" and "emus". There were no DVDs, the MPAA just rated movies, and few people knew what the RIAA did. There were no dot-com IPOs.
And there was no slashdot. A fucking lot has changed in ten years.
Oh yeah... Ten years ago, there were trolls and flamewars. I guess there are a few things that never change.
Not only that, he gave Bill G the idea to take MSFT onto the Net, so he definitely should precede him.
And, who will ever forget the immortal words that gave Bill G his recent slogan - "What are we doing tonight, Brain?" "Same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to offload buggy software and Take Over The World!"
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
For the inevitable multitudes who haven't the foggiest who Kahn and Cerf are, here's a bio of Kahn (and no, he isn't the guy played by Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II).
And here's a nice little article about Cerf.
Now, please explain the comment about Al Gore for me.
Thanks.
The nice people at NC are just posting things people will read.
They are pretty much right about the people on the list, though of course they're too mainstream to pick up any unsung heroes that have more to do with the way the web turned out, for example.
They also make some fairly silly statements, like "AppleTalk is still the easiest method of file and print sharing for casual computer users" or "Attribute all this, if you will, to Jobs' vision of the Macintosh: It's for people who `Think Different.'" I know, I know, I'm picking on the Steve Jobs part of the article. But let's face it, NetBEUI is just as easy as apple's networking, possibly easier since you can use a standard folder/file context rather than the chooser or network browser. And the Apple People may want to think different, but apple's sugar-sweet (sugar-water?) packaging can't be rationally seen as anything but an encouragement to think the same.
I personally would have liked to see people on this list that I hadn't ever heard of before (Not just people whose names I'd forgotten, and people whose names I can't escape.) Oh, and here, I just found another inaccuracy: "In his early days at Sun Microsystems, Khosla participated in the creation of the first and, today, the most successful RISC-based platform, proving that there's a world beyond the Wintel phenomenon." BZZZZZT. Thank you for playing. IBM put together the first RISC architecture (though possibly the least successful:) The ROMP architecture, which was found in the IBM RT-PC. Thank you, Network Computing, for consistently getting the facts wrong.
They seem to have Berners-Lee's microbio written out fairly well, one hopes out of a sense of reverence. And of course, as one would expect, they are ritualistically (perhaps even fetishistically) correct on the BillyG front, perhaps more out of fear of lawsuit than for any other reason. But even in the large print at the top of Linus' data they hose things up; Linus created a kernel. He no more created an operating system than I created a waste treatment plant in the bathroom this morning. This is not to denigrate the man or his achievements, which are nonetheless very important to the point we have reached today. But please, let's try for some precision.
All in all, another mediocre article from a mediocre publication. Personally, I'd like to see a "top ten slashdotters" article. Can you imagine the height of the flames?
I can only dream.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You know, it's funny you mention that. A few years ago I came up with a great fund-raising scheme, kinda like the Jerry Lewis telethon for techs. I didn't have a particularly worthy cause in mind, but the gist of it is this...
Ellison, Jobs, Gates, et al auctioning off pies to be hit with, or sitting in dunk tanks, etc, with a grand a ball. I can see Jobs lining up with bags of money and a rented roger clemens when gates gets in the tank. Feed the homeless, clean the environment, all is possible with this scheme. And all it really costs is the rental of the arena (Say, the San Jose Sharks rink comes to mind) and the pride of the few CEOs involved.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
just wondering.
Microsoft pushed forward the idea of a PC, i.e. getting a computer into everyone's home. I don't think people would have thought (then around 1980) getting a full Unix for everyone. Although their OS may be crap, M$ is responsible for us having the hardware in the first place. Only then could a much larger number of bright young people start hacking. Remember, Linus started his most famous creation because he wanted a better OS for the 386 PCs (that were there because of M$).
It's like the relation to the GNU project. When the Linux kernel was stable enough, the utilities to make a complete Unix didn't emerge out of thin air. In the same way, the hardware was already there. Except that M$ hadn't done much 'innovations' with the hardware (probably not even with software:).
But as you said, jdgeorge, this is about evolution. We had to have the crap OS before the decent one. Maybe some day we'll be able to dump x86 in the same way..
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Strange to see a slashdot sig adapted from a Jurassic Park quote:
"Your Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
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This list is okay, but what about Al Gore? After all, he created the internet.
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These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Because of Saddam's aggressiveness, the Gulf War came about, during which a lot of American technology (Patriot missles, A10 Warthog, etc) was tried in battle for the first time and found to work really well.
Huh? "Patriot missile" and "work really well" are two phrases I never thought I'd see in a sentence together.
Some more information on the patriot.
IIRC, the A10 was around long before the Gulf War, and in fact was in the middle of being phased out before the war started (and the Pentagon realized that they didn't have anything that could replace it.)
I read the internet for the articles.
