Top Ten Software Innovators?

Rsriram asks: "At our company we have named some of the conference rooms with names of software innovators. The names include Ken Thompson, Donald Knuth, Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie. We need to name 10 more rooms and I was wondering who Slashdot readers would think are the top ten software innovators. Not computer hardware but software. I was thinking Von Neumann, and Linus Torvalds would find a mention, What about Watts Humphrey?"

Comments

Linus

[Komarosu]

Your choice about linus is a good one, what can you say bar he has even Microsoft flapping...maybe deviating a bit but Richard Stallman? He and the FSF group have had a lasting effect on software...i'd class that as good reason :)

Re:Linus

[doofusclam]

I wouldn't call Linus an 'innovator' but he has certainly changes the software market and will probably end up having as much impact as the original IBM PC or Windows. I think the question was badly worded, do we want innovators or people who have made their mark on the market?

seany

Re:Linus

[cyb97]

Linus was only the right guy at the right place in time&space...

On the whole Linux hasn't got anything that other Open Source OSes haven't got...

Apart from a highly visible front figure...

Re:Linus

[garyevesson]

I would have said that his project management was innovative. He basically runs the biggest development group in the world where no-one gets paid.

Think about it....

Re:Linus

[napi]

How about Brian Kernighan and Jon Bentley (Programming Pearls series) Napi

Re:Linus

[BMazurek]

Von Nuemann and the others you mentioned were theorists, people on the science side of computer science, who developed new theories. They changed the way people think about the whole field.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

The closest I would come to Linus would possibly be Kernighan and Ritchie, perhaps not so much for C, but for their contribution to Operating Systems.

Some names that come to my mind as important:

• Alonso Church
• Alan Turing
• Edsger Dijkstra
• Grace Hooper
• Donald Knuth
• Marvin Minsky
• John McCarthy
• Edgar Codd
• John Backus
• John von Neumann
• Stephen Cook

I'm curious to see how people justify Linus or Stallman or Wall or Gosling and leave out the giants that built and discovered the very foundations of Computer Science.

Re:Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, a decent percentage of kernel programmers get paid to hack the kernel. i know quite a few. this wasn't always the case, of course, however it wasn't always so big or so well managed.

When you say 'software innovation'

[Anonymous Coward]

You've said 'Bill Gates'.

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[(trb001)]

No flame retardant suit will protect me from this, so I might as well just say it. Bill Gates was one hell of a software innovator, we (the /. crowd) just don't typically like him. Come on, he wrote a cheap, simple OS that was easy for the masses to use. He helped make computers popular by providing a simple interface that my grandmother can figure out. Without Windows, you wouldn't have had Quake or Doom or Civ or any of the other games because they wouldn't have been written...without the home market, those games wouldn't have been economically viable.

A good portion of us owe our careers and hobbies to Gates since he allowed the home user access to a PC with a simple OS. While I don't think his OS is great, his innovation is remarkable.

--trb

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[Ivan Raikov]

Without Windows, you wouldn't have had Quake or Doom or Civ or any of the other games because they wouldn't have been written[...]

Funny that all three games that you mention actually worked under DOS; Quake and Doom used Watcom's DOS4GW protected-mode extender, which in itself was a patch for the hugely pathetic x86/DOS "platform." And no, DOS wasn't written by Microsoft, sorry. So I'm still waiting for you to point one, ONE original idea by Microsoft.

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[(trb001)]

You're right, I should have said "without Microsoft", not "without Windows". That withstanding, you would have been hardpressed to buy a computer in the mid/late 80s and early 90s that didn't have a Microsoft operating system installed on it. If it wasn't MS-DOS, it was probably licensed from Microsoft. The only occasional exceptions were DRDOS and PCDOS, which you didn't see too terribly often. Yes, there were other OS's that could run games, but they weren't popular, and 99% of the gaming population didn't play games on them, they played on MS platforms.

--trb

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[eyez]

Without Windows, you wouldn't have had Quake or Doom or Civ or any of the other games because they wouldn't have been written...

Um. Both Doom and Civilization came out before windows. They ran natively in DOS, which although microsoft /was/ behind it, is not nearly as "innovative" nor "easy to use" as you claim that windows is. Windows doesn't have a DAMN thing to do with the popularity of computer gaming. It was along far before windows, and had MacOS or OS/2 or some UNIX derivative taken market share for the home user instead of DOS back in the day, the games would be there today.

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Yes, troll, you would be hardpressed to have found a computer without MSDOS on it. That's because they had a monopoly handed to them, and they weren't afraid to use it. Heavy-handed and often illegal tactics, licensing extortion, and every other scheme Satan himself would be proud of, were used to great effect to retard the advance of the personal computer and technology innovation. Without a Microsoft, we might have the OS now, that we won't have for another 20 years. Thanks Microsoft, for slowing down everything.

Our only consolation might be that hardware is more advanced than it would have been otherwise, it had to compensate for software's weakness.

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[pauljlucas]

Come on, he wrote a cheap, simple OS that was easy for the masses to use

No: he bought DOS from some guy (in Arizona?) for $50K and turned around and licensed it to IBM. He then ripped off MacOS for Windows (not that MacOS wasn't ripped off from Xerox).

Gates is a good businessman ("good" in the sense of making money, not in the sense of "good business") and has lots of chutzpah, but he's no innovator. He's not even a good programmer.

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[Anonymous Coward]

No,

He sold DOS and *THEN* bought it.

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[iago]

There was a link that is now gone about whether or not Bill Gates was a good programmer. The answer was yes. The link is now gone unfortunately. Here's a discussion on Kuro5hin about it though:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/15/201523/1 35

I can't talk because I can't code my way out of a paper bag.

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[belroth]

Funny, I found it quite easy to get mine with DrDos instead, I just asked and they said OK.
Admittedly DrDos came in a box and I had to wipe MsDos to install it but that was was the point. DrDos was much better than MsDos...

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[ajw1976]

If I had a business, that is the same way that I'd run it. I'd try my best to crush the competition and make the most money. I'm sure most here would agree, eventhough they don't want to.

Re:When you say 'software innovation'

[arb]

So I'm still waiting for you to point one, ONE original idea by Microsoft.

Bob? ;-)

You seem to be going for recent people?

[herrlich_98]

Linus and Stallman would be definites... and, shoot, what is the name of the Mozilla guy?

If you wanted to go more "classical" you could do people like Blaise Pascal or Dikstra or even Turning.

Re:You seem to be going for recent people?