As it's been said before, Gates has been very important in the computer world as we know it. However, I don't see how anyone can include him in a list of important TECH people. Marketing, maybe. Software legal issues, sure he's had plenty to say. But Tech? Come on, what has he himself created?.
Finkployd
And I'll bet that he later refuted that statement by claiming he was tired when he said it.
/HUMOR
Anyway, I definitely agree with Bill Gates' position on that list. Like the article said, whether you love him or hate him, there's no doubt he helped shape the computer industry into what it is today. (For those of you who doubt this is a good thing, we're HERE, aren't we?) Windows isn't the best OS on the planet for a lot of things, but it's inspired competition - and rigorous competition helps everyone. (I'm anxious to see an interface that can rival the Windows interface. It may not be the best OS there is, but there isn't an interface that comes close to the ease that Windows provides. That's the problem with X.)
If we had an interface that was as good as the Windows UI (and provided the same continuity! Important!), with the power and stability of Linux - the sky's the limit.
I was disappointed I didn't see MY name on the list, but....
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Intersting... it says under Linus that originally the Linux kernel had an extremely restrictive (in respect to commercial exploitation) licence, and only later the GNU licence was adopted. _More_ restrictive than GNU? I guess GNU says nothing about how much you can charge for the software, just that you must make the source easily available at no (or nominal) cost to the user. Anyone know what the original licence was?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Gates did two things in the 90's:
1) Going into the mid 90's, Microsoft thought they had it made... they owned the desktop after all. Apple was dying, no other competition was on the horizon. Meanwhile, this little thing called "The Internet" and the little app that was available on it called "The World Wide Web" appeared. People in the trenches seized on the new idea as the Next Big Thing. But, up on the bridge of the SS. Microsoft, it was business as usual... they were passing out MSN floppies and waiting for their captured audience to flock to them. A *lot* of people (myself included) rubbed their hands gleefully waiting for Microsoft to founder on the rocks.
At almost the last second, before Microsoft's monopoly was rendered moot by Internet and network computing, Gates & co. realized that they were about to get clobbered. Gates managed in an incredibly short amount to time to turn his behemoth of a company around and take advantage of the Internet. All products became "Internet enabled" (at least t the point that they could add a bullet list to the "new features section"). They also rammed a behemoth-to-be called Netscape and sank them handily. Considering how many other major companies in the IT sector have perished or have been greatly diminished by previous paradigm shifts (i.e. DEC in the age of the PC), Gate's feat was pretty impressive.
2) Another thing that Microsoft did during the 90's is make major inroads into the server market. Going into the 90's, Novell, DEC, IBM, and various UNIXen owned the server markets. Microsoft has managed to carve out a fairly handy piece of the server sector pie, a very competitive sector compared to its familiar desktop zone where it has had Apple on the ropes for a while. The very fact that many people feel they have to become MSCE's pretty much makes Gates a shoe-in for the top ten list put together by an IT magazine.
Was it really necessary to start the Linux vs GNU/Linux flame war here? Way to abuse your +2 bonus.
... or Charles Manson ...
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
...then it must be Mac OS X.
Coming to a box near you... (if you live near someone who owns a Macintosh, that is...<HOMER>DOH!</HOMER>) ;)
George Lee
Did you bother to read what it was about? NETWORKING...not just computers in general, GUI's, Gaming, and Utilities do very little for networking.
Thanks for coming out.
"You end up talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you're going to sa
CmdrTaco. Seriously, how can you overlook the brains behind /. ?
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Something cleverIn the case of Gates ranking second, and Linus third, you've got to think -- Would Linux matter as much if Windows weren't around?
And someone else made a good point that RMS was neglected, he definetly should be on there. However, this is a list for the past decade, and RMS started his stuff in the 80s didn't he?
-kidlinux.
Where's Jeff Hawkins? He's arguably the inventor of the first practical PDA.
Apparently you never used any of the early Casios. The Palm is definitely not the first "practical" PDA.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I would prefer that this particular crowd, ostensibly so much more sophisticated than the hoi polloi, would exhibit the capacity to elevate themselves above the knee-jerk, mindless reaction of the average goober-picking yee-haw who mimics the spoon-fed pablum provided by Mass media and show at least a little insight and understanding of Al Gore's role as a Senator during the 70's (as you correctly state). Gee, I thought it might be somehow different here, but I suppose a cross-cut through the bedrock will reveal the same strata as anywhere else...
g y/www_accomp.html
I may be off-topic here, but seeing the above post gave me hope that perhaps not everyone was 'lol'-ing for the gazillionth time at that tired, worn out joke. By the way
http://www.algore2000.com/internet_and_technolo
Now, about that Love Story thing...
Bluesee
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Maybe he should be on the list for the past 2 decades, but what did he do in the 90's other than watch as apple tanked.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Although Bill Gates is more of a name of the 80's and could have been left off on those grounds. (Along with Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs and Vinod Khosla)
Tim probably is an important name at least as far as consumer tech goes. Linus I'm not so sure about. An equivilent of Linux probably would have happened without him. (GNU Hurd perhaps)
Sanford ('Spamford') Wallace and Cyber Promotions.... they certainly affected the course of the Internet during the late 90's, regardless of how low and turd-like you think he might be.
I think I read somewhere he's planning a comeback....
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
It's just an expression.
Soylent Green is people!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yep. Try networking without a computer and networking utilities:=)
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
IBM (and the fact that its PC could be cloned) put a PC in something well under 75% of the homes in america. Gate's OS rode the wave. Gates took credit for the wave.
In terms of Linux, he copied Unix - and made it free (speech) which was his real innovation
Wales probably...
~ppppppppö
enough said.
"Linus is a personable Scandinavian"? Perhaps you would find it educational to read through the kernel development mailing list archives. ;-)
Personally, I suspect Stallman's facial hair is what kept him off the list. I would think Stallman looks a bit too much like Fidel Castro for the delicate sensibilities of mild-mannered media.
I guess any revolution needs a mouthpiece, but this guy is so unlikable and plain annoying that I would personally do anything I could to keep him off the list, regardless of his credentials. Personally, I'd much rather listen to Bill Gates spew his crap than RMS, and believe me, that's saying something. So, justify his exclusion however you like, but I guarantee that you zealots would hate this guy more than any other technological-celebrity if he wasn't supporting what you personally care about.
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
Hey, several the folks in that list are not technicians, I therefore propose the David Boies receive placement due to his major influence on the MS trial and now the pivotal Napster trial.
Scott McNealy is pissed.
"But...but...what about Java? And...and we put the 'dot' in 'dot com'! I demand a recount!"
McNealy is such a whiny little pussy.
Where's Al Gore?
That's what I love about them high-school girls. I get older, they stay the same age... yes they do.
--Wooderson 1976
-- jimmycarter
The original rfc editor, Dr. Jonathan B. Postel.
For those not familiar with his work, he is responsible for the foundations that the Internet is built on today. Such trivial little things that we take for granted:
A good site with more links is here.
- ------------
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Segmentation Fault ( core dumped )
I hope everyone understands I'm not serious here. Just a bit of sarcasm on a Monday morning.
SYSOP ('sih-sop) n.: the guy laughing at your typing.
Does this mean I've got to start routing my spam to /dev/gore ?
Is ethernet not one of the most important technologies of the decade? Geez, what about Kernighan & Ritchie for the C language? Or Stroustrup for C++ ? OK, maybe the programming arguments are debatable from the layman's point-of-view for most important, but ethernet is omnipresent. Am I missing something?
Agree. Though at least Gates and Jobs were geeks at one point. What about Gerstner? There's a true suit.
I think Gosling and Stroustrup need to be on the list. What would IT be today without Java and C++?
The original ARPAnet systems went online in 1969. If Unix existed at all at that time, it was certainly still confined to its Bell Labs cradle.
where there's fish, there's cats
Yeah, you're probably right. Like many people on this thread, I just got pretty ticked at Homes' calling the list useless because our buddies Linus, RMS, ESR, et al weren't all at the top of the list. I might be wrong in my interpretation, but as you can see I'm not alone in this one. 'Course, I'd probably run nothing but Linux if I didn't get a free one to develop on.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
It's not a list of the most innovative people, it's a list of the most influential people. Positive or negative, Bill Gates has had a considerable infuence on the industry.
Well, I thought of this, and poked around a bit. While I do not hesitate to say that Ethernet is one of the most important technologies in network computing these days, it was invented at PARC in 1972, and named Ethernet in 1973.
One might have a case to say that it was in the 80s that Ethernet came of age and was the top technology of that decade, along with Novell... but since this is not a "last quarter of a century" thing, let's let it slide.
-Nev
Steve Jobs would undoubtedly earn a spot in the top 5 in a list covering the 1970s or the 1980s. But in the 1990s?
Jobs turned Apple around, but Apple isn't really important to computing as a whole anymore, not with an 8% market share. They make nice, leading-edge machines, they have a nice UI, and they're swell at industrial design again, but with the exception of case design, Apple -- and Steve Jobs -- don't shape computing anymore.
Where's Jeff Hawkins? He's arguably the inventor of the first practical PDA. Just as Apple deserves enormous credit for making existing "outsider" technologies palatable in the '70s and '80s, Palm should get props for making the handheld computer into something for the masses back in '97.
Some things no one seems to have pointed out in this fervent comments on Steve Jobs's inclusion on the list are his non-Apple pursuits, which of course were all brought back into the Apple umbrella when he became iCEO.
Webobjects. Ever used it? Especially on a list of networking heavies, I think it deserves some mention.
Webobjects and NeXTstep were both born out of Jobs's personal vision of the late 80s, and brought into the Apple fold circa '95 or '96.
Pixar has brought feature-length digital animation to near-perfection. It's not networking-related, but it certainly is techinical achievement. That's one of Steve's companies, too.