[i chose quality]

Turning would be turing in his grave.

SCNR

Re:You seem to be going for recent people?

[Anonymous Coward]

are you looking for Jamie Zawinski(JWZ)?

Re:You seem to be going for recent people?

[Kevin Stevens]

I like Linus Torvalds alot, and he wrote a great software product, but how exactly has he been an innovator? Stallman was more directly tied to the Free Software Movement and Open Source. He did do great things for computing, bringing *nix type power to desktops, but is copying another system really an innovation? I feel he should be seen more as a great engineer and designer, not necessarily an innovator. I guess I am not really an expert on the linux kernel, but as I understand it, it uses technology that has been around for awhile (as it should be if you are trying to build a solid system). From what I understand, Alan Cox was also more directly tied to any new innovations going into the kernel, while Linus is more of a commander-in-chief now.

Re:You seem to be going for recent people?

[orthogonal]

Turning would be turing in his grave.

Actually, I think you mean his tape is caught in an infinite loop of read forward--print zero--read backward--print zero--read forward--....

Re:You seem to be going for recent people?

[pauljlucas]

... you could do people like Blaise Pascal ...

Pascal was not a software innovator as the submitter specifically requested. He was a mathematician who died in 1662, quite a bit before computers including the one Ada Lovelace worked on (she died in 1852).

Larry Wall....

[HaloZero]

Idolize he who gave us Perl. Without perl, there would be no slashdot. o_O Think about THAT one. :p

(Actually, there probably WOULD be a Slashdot-esqe place, if not Slashdot simply done in a different language... BUT STILL!) It are Slashdot. We lubble slashdot. *hugs teh Slashdot*

Re:Larry Wall....

[gowen]

Yeah, but imagine the confusion of a door with the word "Wall" written on it...

Re:Larry Wall....

[orthogonal]

Yeah, but imagine the confusion of a door with the word "Wall" written on it...

Who has to imagine confusion when they can read Perl source code?

Or was that Perl? Maybe it was line noise, I couldn't tell?

Re:Larry Wall....

[The Bungi]

Without perl, there would be no slashdot.

I have good intelligence that Microsoft, Sony, the RIAA and Nintendo are teaming up to send a terminator back in time to off his mom.

CmdTaco is going to counter by sending CowboyNeal back to fight the terminator.

Of course the problem is CowboyNeal wants to stay naked after he exits the time warp.

Re:Larry Wall....

[Anonymous Coward]

...except that there isn't really anything innovative about Perl. It was created simply because awk wasn't powerful enough.

And awk, OTOH, was innovative.

what about

[Prowl]

tim berners-lee
alan turing
larry wall
bill gates ??
steve wozniak
jay miner

Re:what about

[AtrN]

McCarthy
All the Multicians
larry wall (for rn but not perl!)
Kay, Ingalls (for Smalltalk)
Massalin (read the thesis and weep)
Cray, Amdahl, Josh Fisher (hw == sw)
Hoare (for CSP)
Pike for Pike-goodness

Jay Miner? Maybe. I bought an Amiga 1000 as soon as they were available, I played games on the Atari 800. It was great at the time.

All the graphics gurus...
Blinn
James Clark
Porter + Duff (I use rc :)

There are hundreds of them! Where do you stop?

Re:what about

[Anonymous Coward]

bill joy
marc andreeson
scott mcnealy
carmack

Re:what about

[pmz]

bill gates ??

How about on a bathroom stall in honor of Microsoft software and business tactics?

Re:what about

[stevew]

I'd agree with gates being here - he hacked together a reasonable Basic for uP's before anyone else did. (I lived through the era ;-)
I can't agree with Woz MOSTLY because he is really a superb Hardware hacker. His software hacking ain't shabby - but his innovations were mostly in the hardware world.

Re:what about

[merriam]

Software innovators, right?

tim berners-lee

Ahead of Ted Nelson? Anyway, that's more information and networks than software.

alan turing

Of course.

larry wall

That's five moderated mentions so far of Wall. Here's one of John McCarthy. Quoting Paul Graham:

In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry.

I think Wall would probably mention McCarthy.

bill gates ??

I call that business.

steve wozniak jay miner

hardware

Re:what about

[__past__]

In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry.

Reminds me that Alonzo Church, father of the lambda calculus, should not be forgotten. Of course, he actually was a mathematician and had little to do with computers, but then again, that's true for a lot of the early giants (after all, Turing did never try to acutally sell his machine or something...)

Re:what about

[sohp]

I'll second Alonzo Church. Think about it -- to have a meeting "in Church"!

Re:what about

[mshiltonj]

tim berners-lee
alan turing
larry wall
bill gates ??
steve wozniak
jay miner

...INCOMING!!!

Re:what about

[zonker]

actually, you might find this article interesting as it mentions woz's visicalc hack...

Re:what about

[Anonymous Coward]

Greenblatt, Weinreb, Moon, Knight, etc. Or are they politically incorrect, given that this is slashdot?

Dijkstra

[Reemi]

My personal favorite: Dijkstra

Re:Dijkstra

[ptomblin]

Dijkstra considered harmful.

Re:Dijkstra

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe. You should have tacked it to the bathroom wall...

Re:Dijkstra

[__past__]

The use of fake Dijkstra quotes cripples the mind; posting them on /. should, therefore, be regarded as criminal offense.

Re:Dijkstra

[sahala]

Hehe. You should have tacked it to the bathroom wall...

...or on the bedroom ceiling.

Re:Dijkstra

[jason_watkins]

Definately Dijkstra... structured programming is probibly the single most widespread and powerful idea in the last 30 years of software.

Maybe OOP or something else will reach the same level of usage over the next thirty years, but it's hard to imagine what form any language could take without the basic repettitive constructs.

And certainly there were more people involved in SP than just Dijkstra, but then again Dijkstra contributed a staggering amount more than just SP as well.

Re:Dijkstra

[Raiford]

Dijkstra definitly belongs on such a list but I can't believe some of these other names. Wozniak, Gates yea they may be innovators but for some reason I can't just place their name next to scholars or innovators such as the likes of say what Henry Ford was to the automotive industry. Something just doesn't sit well with it.

Re:Dijkstra

[Anonymous Coward]

it's hard to imagine what form any language could take without the basic repettitive constructs [of structured programming]

No need to imagine ! There are plenty you can look at. They are the declarative languages.