Finally, I'd like to put in a word of caution: market share numbers are meaningless in a world of cash registers running off 486s, entire developing economies running pirated copies of windows, and idiots buying a new machine every 6 months so they can run Diablo II. Does market share equal innovation? Performance? Stability?
It would be nice to see PDAs mentioned on the list, though, you're right about that. I'm consistently amazed at the new uses these things are being put to. They're like high-tech duct tape.
Here's what the article says
"Tim Berners-Lee is the man who gave us the World Wide Web. Not only is he responsible for the killer invention of the past decade, he also worked tirelessly to promote it, and he continues to foster the Web as an open and freely available medium. "
THAT'S A LIE!
AL GORE INVENTED THE INTERNET! That's what he said. And you know you can trust our polititions.
This "Tim Berners-Lee"-guy just wants his name in the papers.
Where would the Internet be without him?
Bill Gates is a programmer but he's more known for his busness efforts than his code.
Ranking Gates amoung techs is kinda like ranking the CEO of RedHat instead of Alan Cox or the CEO of Transmeta instead of Linus.
If the founder of Commodore were listed I'd expect people to scream fuzzy blue mud.
Like Gates he is(was?) a tech and like Gates he is more known as a busness man not as a tech.
You don't give a Nobel prize to the scientists boss...
Now if the head of the original Windows dev team got recognition over Linus.. That might be debatable.. and if Linus got on a list of busnessmen.. that would be really screwed up...
I don't actually exist.
naw - maybe 3C since he simply cloned Ken Thompson's work who would have been 3b. :)
>Love or hate them, MS is the most important player in the OS market right now. And they will be for some time.
Thats undeniable...
Don't hold your breath that Microsoft will go away anytime soon.. But then don't lay any bet's on Microsoft's longevity eather.
Anything may happen...
I don't think anything will come of the DoJ thing but it sure dose set up a good PR target for say.. Apple, IBM or the new Amiga.
I'd say Microsoft would be injured more by an attack from the backside (A direction they don't expect) than from say Linux or Apple.
But don't expect BSD, BeOS or Amiga to be totally beond such a thing...
I don't actually exist.
They are missing Bill Joy. What world would be without VI-editor?
In the 90s, Microsoft just played catch up
Very strange. Microsoft was big in the 1980s but became *huge* in the 1990s. Windows pre-3.0 was an obscure relic. MS-DOS was crusty, and kept people from becoming common household items. Windows 3.0 took off like a shot, followed quickly by 3.1. It turned into the standard operating system. Sure, Microsoft missed the rise of the web, but everyone running Navigator was running it on Windows anyway. In a nutshell, Windows became the ubiquitous operating system. Word became the standard word processor. Excel became the standard spreadsheet. Internet Explorer became the standard browser. Visual Basic became the standard enterprise application development tool. Visual C++ became the dominant commercial C/C++ compiler. You can belittle this any way you want, but that's where we are today.
I have a better explenation...
Basicly people see the kernel as the Os and everything else as an ad on.. the compiler as detatchable.
Look at Dos...
Remove everything but the MsDos kernel..
install 4Dos for the command line.. install Norten Utilitys for the utilitys...
It's still MsDos..
The rule folows for all Unix systems... The kernel is the os.. the rest just prop it up.
That is why Linux is seen as the os..
GNU is great but installed on SunOs it's still SunOs..
Some Unix venders see nothing wrong with shipping Unix systems with NO compiler what so ever.
Unless you plan to write software... you don't need it.
And IT managers seem to agree with this...
Once the system is working and no changes are needed the compiler may be disposed of.
So the kernel gets top priority... no matter how much much work went into the rest of the system. The kernel gets the credit...
(Kinda like your manager getting the credit for all your hard work)
I don't actually exist.
K.W. was undoubtedly important in the eighties, but during the last decade the adventure genre more or less died. This was also the fault of the same company, plus Origin with their mildly sucking Wing Commander series. WC was also important in the evolution of sound and graphics - but of course no person in his or her right mind wants to play a movie. So, actually - the only achievement of Sierra was digging their own grave with more realistic sound & video crap.
John Carmack is a more likely candidate.
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I agree with everything you said about Windows helping propel Micrososft to the heights it currently is. Observe, nevertheless, that the strategic course (and most of the technical) taken by MS regarding Windows was already outlined in the late 80s. Perhaps it wasn't clear for everybody in the field (specially IBM) but there was a clear roadmap for MS. Of course, they managed to leverage Windows because of their stronghold on DOS, acuired in the early 80s. Of course, they lately managed to elbow out most particpants in the DOS/Windows app market because of their Windows stronghold. That is, everything MS reaped in the 90s is a consequence of: a) DOS dominance in the early 80s; 2) Leveraging Windows through their market dominance;
In the 90s, Microsoft just played catch up, either voluntarily, when it went after the enterprise/networking markets where Novell and various UNIX vendors played alone, or involuntatily, and quite taken by surprise, as in the case of the whole Internet explosion thing. If that is not obvious too you, I suspect you must not be very old, despite the 'remember VisiCalc' reference.