Re:Dijkstra

[jason_watkins]

I'm aware of functional programing, but they often include SP primatives as well. For example, Haskell is declaritive not because the constructs are different, but because of lazy evaluation. Most declaritive languages still carry many of the SP concepts forward.

But imagining a widespread general purpose langauge that does not have repetition, alternation or predication is a little more difficult. I suppose SQL qualifies as do various markup languages. Assembly does as well of course (after all, it's what motivated SP :P).

Woz

[calumr]

Steve Wozniak gets my vote.

Re:Woz

[happyDave]

I like Woz as a hardware innovator, but not so much as a software innovator. Not mentioned so far:
Dan Bricklin (creator of Visi-Calc, the first computer spreadsheet)
Marc Andreesen for Mosaic/Netscape
Donald Knuth (for the exact opposite of innovation: explication. He wrote The Art of Computer Programming)
Bob Taylor (for being the head of Xerox PARC while so much innovation was going on)
Alan Turing gave us the logic behind computer programming
I could put Tim Patterson, who wrote Q-DOS and then had it bought by Bill Gates to become Windows XP :-), but why not say Gary Kildall who wrote CP/M which Q-DOS is a rip-off of.
Google has a directory of Computer Pioneers. You can check that out.

Re:Woz

[DarkDust]

I could put Tim Patterson, who wrote Q-DOS and then had it bought by Bill Gates to become Windows XP :-), but why not say Gary Kildall who wrote CP/M which Q-DOS is a rip-off of.

I know, this is totally off-topic but I can't resist :-)

While doing a little research on a little paper I'm currently working on I learned a bit about the history of MicroSoft. Windows XP is based on Windows 2000 which is based on Windows NT which in turn is based on... OS/2 ! MicroSoft worked together with IBM to create OS/2, the two had a dispute and parted and each one went a different way with their parts of OS/2.

But Windows ME is just a pretty big DOS application :-)

Re:Woz

[Anonymous Coward]

NT is based on Mica. Interesting kernel... Even more interesting court case.

Re:Woz

[Lars T.]

Hey, why not Tony Tebby for QDOS (not related to Q-DOS)? That got Linus into multi-tasking.

Re:Woz

[stevew]

Gary also wasn't a bad hacker, but CP/M was a rip-off of Dec OS's of the time. So he was a great engineer - but is what he did innovative, i.e. was it the first of it's kind. Nope.
Same goes for Tim Patterson who really ripped off CP/M to build Q-DOS.

Re:Woz

[anthony_dipierro]

Marc Andreesen for Mosaic/Netscape? No way. Andreesen pretty much single handedly ruined Netscape to the point where they had to start over from scratch with Mozilla.

Re:Woz

[happyDave]

The question isn't about what he did with existing software, but whether he was a software innovator. I think you can definitely question his software innovator-ness if you want to, but talking about how he "ruined" Netscape doesn't acknowledge that he created a web browser that included in-line graphics. I think that counts as innovation. If you don't think it counts as innovation, that's fine. But don't say he doesn't belong in an innovators list because of some bad decisions he later made.

As to the case for innovation, I would say that his little adjustment to browsing drastically and fundamentally altered our society. Remember, before Mosaic, browsers didn't have in-line graphics. I don't think we can forget how big an innovation that is. Sure, someone else would have come up with it eventually, but that's not the point. So how about Marc Andreesen for Mosaic? That was the innovation. What he did or did not do with Netscape is irrelevant.

Re:Woz

[anthony_dipierro]

I think you can definitely question his software innovator-ness if you want to, but talking about how he "ruined" Netscape doesn't acknowledge that he created a web browser that included in-line graphics.

Which browser is that? He didn't create Mosaic. I don't even think he came up with the idea for in-line graphics. Well, obviously he didn't come up with it, because it was done before him, not with an HTML browser, but didn't prodigy and AOL have in-line graphics before Mosaic? I'm sure someone did.

But don't say he doesn't belong in an innovators list because of some bad decisions he later made.

Perhaps I was unclear. I was judging his bad decisions he made from the very beginning as the technical visionary for the company. As was evidenced later (but occurred from the very beginning), he failed miserably.

As for Mosaic, I've never read that he was the main designer for Mosaic. A code monkey perhaps. Chief architect maybe. But the code and architecture of Mosaic are not particularly impressive. The idea is. So where are you basing your assertion that Andreesen is responsible for the idea of Mosaic? Also, I don't feel that in-line graphics was as novel an idea as you are suggesting.

Finally, you are the one who nominated "Marc Andreesen for Mosaic/Netscape." Had you nominated "Marc Andreesen for Mosaic" I wouldn't have mentioned Netscape at all.

Re:Woz

[Anonymous Coward]

Two books for your research: "Showstopper" (Dave Cutler and WinNT) and "Gates" (more a history of Microsoft than an autobiography - discusses IBM relationship).

John Carmack

[Electrum]

John Carmack started the genre of 3D games on the PC. When it comes to games, who else do you think of?

Re:John Carmack

[doofusclam]

How about Dave Theurer?

http://www.geocities.com/arcadeclassics.geo/TEMP ES T.html

Or Shiguru Miyamoto, creator of Mario?

Lots of games programmers have revolutionised one thing or another, due to the cutting-edge nature of the market.

seany

Re:John Carmack

[pizza_milkshake]

I second the Carmack nomination. That man personally redefined the video game industry.

Re:John Carmack

[bluelip]

Parker Brothers ;)

Re:John Carmack

[tdelaney]

In terms of gaming innovations ...

Tim Cain

http://www.troikagames.com/team.htm

Fallout was without a doubt the most innovative game of its time, reviving the CRPG genre single-handedly.

Re:John Carmack

[Junks Jerzey]

John Carmack started the genre of 3D games on the PC. When it comes to games, who else do you think of?

No, no, no! He--along with Romero and others--started the first person shooter genre, but not 3D games on the PC. Some fully 3D games that came out before Wolfenstein are:

Stunts!
Stunt Driver
Flight Simulator 2 (later Microsoft Flight Simulator)
Jet
UFO
Ultima Underworld
Stunt Island (also 1992)

All of these were fully polygonal games. Id's games didn't go fully polygonal until Quake (1996).

Re:John Carmack

[nullard]

He--along with Romero and others--started the first person shooter genre

Isn't Colony older than anything from Carmack?

Re:John Carmack

[Junks Jerzey]

Isn't Colony [macehq.cx] older than anything from Carmack?