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Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
I'm sure a lot of people would have taken it personally, regardless of how Hemos phrased it. What I fail to understand is why these same people continue to read slashdot if they find it so inherently offensive.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Move the two lab mice into number three to replace Ren and Stimpy and I think you've got yerself a winning list there, Bub.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/ol d-versions/RELNOTES-0.01
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
My all-time favorites are Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. With their work 30 years ago they even influence computer industry today, either through clones (Linux), or through further developments of the Berkeley System Distribution (especially the upcoming MacOS X). I think they should be in the list, too.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate...
Because of Saddam's aggressiveness, the Gulf War came about, during which a lot of American technology (Patriot missles, A10 Warthog, etc) was tried in battle for the first time and found to work really well.
Does that get him on the list? No, not really, but Spudley's got a valid point. World leaders and other non-technical but prominent people can have a massive effect on technology. To wit, would we have had radar or jet engines or the Bomb as soon as we did were it not for Hitler? For that matter, the invention of the electronic digital computer was closely entwined with the attempt to break Nazi codes. So it could be argued that Hitler had a large effect on technology in the 1940's.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
As stated in the text above, lists like this are really useless. It's just such an objective thing.
To be fair, it's hard to imagine a list like this not including Bill Gates, but how long has Linus been 'important'? Long enough to be number 3 in the top ten most important people of the decade? Hmmm...
And it depends how you define 'important'. Should Saddam Hussein be in there? How about Vladimir Putin, or any of a range of world leaders who've had their say over the last ten years.
My top ten list will be completely different to another person's. That's the way it is.
<irony mode=on>
Now, if I put up a top-ten list of most important people, would I have been mentioned on Slashdot? Probably only if I put Linus in there somewhere...
</irony>
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Actually, at least around me, I'd be willing to bet most people go their start on some sort of Apple system, since we had them in schools from first grade on up. Maybe that was just my school, but somehow I doubt it.
i'll agree that bill gates earnt his place on that list, but i'll never agree that windows has a good ui..
i installed an acorn archimedes emulator the other day.. that early 90's pre-286 gui windowed interface was *miles* ahead of windows in useability and consistency/continuity.. and that's just one example, there's many more..
the windows ui is an embarrasment to the computing community, and a step down from many that have come before..
bill gate's progressions, although very prominent, have definately not been in avenues of user interface..
No, the list is usesless because they completely left off Steve Case, the man who brought the unwashed masses to the internet.
What you meant to say was "Where would GNU/Linux be without GCC and GNU Libc?"
Regards, Ralph.
Is there any doubt that this man is not one of the most consummate programmers alive? Carmack & crew at id have done some of the most stunning work in the field of 3d gaming that any of us have ever seen. The man's work is nothing short of prodigious.
He is certainly very influential in the entire industry as well. John is a major supporter of opengl (remember the OGL vs. directx days?) He is on several advisory boards in the industry... he has his hands into everything from Apple to Microsoft.
When JohnC speaks, people listen.
Shouldn't Al Gore be on that list, for creating the internet?
I mean, all the stuff those other people did.. Berners-Lee, Levy, and Clark, would have been pretty pointless if good 'ol Gore hadn't created the internet for them.
What about Al Gore, after all he did invent the internet.
As far as Linus goes, I don't think we have anything to worry about....after all, he's going to be the most important tech person of this *coming* decade!
Got Rhinos?
I agree with most of the people on that list but there is one peoson who I belive should have been on there.... Steve Case... Seriously... how can you leave someone runs the worlds largest ISP with the largest number of subscribers(most of whom have no place on the net). But still he has given easy internet access to all these dimwits, perverts and freaks who probably can't even program their VCR. So my vote goes for Steve Case...... Flame ON!!!
Torvalds committed commercial suicide and conjured up a copyright that would prohibit anyone--including himself--from using his creation for capital gain.
As this statement proves, this list is mainly for the people that gained financially from IT in the '90s, not the people that actually did something for IT...
For making it all so easy to understand for us readers!
;)
Where would Linux be without GCC and GNU Libc?
The term "market" in this list looks interesting.
By being mentioned in that list it seems that the guy is considered to have used every bit of opportunity to make money in his field. If thats not the case, why isnt Stallman there ? If it is exactly that, why is Linus there ? He is exactly the opposite of what this list tries to gather: people who used their creations (Sun, Apple, Microsoft...) to build a really big pile of money.
Interesting how all 10 are male.
Where is Jon Katz?
but with the exception of case design, Apple--and Steve Jobs--don't shape computing anymore.
Heh, that's funny. But the thing is they do shape computing significantly. Apple has more users than Linux and it's precisely because of case design and pretty UI; it has fuck all to do with how stable or open the OS is.
So just because Bill Gates outranked Linus Torvalds, this list is "pretty useless"? Why do I suspect that if Linus was ranked higher than Gates, Slashdot would be holding a rallying cry and citing it as a sign that Linux really is the greatest achievement in the history of the world?
For more information, click here.
While I certainly don't disagree with the inclusion of any of the people listed, I wonder how they are ordered into their relative position.
No matter how impartial the judiciary may have felt (who, incidentally, are not listed in the article), one can only feel that singular bias rates these individuals in a particular order.
My vote goes for the inclusion of Turing.
and i guess u come from a country where little kids shoot others for fun:)
Some people might wonder about this, and with good right. Because really, what HAS he done? Okay, so he invented the WWW. That's all. That would be important if only it had been original. But the fact is that he simply combined things. Hyperlinks, a gopher-like system, multimedia (yeah, especially in the beginning) were all available when he started. In fact the web wasn't too different from Gopher when it began. Only when it started to evolve it became what it is today. And that's exactly the part he didn't infuence.
I'm not denying his importance, I just don't think he should be number one.
But in the nineties, ins spite of all its stock growth, Microsoft has mostly been reactive to threats to its marketshare. Granted, it has a fast reaction time, and once it gets in on whatever new trend that menaced it, it doesn't let go easily, but this is far from being influential or leading the way, at least IMO.
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Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
Are you talking about those clamshell things with calculator-y keyboards exemplified by the Sharp Wizards, or are you talking about the Casio Zoomer?
The Zoomer was practical if you didn't mind pausing a second after each letter you wrote with Grafitti, and you didn't really care if syncing took ten minutes. I guess. I didn't say first PDA, which was pretty much Apple's, nor did I say the first PDA of the right size, which was the Zoomer and its slow, clumsy ilk.
The Zoomer didn't fail because of bad marketing. It was in every Radio Shack in North America displayed up front and given pride of place in the catalog. It failed because it was a deeply flawed product that did many things, none very well.
The Newton didn't fail because people were too primitive and stupid to understand its genius. The Newton failed because even when they got the speed and handwriting stuff right, they were still trying to sell the new models for $1100 USD and they were the size of a rack of barbecued ribs.
The Palm was the first PDA that had the right size (zero carry), the right price (under $400 from the start) and the right interface (simple and efficient). Consider this: it took Microsoft and its hardware partners three years and three product iterations after the Palm was introduced to figure this out and make a product that could grab more than 10% market share.
Steve Jobs would undoubtedly earn a spot in the top 5 in a list covering the 1970s or the 1980s. But in the 1990s?
Jobs turned Apple around, but Apple isn't really important to computing as a whole anymore, not with an 8% market share. They make nice, leading-edge machines, they have a nice UI, and they're swell at industrial design again, but with the exception of case design, Apple--and Steve Jobs--don't shape computing anymore.
Where's Jeff Hawkins? He's arguably the inventor of the first practical PDA. Just as Apple deserves enormous credit for making existing "outsider" technologies palatable in the '70s and '80s, Palm should get props for making the handheld computer into something for the masses back in '97.
Sure its debatable, but I would give them mention.
dnnrly
I really doubt Hemos would be making such a fuss over "stupid lists" if Linus was in a higher position than Gates in this list.
Come on, we have still got the olympic spirit haven't we? My only quibble is between silver and bronze.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Al Gore. I thought he created the Internet.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Its not what it is, its something else.
yeah, if Ken Williams had been selected, i could have possibly profited in a big way due to the similarity in names. i could have ridden his coat tails to fame and fortune damnit! i get email all the time too for the other ken williams - questions about games (i played them all back in the day too!), people wondering why i left such a lucrative career in games to pursue a career in the incredibly incestuous field of information security, etc. the best one though was the guy who wanted my autograph since i was a famous major league baseball player [http://sportsline.netscape.com/u/baseball/bol/bal lplayers/W/Williams_Ken.html].
-- ken williams
Most of my early motivation in computers was do to my desire to figure out "How did that do THAT?". Which quickly followed by "How do I do that myself". I am sure many geeks today feel the same way.
Don't forget Sierra on-line was one of the early companies to promote sound boards (especially theRoland MT-32), they stared on-line gaming a long time ago (remember the Sierra Network), and they also became heavily involved in 3-D after they bought Dynamix. They also were early adopters of CD-ROM based games. I have to say part of Sierra's problems was they were ahead of their time by about 2 years. They were in markets that didn't exist yet.
I have to mention that there is a strong Internet bias in the top 10 list. Some of these people I have never heard of. Remember that the Internet only became main stream a few years ago, but games have been main stream much longer (and therefore have influenced more people).
Er... it's the top ten people of the decade.
While Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, and RMS are certainly more important than many of the names on that list, remember that some their most significant achievements (the GUI, the Apple II, the GNU project and GPL license) are more than ten years old.