Let me clarify. There were a few first person shooter style games before id, such as MIDI-Maze for the Atari ST (which was networked even). And the raycasting effect of Wolfenstein 3D can be traced back to WayOut and Capture the Flag for the Atari 800, if not further. But id created the model for first person shooters as we know them.

Now if people would just stop giving Carmack credit for inventing 3D graphics...

How about..

[glh]

Anders Hejlsberg the creator of C# (and Delphi?)
- the "Hejlsberg" room

Larry Wall the creator of Perl
- the "wall" room?

Alan Cooper "father of VB"
- the "Closet"? :)

Re:How about..

[merriam]

Jan Lukasiewicz -- the Luka... the Polish room

Re:How about..

[msouth]

Or you could put Wall's name on the LabrARRY

Re:How about..

[pauljlucas]

Except C# and Visual basic gave nothing new to the world of computer science. Both languages are merely ho-hum tweaks to existing languages.

Re:How about..

[glh]

Well, as far as the languages go there is nothing earth-shattering (other than they are all OO now, but OO has been around for a while). However, with the .NET platform (VB and C# comprise part of it anyway) you can write any language and compile down to the same byte code. I'd say there is some innovation in that sense. OK, not exactly groundbreaking.. but technically, you could say the same thing about Perl (why narrow it down to C#/VB- is that a stench of bigotry in the air?)

Besides, the original poster asked about software innovations, which may be different than computer science theories.

Re:How about..

[pauljlucas]

why narrow it down to C#/VB- is that a stench of bigotry in the air?

Because those are the languages that the parent post mentioned.

Besides, the original poster asked about software innovations, which may be different than computer science theories.

I never said anything about theories.

Obvious

[DeadSea]

Here is a list of who it should be (Sorry if I left anybody out):

1. CmdrTaco
2. Hemos
3. CowboyNeal
4. JonKatz
5. Cliff
6. jamie
7. michael
8. pudge
9. timothy
10. DeadSea

Re:Obvious

[actor_au]

You haven't been here very long have you?

The CowboyNeal option always goes at the very end!

Re:Obvious

[cuyler]

JonKatz is still with Slashdot? Wow.

I totatlly forgot about him since I've had my account set up for the past month to ignore any article posted by him.

I find Slashdot much better this way. I thought he would have left Slashdot by now.

Re:Obvious

[nelsonal]

I enjoyed reading the flames on his articles, so I left him on, and I haven't seen an article from him for months. I think the Commodore toting kid in Afghanistan was the final nail in his coffin.

Re:Obvious

[damiam]

The lesser-known admins:

• Nathan
• krow
• HeUnique
• Nik
• Roblimo

Engineers Vs Scientists

[jeorgen]

I was thinking Von Neumann

Think of the US military engineers that actually built the von Neumann architecture, before it was known under his name or indeed known by him. von Neumann published it first, and when the engineers found out they decided to publish to get credit. But their paper was stopped by the US military. This according to at least one account

The Book ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer seems to give one opinion on who actually did what.

/jeorgen

Linus

[sql*kitten]

. Not computer hardware but software. I was thinking Von Neumann, and Linus Torvalds would find a mention

Linus Torvalds should not be on such a list. Tananbaum was wrong to say that Linux is obsolete, but he was correct that it is of little academic interest. Linus' skill is not in innovation, it is in execution and dare I say it, project management.

Von Nuemann and the others you mentioned were theorists, people on the science side of computer science, who developed new theories. They changed the way people think about the whole field.

Tim Berners-Lee

[an_mo]

He wrote the first web browser and server

Re:Tim Berners-Lee

[smithmc]

If you're going to credit Tim Berners-Lee (and I'm not saying we shouldn't), then we should also credit Vannevar Bush, whose "Memex" concept is the spiritual father of the Web.

My top ten

[Koos Baster]

My favorites:

Jeff Minter
E.W. Dijkstra
Donald Knuth
Niclaus Wirth
Richard Stallman
Bjarne Stroustrup
Linus Torvalds
Miquel d'Icaza
Wouter van Oortmerssen
Larry Wall

Re:My top ten

[sharkey]

Dmitri Sklyarov
Jon Johannsen

Re:My top ten

[GigsVT]

I like Jeff Minter too, but I don't see him as an innovator to be grouped in with the likes of Knuth. Has he even written anything much for any platforms other than commodore/amiga?

Re:My top ten

[Koos Baster]

Minter was in the news yesterday ,as a sidenote. Check out: gridrunner++ if you're looking something un-commodorish.

I saw people posting John Carmack. I agree he's a great hacker and deserves the credits, but his great abilities are focussed on great graphics, not gameplay. IMHO Jeff is truly innovative in combining art, psychadelics and a crazy sense of humor with his coding skills. It's not just how much his code changed the masses. Hmmkay. guess he's just one of my personal favorites...

Re:My top ten

[__past__]

I'm not sure about both Stroustroup and Wall: Both basically created a language by merging features others alread had. This is of course a creative process of it's own, but I'd say the origial inventors of these features have deserved being on this list more.

Miguel de Icaza? What's his innovation again? Writing a desktop because he didn't like something about the license used by people who wrote a desktop because they didn't like the license and technology other Desktops (Windows and CDE) used? Copying Outlook? Copying .NET?

Re:My top ten

[Koos Baster]

True neither of the three are obviously innovative.

I like Stroustrup for being modestly innovative but also keeping a pragmatic eye on what application developers are used to, or want.

Wall, for just throwing in anything a programmer migth need, and in doing so creating a soup polymorphous and rich syntax, with its own poetry.

Wrt. De Icaza -- the same could be said about Torvalds, Stallman, Gates or Jobs. Admitted: they aren't great in the problem's they've tackled, or the way they did it. De Icaza (or Havoc Pennington, Torvalds, Raymond, Stallman and of course many others) is great in the huge amount of work he did, while sticking to and advertising a phylosophy I greatly admire. To great extent Open Source isn't innovative, it's just dull copying, improving and releasing it under a license it should have had from the beginning.

De Icaza is innovative in what he believes good software development should look like.

(And then again, its just my 2 cents. I might just as easily have put in Russell, Turing, for their fundamental thoughts on computability, Saul Kripke for his stimulating thoughts on epistemology or Noam Chomsky, for instigating Computational Linguistics.)

Re:My top ten

[damiam]

What did Dmitri Skylarov "innovate"? Jon Johanson at least broke CSS. Dmitri Skylarov worked for a company that cracked ebook protection. There's nothing really innovative about that.

Re:My top ten

[petee moobaa]

Has he even written anything much for any platforms other than commodore/amiga?