However, I agree that John Carmack ought to be on that list.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Where would the Internet be without his brilliant invention, one-click-shopping?
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
Judge Jackson!
You GO girl!
Soylent Green is people!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Since its conception it has influenced the minds of at least 7 software developers. That many people commented on my quote in a non-negative way; most of them heeding it as advice. Which is why, on the bottom of every one of my comments, it says:
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Steve Case (AOL) - like it or not, AOL is the vehicle by which the populace has now saturated the net, including my Mom and Dad who were it probally not for AOL, would not be online - now whether or not this is a good thing is another debate, but the fact of the matter is that if "influential" index is used, he is extremely relevant ...
Stroudsup (sp?) for C++ ... again, this might not be a good thing, but isn't C++ the language the language of the PC (at least for the 90s - those of you posting about K&R - that was the 70s or maybe even 80s ...)
Larry Wall - no I am not joking ... look at the web pervasiveness of Perl, from the humble origins of shell scripting, simple file-in file-out guestbooks, Matt's WWW board all the way to /., OO perl, etc ... maybe for the "ought" 00 decade, Rasmus and Guido can take his place ...
Bill Gates might have a case for #1 - I know it pains me to say it ... but consider where M$ was in 1990 and where they are now in 2000 (or better yet, where they were in 1995 ...) ... they will be kings of the desktop forever (at least my lifetime) and I will be getting frustrated at my wife's inability to make Word do what she wants for eternity ... for him now I can thank for the legions of "Beancounter Eds" and MBS (management by spreadsheet) ...
How can Tim Berners Lee not be on the list?
AZspot
Several concussions, and even two fatalities, have been reported so far. When reached for comment, Bill Gates said, "What were they thinking? It was just another Top Ten list which I nearly won. Do they do this every night Letterman reads his?"
[/spoof]"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
It can't be a meaningful list. Where's John Katz?????
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
I agree with the suggestions that maybe Steve Jobs didn't have a real effect on networking in the '90s, and that e-commerce(tm) really couldn't have taken off without Larry Wall's Perl.
However, XML is increasingly an important part of the networking world, and wouldn't have happened without Jon Bosak getting pissed off at the lack of ability to use SGML on the Web. The W3C does not get credit for that, as is listed under TimBL's entry; Jon was given a working group to shut him up from complaining, and XML wasn't co-opted by the W3C until it began to get a lot of press. Arguably, the integrity of the effort started going down at that point...
The article claims Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for the WWW. I disagree. I feel the person who really made the WWW possible... the person who really gave access to the web to everyone... the person who placed the WWW on everyone's desktop is Bill Gates. (You thought I was going to say Al Gore, didn't you?)
I must be number 11, tho. Its so nice to be in such distinguished company :-)
The ones I miss are people made a difference, rather than just tons of money. Linus and TB-L made a difference because they were techies, not just to make money. Bill G. and Larry E. are just businessmen in a pissing contest to see who can scam more money off an ignorant public.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
If you rank people in order of influence they had on the computer industry, he'd rank pretty high up there (I reckon #3). Think of it.
Overal, a pretty clueless list. I didn't know all these big fat conservative corporations caused our progress...
Steve just rode in on his coattails. Woz *built* Apple, Jobs just hyped it.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
But Gates? What's he done in the 90s? Now if this were a list of the 80s, I would agree. He helped turn M$ into a powerhouse during the 80s. But by 1990, it was already dominant, and what's new since then? Windows? Same old, same old, but with newer bugs. Word? Uh, 80s. Bob? Uh, forget that... Buying off congressmen? Maybe that was new for the 90s, I dunno. Oh, I get it! Lying in court! That was definately a 90s sort of thing.
Here is a quote from the article justifying the choice:
"People who admire him point to his unwavering vision for Windows as the universal operating system, and Microsoft Corp.'s leadership in developing applications for that environment. "
ROFL! "Unwavering vision for Windows" = lack of vision for anything else! And M$'s "leadership in developing applications for that environment" = killing any other company who tried to do the same.
________________
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Private Essayist
Where would we be without Mr. Malda - we sure wouldn't be bitching about this article. He made it possible for us all to read, reject, and whine about every little thing (especially Steve Jobs being so high on the list).
Jon Katz - the worlds biggest waste of time and bandwith.
See that word between "Important" and "People" in your title bar there? See it? T, E, C, H. That spells "Tech." Nelson Mandela is not a tech person, so he doesn't get on the list.
Read the fucking headlines before you start ranting.
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The Chef is number 9?!? What's wrong with you? This list is "pretty useless".
How did john carmack make an influence on the computer industry? Sure he created a revolution with FPS gaming, but it's still not a killer app.
Read the fucking article at all? They didn't say that. They said most important people with no T-E-C-H.
This is a travesty! I demand a write-in for Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf!