Hmmmm... Commodore VIC20/C64/Amiga, Atari 800/ST/Jaguar, Nuon, PC, PocketPC, mystery console...

Re:My top ten

[Anonymous Coward]

Johanson didn't really break CSS. He found a private key in his Windows DVD software.

CSS was later broken by someone else.

how about...

[NemoX]

The folowing has some people: softwarehistory important people

Also, Ada Lovelase (Byron) assited Charles Babbage. How about: John von Newmann ("von Newmann architecture"), John Backus (FORTRAN), Niklaus Writh (Pascal), Dan Bricklin/Bob Frankston (first spreadsheet - VisiCalc),

IMO, Bill Gates is not an inovator, he is a buisiness man who invented nothing that wasn't already on the market in the 80's.

Some cool people

[__past__]

• Edsger Dijkstra, for stuff ranging from the shortest-path algorithm to "Basic considered harmful".
• Turing and Babbage for the fundaments of CS
• Alan Kay, inventor of smalltalk and the term "Object-Oriented Programming"
• Fred Brooks, author of the Mythical Man Month
• J. McCarthy, who developed Lisp by accident

Re:Some cool people

[__past__]

Duh. GOTO is harmful. Basic only makes you mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

Re:Some cool people

[Anonymous Coward]

You may think BASIC is bad, but check out PL/I:

printhello: proc;
call $dostuff();
if err ^= 0 then call $errhandler();
getout: return;
errhandler: proc;
call $printerror();
goto getout;

Yes, that's right, you're RETURNing from the outer scope with a GOTO from the inner scope. "longjmp" anyone?

Re:Some cool people

[CharlieG]

Larry Constantine
Demarco and Lister

You've got to have...

[jetsfandb]

Linus Torvalds and Bjarne Stroustroup (IMHO)

Re:You've got to have...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stroustroup shoud be the name of the men's room. The ass hole mutilated an excellent language - to make it "object oriented". Now when you look for a job - all the ass hole's want are C/C++ programmers. There is no such language as C/C++.

Re:You've got to have...

[Lars T.]

What excellent language would that be?

Re:You've got to have...

[jetsfandb]

Sorry to dis agree. IMO he took an excellent language and made it better. Besides, you can still use C only coding if you feel that strongly about OO and C++. I also doubt you have solid understanding of proper software design and usage with C++ if you feel that negatively about it. Especially considering your post as an AC.

I wouldn't normally, but what the hell.

[balog]

Not to belittle his role in the software world, but i don't really agree that linus torvalds should be named as one of the top software innovators. Imho linux is really unix done all over again, just under a different kind of licensing. If that's software innovation then go for stallman instead...

I'd probably go for people more like the woz, carmack, etc. (and of course some of the good ol' guys, turing, davies, babbage etc.)

Some thoughts:
The inventor of hypertext?
The inventor of compression?
The inventor of linked lists?
The inventor of multitasking?
and on and on and on...

(sry for my crappy english btw.)

Re:I wouldn't normally, but what the hell.

[glenstar]

The inventor of hypertext?

While there is some controversy over this, it is *generally* accepted (at least in my circles) that Ted Nelson who founded the Xanadu project many, many moons ago.

I had the opportunity to speak with Ted on several occassions in Tokyo several years back and I must say that he is one of the most eccentric human beings I have ever met. In the first meeting he plopped a giant tape recorder on the table and then, in the midst of the discussion, pulled out a camcorder and started recording me while I spoke. The man records *everything* for some future purpose. Amazing, really.

Read that headline again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Software innovators. If it was for hardware, Woz would get my vote too. But he really didn't do a hell of a lot on the software side of things (compared to what he did with hardware, at least).

Re:Read that headline again.

[Lars T.]

That's like saying that Da Vinci wasn't a good engineer compared to what he did in the arts.

Alan Kay, Doug Englebart, Will Wright, etc

[RobotWisdom]

I've been doing a (still very gappy) timeline of software/ data structures. Some of my faves:

Alan Kay, Doug Englebart, Will Wright, Chris Crawford, Doug Lenat, Jay Forrester, Ivan Sutherland

Bill Gates

[retards]

There, I said it, so now you don't have to. ... besides, Microsoft did change personal computing, for better or for worse (more likely).

Re:Bill Gates

[spitzak]

Certainly he had some effect on the modern world but it is not clear if he did anything special. I think it is extremely likely there would be some monopoly right now and it is just coincidence that he is running it. Even if you think MicroSoft is special it is not really clear if the decisions that made them successful were from Bill or from others in the organization.

In a similar vein it is not clear if Linus is special either. There were dozens of Unix clones coming out at the same time and he was lucky it was his that won.

Possibly Bill Gates did do some innovation with the Basic interpreter before 1980. It seems that he pushed for using the same interpreter on different computers, while most manufacturers were attempting to make their own incompatable version. That could be considered quite important.

Re:Bill Gates

[joto]

Yes, with a lot of good-will, it could be said that Bill Gates "invented" the portable interpreted scripting language. Most BASICs before his time was compiled. Of course, we had interpreted languages long before that time (e.g. McCarthys LISP). And it is doubtful whether Gates would know about it at the time.

His major contribution, however, is that he was one of the first to actually sell software to end-users. Untill then, software was either free, or it was paid for by the manufacturer of the computer (who would make it free - why else would somebody buy their incompatible computer?).

Re:Bill Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Bill Gates does not belong on the list. We're listing Innovators, not Terminators.

Re:Bill Gates

[natersoz]

Billg gets the handicapped toilet stall

Re:Bill Gates

[WindBourne]

Actually, Bill only contributed about 5% to it. The bulk of it was Allen and the 3'rd guy (I forget who it was). Personally, I like the idea of naming a toliet stall door with "Gates". It is quite approriate considering how badly Bill use to smell at tech meetings.

I think RMS is a good one

[91degrees]

Of course, his main contribution was the free software philosophy, which certainly was an innovation for software design, if not actually for software.

Also, wans't he primarily responsible for Emacs?

Re:I think RMS is a good one

[oliverthered]

I aggree, why did Linus make it into the list 'modern saints' instead of RMS.

Sure Linus has done a fine job, but RMS's contribution is GPL and the FSF which is far greater (and more saintly).

RMS has been the most effective libertarian of modern times, people say what if the Nazis had won the war, well what if RMS hadn't have bothered.

Re:I think RMS is a good one

[Anonymous Coward]

RMS also invented "truth maintenance" for fast rulebases, and wrote emacs and gcc.