I think that al gore should be # 1 for inventing the internet, and TUX should be #2 for making it that much better.
[NOT]
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
If you still want to see the Unix creators' names in lights, then go to another top ten list. Or better yet, go in a cave and make your own. And don't come out until you can live for today!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Wait, isn't Al Gore supposed to supercede Tim-Berners Lee? What exactly is the recipe for this thing? Isn't it futile since the list is entirely subjective?
INTERACTIVE
great comedy company.
You said 'Tech People' and I see Steve Jobs on the list. He hasn't been tech in ages, he's just a suit.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hey, it's really nice to see that Elias Levy made the list. He's a hell of a guy and really deserves it. Lodes of congratulations to him. ;-)
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who runs around with a laptop touting e-governance in andhra pradesh?
IMHO, anything with a trace of Steve Jobs on it deserves a spot in that dumpster in the alley. Gee, I'd see a lot of translucent plastic in there...
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
He should be on the list, he told me so himself!
I wonder if Larry Ellison would be so pissed about ranking behind Gates... Perhaps theres an OracleDot.org somewhere in an alternate universe full of angry Ellison worshippers?
Ellison and Gates should rent out Caesar's Palace boxing ring, put on gloves, and settle the whole thing once and for all.
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The headline says tech, the hyperlink doesn't. Just a bit of editor timesaving. Nothing to see here, move along.
That was my point...
I know, this is a controversial opinion, but Java's made a mark on the industry, and its entire span of influence has been within this decade, so perhaps its creator should be on this list.
At any rate, I see more of a reason for Gosling to be in the top 10 this decade, than Jobs or Gates, whose major influences were in the last decade.
But yes, lists like this are stupid.
I can spell. I just can't type.
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I know. But look at the influence of it... just look what /. is all about. Mostly Linux,
which is Unix-like.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
I thought Al Gore was responsible for this! My government has lied to me! Double bastard!
Even though al gore isn't directly mentioned.... you have to look between the lines, outside of the box.
From the article:
# 1: tim berners-lee
# 2: bill GatEs
# 3: linus tORvALds
Capitalizded letters: GEORAL
If you look at the first three people on the list, you can see, it's an anagram for Al Gore. Al Gore invented the internet, and is the most imporant person of the decade, actually, he's more important than the top three tech people of the decade combined!.... Rush Limbaugh could of told you that.
Oh, boy. Before you make a post like this, you really need to look at the context. /. deep-linked. If you go to the front page, though, it says this: Help us celebrate as we unveil networking's 10 most influential people.
So, uh, Nelson Mandela really would have been a bad choice.
Perl, Perl, Perl!!! Where would Apache be without it? ...or Slashdot for that matter.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
This should really be a list of important companies/organisations. They've put the heads of IBM/Oracle just because their software is important. To be more realistic this is just a list of _software_ that has made the internet what it is.
Everyone else seems to like it, so I'm leaving it. Besides, it serves as a reminder to the programming community to investigate the benefit to society that their creations will give (if any.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Actually, I quite agree with Mr. Gates position, at least in regard to his contribution to the free software movement. Bill Gates (and his evil empire) is the single greatest motivator behind the free software/GNU/Linux community. If it weren't for the complete market dominance of Winders and the anti-competitive and illegal behaviour of Microsoft, Linux never would have progressed so far, so quickly.
In my humble opinion. Which is obviously the undeniable Truth and you're an idiot if you don't totally agree with me. Oh, yeah.
Hey, I'm not arguing that all these guys were influential...but sheesh, gimme a break.
Berner's Lee and Steve Jobs, but not Alan Kay? For cripes sake, Kay invented modern GUI.What about Steve Wozniak ? Hello? Steve Jobs wouldn't have been as sucessful if not for Woz!
Ummm, sheesh. Linus Torvalds, good and well. What about Richard Stallman? What good is a kernel if you can't compile it and don't have OS utilities to use it with?Also, there's an area that they didn't cover: modern gaming. While this might not seem like an overly important part of tech: consider this: Games in general have pushed hardware designers to increase the potential and capacity - for example, video cards and sound cards, which have grown so powerful over the last 6 or 7 years that they rival top stuff from 10 years ago, state of the art stuff that cost millions of dollars. Why don't we see any mention of Carmack, Sweeney, Woston or Romero?
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
Top ten people of the decade?
It should read:
Top ten technologically-influential people of the decade.
Three cheers for social equality!
Get paid for calcualting on your computer.
http://siokaos.org/
Yeah, Tim Berners-Lee, he's great and all, but he gave us the text web. Marc Andreesen should head the list if they want to get into who created the web we know and love today.
eof
-f
The fact of the matter is that Gates deserves to be on the list. Without M$'s software the web and computing would be vastly different. It was the demand for that software that drove down the cost of PC's, and fueled the industry in general. Without a doubt Linux is a better product than Windoze. But I think it is just starting to become useable enough for the average retard user.