Ingo Molnar

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't poor only Mingo deserve a mention? if not for the excellent work he's been done on Tux, then surely for all of the work he has done with threading within the kernel???

my votes

[Ender Ryan]

Larry Wall - This guy is great. He created Perl, a fun, interesting language with great obfuscation potential! - disclaimer: I earn a living writing Perl ;-)

John Carmack - Doom, Quake, Q3A engine, etc. Plus he works on rockets! John Carmack has done a lot to promote the state of computing today. Just look at how people benchmark PCs, "I got 1.5 trillion fps in Q3A dude!"

Linus Torvalds - He gave us the last piece to a free *nix. Who knows what would have happened to the GNU project without him.

Richard Stallman - He started the GNU project. He also should probably be awarded a medal for the most misunderstood person in the industry. There is an equal amount of FUD directed at him as there is directed at GNU/Linux from Microsoft.

Steve Wozniak - Come on, you can't forget this guy!

Steve Jobs - Now here is someone who has had an interesting career. He's also the guy who started the push to make software "pretty". Just look at OS X.

There's plenty of others.

Re:my votes

[eht]

I beg quite heavily to differ on your statement about Linus Torvalds, the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects were going long before Linus ever stepped on the free *nix scene, and what would have happened to the GNU project without him? Maybe GNU/HURD would be done by now.

Now mod me down for actually knowing what i'm talking about.

Re:my votes

[joto]

Maybe GNU/HURD would be done by now.

Somehow, I doubt it. Surely, no software ever gets "finished" (even TeX, which is, at least by my standards, anything but "perfect").

But Hurd was doomed to failure from the start. It was exactly the diamond-like jewel type of system that was predestined to be obsolete by the time it finally arrived.

Re:my votes

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck larry wall !!!

I'd name...

[DarkDust]

Lord British (father of Ultima) and Shigery Miyamoto (father of Mario, Donkey Kong, etc.) ;-)

But a serious vote would be Bjarne Stroustrup (the C++ inventor)...

Re:I'd name...

[Anonymous Coward]

At Nintendo Of America the conferance rooms are named after (duh) best selling Nintendo characters and games.

Alan Turing of course!

[turgid]

How could anyone forget him. And what about Chuck Moore, inventor of FORTH? :-)

Re:Alan Turing of course!

[blackcoot]

a complete list of interesting candidates can be found here. alan definately has my vote, of course, i'm slightly biased in this, given that he's the father of my field (ai). unfortunately, 90+% of people don't know turing's full story --- a lot of people are surprised to find out that he started at bletchley park cracking enigma and ended up committing suicide thinking he was snow white (eating a poisoned apple). it was turing's stored program concept that was the foundation for the von neumann architecture, so in a sense turing is the father of computing in general. anyways, for more info, try here or here

Don't forget...

[wanderb]

Sid Meier, for bringing us SimCity.

Re:Don't forget...

[ShwAsasin]

Will Wright made Sim City...Sid made Civilization.

Re:Don't forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Sid Meier bring us the all-mighty Civilization (1, 2, & 3) games, whereas Maxis brought us the SimCities?

Bricklin/Frankston

[Peyote Pekka]

Dan Bricklin/Bob Frankston's creation, Visicalc, is why each business / organization bought a microcomputer in the 1980's. Visicalc and subsequent copycats spreadsheets really changed the way things could be done, suddenly a day or two of statistics or accounting work could be done in a few minutes to a few hours.

For a while, there were dozens of quality spreadsheets on the market. The office spreadsheet opened the door for other technologies, more gradual adoption of microcomputers for word processin and eventually e-mail and the WWW. Counting these two definitely get my vote for one of the slots as top ten software innovators.

Number one

[moc.tfosorcimgllib]

Name the red room Romero.

Gang of Four

[Samus]

How about the guys who codified design patterns in the classic Design Patterns book? While I don't think you would really want to take up four of your rooms with each of their names you could just call it the Gang of Four room.
You could also nominate James Gosling the Java guy. While I wouldn't really call Java all that innovative it has had a revolutionary impact like Larry Wall and Perl. I think you would more want names that when people say, "what did they guy who this room is named after do?" and you tell them to look it up they will be better coders for it. Thats why I nominate the Gang of Four name.

Re:Gang of Four

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosling also brought us the king of all editors: emacs (sorry vi fans)

Kernhigan? Postel?

[Kevin Stevens]

How about Brian Kernhigan?

I know this doesnt exactly fit, but Jon Postel deserves an honor too.

Re:Kernhigan? Postel?

[Anonymous Coward]

God is dog spelled backwards....

Yeah, and "Stupid Pretentious Dipshit" is another way of spelling Kevin Stevens.

Do you seriously believe the similarity between "dog" and "God" is anything meaningful, or anything more than an unremarkable coincidence?

As I see it, in order for there to be any higher meaning behind the congruence you observe, you have to believe one of the following:

1) The similarity between the words was arrived at through a deliberate and calculating act by some all powerful deity, who influenced the course of language and history to reach a point where a self-righteous cretin like you could use the result to mock said deity.

2) The similarity between the words was arrived at owing to the labors of a secret, powerful organization of atheists who influenced the course of language and history to reach a point where everyone could observe the similarity between the two words and conclude that God had something in common with Fido.

Notice that we must assert control over language and history in order for meaning to be present, because languages do not spring out of nothing and become dominant but rather evolve gradually. Without something directing that evolution the similarity between God and dog would be random and hence meaningless.

#2 is absurd in general, but specifically because two equally plausible and mutally contradictory conclusions can be drawn: that God has just as much material existence as a dog, or that God is just as powerful as a dog. Neither conclusion could really be validated unless the heretofore hidden atheists came forward and said "Hey guys, this is the interpretation we meant for you to reach." And even then all that demonstrates is that those people have an opinion on God, which may or may not be right.

I think you're not the sort to hold the belief expressed in #1, which is sort of unfortunate for you since this is far and away the most plausible of the explanations, which is saying quite a lot since it does involve an omniscient, all powerful deity.

So basically all you're doing is expressing some inner desire to be offensive to people who have done nothing to harm you. What a juvenile mind and empty life you must have to take satisfaction in such a thing.

Re:Kernhigan? Postel?

[Anonymous Coward]

You take my signature too seriously. I meant that God is dog spelled backwards, and nothing more. you can assign whatever meaning you want to that word, but thats all the value it holds for me.

Grace Hopper is a good one

[budalite]

Grace Murray Hopper (bio can be found at The History of Computing ), generally credited with "developing the first compiler and who led the effort in the 60's to develop COBOL." Cool lady.

Re:Grace Hopper is a good one

[FireDoctor]

The most important reason for including Grace Hopper is that she is credited as the first to apply the term "bug" to a computer problem.

Re:Grace Hopper is a good one

[blackcoot]

she was also a rear admiral in the navy, coined the term, "debug" and had trouble balancing her check book because she thought in octal rather than decimal. there's also the fact that she was the first woman to recieve a ph.d. in mathematics from yale. more info here. definately a cool chick ;-) byte magazine did a really nice bio on here in their 25th anniversary edition too.

Re:Grace Hopper is a good one

[__past__]

She was perhaps also the one that introduced the tradition of wearing crappy glasses to computer geekdom.

Re:Grace Hopper is a good one

[devinjones]

She also coined the term "bug" after she found a moth shorting out a circuit in an early vaccum tube computer. From then on, whenever there was a problem with the system, the engineers would say "must be a bug in the system"

I saw her on the David Letterman show once. She handed him a piece of string about a foot long: "Here, have a nanosecond" the string was one light-nanosecond long.

What about Watts Humphrey?

[skaffen42]

Uhm... how the hell did he make it into that list?

I've suffered under his misguided, outdated and usually just plain wrong ideas about process management. I've also met him and it simply confirmed the fact that this guy hasn't had an original idea in his life. He is so rigid and clueless that he shouldn't be allowed near a software company.

Two projects. One run using his Team Software Process, the other run using a very watered down version of XP. The Team Software Process project was months late and was full of bugs. The XP project was delivered on time even though it was staffed with only about 80% of the manpower that was planned for.

MMhhhh... might I suggest the Watts Humphrey Urinal?

The Danni Ashe Room

[ignatzMouse]

For her innovative work in promoting the internet and online commerce.

and some

[mnmn]

John Carmack
Alan Cox
Bill Joy

Re:and some

[bofkentucky]

Thank $DEITY someone finally mentioned Mr. Joy. Even though he works for a company (Sun) that we have a serious love-hate relationship with (Who wouldn't want a Fire 15000 to play with?), he still helped lay the foundation for Unix as we know it along with the rest of the CSRG group.

Re:and some

[davechen]

And he wrote vi. What more do you need?

Re:and some

[mnmn]

There are probably more such people not popularized much. This is really a geek popularity contest, not the most influential list. Businessmen who helped UNIX advance would probably make that list, and so might professors who taught at University of California.

How about Corporate decision-makers who decided to buy UNIX when they badly needed to sell it, even in the days of the PDP?

How could you ...

[Pogue Mahone]

How could you include Dennis Ritchie, but exclude
Brian Kernighan?

Dspite the fact ...

[floydman]

Dspite the fact i am one of the biggest Linus fans, but i dont think he should be exisiting in such a list. He is not an innovator, he is a supreme upper geek, with a vision, a good cause, willing and intention..... Haaailll for the man, but he shouldnt be on the list though:)

Bill Atkinson

[Anonymous Codger]

Wrote much of the original Mac UI, wrote the revolutionary Quickdraw, wrote the first version of MacPaint, and invented HyperCard. If anyone belongs on this list, he does.

Here's a brief profile on Apple.com: http://www.apple.com/creative/stories/atkinson/

Re:Bill Atkinson

[GeekusEnormous]

Good one! I have to agree, and I don't even like Mac's much. HyperCard was sort of a predecessor to Visual Basic and later GUI-oriented languages. Hypercard was really a whole new approach to programming, but was never seen as the theoretical innovation that it really was.

One I have yet to see that is a MUST

[ninewands]

Adm. Grace Hopper

Re:One I have yet to see that is a MUST

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet, the Tao of Programming itself states:

"But never program in COBOL if you can avoid it."

actually, you are somewhat wrong

[Ender Ryan]

"True, the BSD code is much older--a dozen years older--but it wasn't free until Linux had been in development for about a year. That gave Linux a head start, which captured most of the Internet's untapped enthusiasm for a personal UNIX."

From http://www.nb.net/~lbudney/linux/bsd.html

With regards to GNU/HURD... I dunno, maybe, it's impossible to say.

Dijkstra

[Hard_Code]

How about the recently late Edsger Dijkstra.

The day he passed, I printed out and tacked this quote to my cube:

"I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that would be enough immortality for me"
--Edsger Dijkstra

Herman Hollerith

[jjcohen]

The father of the punchcard

Re:Herman Hollerith

[Viqsi]

Eh. I'd call that a hardware innovation. :D

Dave Cutler

[shoppa]

Dave Cutler, architect of RSX-11, VMS, and Windows NT. (For better and worse, in that order!)

Define innovators

[Ivan Raikov]

With the exception of Donald Knuth, all of the names you list are of people who had mostly engineering contributions, as opposed to bringing scientific advancements in the field (although the two are somewhat related). Did you mean to exclude the people who created and formalized computer science? If not, then you most definitely want to include Alan Turing, Edsger Dijsktra, C. Antony R. Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, and Marvin Minsky.

Re:Define innovators

[erotic piebald]

Also, as a true innovator: Edgar F. 'Ted' Codd

More

[jclip]

Some other candidates:

Ken Iverson (APL)
C.A.R. (Tony) Hoare (Quicksort)
Stephen Cook (NP-completeness)

Name spelling?

[Anonymous Coward]

iirc, isn't it "Dijkstra" and "Turing"?

Admiral Dr. Grace Hopper

[Big Sean O]

A) One of the first computer professionals.

B) Documented the first hardware 'bug' (literally, a bug).

C) Among those responsible for one of the first extremely popular programming languages: COBOL.

D) Looks like a sweet old grandmother in a Navy Uniform.

E) The exception that proves the rule that all computer geeks are adolescent guys.

F) Participated in both the private and governmental sectors. Truly a public servant.

Grace Hopper

[sphealey]

Grace Hopper did fundamental work in the creation of the assembler and the compiler, creating the concept of "programming" and increasing the prodctivity of software creation by true orders of magnitude (unless you are one of those who prefer to do their programming in machine language, in which case the invention of the complier was a bad thing!).

sPh

ACID!

[martyb]

Memory fails me at the moment, but the man who developed the whole concept of relational databases... worked at IBM as I recall, and cape up with the concept of ACID: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable. I'm hoping a fellow /.'er can come up with the name for me (a quick google came up empty.) Imagine where'd we be today without RDBs!

Re:ACID!

[scrytch]

C.J. Date, no? Damned if I can remember his actual first name, everyone just calls him C.J.

Probably a bad name for a conference room. "The conference has been moved to Date." "Can we get Date for Friday?"

Re:ACID!

[the_marco_polo]

You are thinking of Edgar F. Codd.

He also came up with the concept of database normal forms. A good way to remember the different normal forms is to have

The Key (1NF)

The Whole Key (2NF)

Nothing but the Key (3NF),
so help you Codd

(thanks to my CS prof for this statement)

Re:ACID!

[galapagos]

kodd

Re:ACID!

[sql*kitten]

Memory fails me at the moment, but the man who developed the whole concept of relational databases... worked at IBM as I recall, and cape up with the concept of ACID: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable.

Ted Codd.

Re:ACID!

[Anthony]

Chris. Heard him speak in 1989.

Remember NeXT?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd add Steve Jobs because of the NeXT stuff. NeXTstep was a great OS: unix with outstanding GUI - if I see someone telling me about this or that new feature of Windows XY, most times I can say NeXT had it 10 years ago....
Then came OpenStep, an outstanding open, cross platform standardization api, and OPENSTEP, the NeXT implementation. (There is even an OpenStep for Solaris by Sun; but they dropped it in favour of Java...)
Mac OS X is the evolution of OPENSTEP (though they skipped the open part of the api :-/)

So, in the end Steve Jobs did change Personal Computing in some way!

p.s.: If you want to help this cool technology on really free platforms, check out GNUstep [gnustep.org], the GNU implementation of OpenStep/Cocoa.

Charles Moore

[FunkyRat]

Charles Moore who invented Forth, and as a side consequence can be said to have given us the first IDE (integrated development environment).

Well, and also for being the first person to utilize line noise as an effective programming language. :-)

Maybe...

[tilk]

Guido van Rossum, Python inventor? And of course Bjarne Stroustrup.

Cooley and Tukey ?

[jazzyseth]

How about James Cooley and/or John Tukey - the inventors of the FFT algorithm (Fast Fourier Transform) ? Invention of this algorithm is widely thought of as a watershed event in signal processing, reducing processing time by a thousand percent or more.

Quake, Doom Precursors

[Big Sean O]

IIRC, the first popular FPS was "Pathways Into Darkness" which debuted on the Macintosh.

Also, your claim that he was responsible for the innovating a cheap simple OS is a little off the mark as well... The Mac OS started in 1984, and Windows 95 (the first serious competitor to the Mac OS) didn't come out until, um... 95? (Or was it 96?).

Re:Quake, Doom Precursors

[kernelistic]

I usually don't bite the bait, but this one just begs for it...

When Steve Jobs found himself with a looming deadline and short on cash for the release of the upcoming Apple platform, which they christened 'Macintosh', he turned to Bill Gates (and Microsoft) for assistance. It was Microsoft programmers which assisted Apple in the development and completion of the original MacOS. In return, Microsoft got to borrow concepts which debuted, and where made popular on and by the Macintosh. Part of the deal required Microsoft to make a substantial amount of it's software available for the Mac for 10 years (Microsoft extended that in 1995, when it bought a significant non-voting share of Apple). Think Word 5.1, Office 98 for Mac, Internet Explorer, etc.

It is for this very same reason that Apple didn't sue Microsoft when Windows 95 was released; even though a lot of the concepts such as Advanced Drag and Drop and the Scrapbook-like Clipboard which the Macintosh pioneered, featured in this operating system.

It's interesting to see the number of Mac users that don't know the history of their platform claim that Microsoft "copied", when it was their engineers that developed a substantial part of it in the first place!

Re:Quake, Doom Precursors

[nullard]

It's interesting to see the number of Mac users that don't know the history of their platform claim that Microsoft "copied", when it was their engineers that developed a substantial part of it in the first place!

I've done my reading on the early history of Apple and my information flatly contradics yours. No Microsoft programmer had anything to do with writing the OS. What Microsoft did was to have a large number of applications ready for the new platform. These were developed with the help of Apple.

There is no question that Microsoft copied Apple's design to make Windows.

Apple's decision not to sue was because Microsoft settled with Apple for an undisclosed amount in exchange for not facing any more lawsuits.

Miguel de Icaza

[Skeezix]

Miguel de Icaza

Re:Miguel de Icaza

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!

Oh man, my sides are splitting! That's a good one!

Grace Hopper

[SicariusMan]

Not to be politically correct, but I think Rear Admiral Grace Hopper should definitly be on the list. After all she wrote the first compiler, A-O, then the successor FLOW-Matic, which then lead to COBOL. You can get a really good idea of all of her contributions to programming here.

E. F. Codd

[FreeBSDbigot]

invented the relational database model.

MIKE MUUSS

[getagrip]

Mike Muuss was the author of PING which is found on nearly every system on the internet. PING is an excellent example of an open source contribution. From the website:

Sadly, Mike Muuss was killed in an automobile accident on November 20, 2000. His work lives on in testament to his intellect and indomitable spirit -- Lee A. Butler

Obviously...

[bongoras]

no such list is complete without Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.

Software Innovators

[Anonymous Coward]

Marc Rochkind. Invented Source Code Control System; developed parts of UNIX operating system; Founded XVT Software; Author of Advanced UNIX Programming

Andy Hertzfeld

[cybaz]

Andy Hertzfeld was esponsible for the original Mac GUI, worked with General Magic, eazel. Had a great amount of influence on the interfaces of systems that we use today

Bresenham

[DeLabarre]

Line and circle rendering algorithms. Probably in every graphics driver ever written.

Douglas Engelbart

[pauljlucas]

... inventor of the computer mouse, shared-screen teleconferencing, hypermedia, groupware, and lots of other stuff.

$0.02

[Viqsi]

Here's a few I'd want to second:

Adm. Grace Hopper
Bill Atkinson
Bill Joy
John Carmack
James Gosling
Tim Berners-Lee

I hesitate a bit to put Richard Stallman on that list; arguably his is more of a social creation.

Re:$0.02

[zaren]

Grace Hopper, indeed! Where would we be without her creation of the first compiler, or better yet, her moth-infested Mark II relay?

K&R

[spitzak]

Yes! Definately Kernighan and Ritchie! People may say that Unix and C are no big deal, but the ability to simplify things down to a useful and easy to understand core is extremely important and the real reason why they succeeded. And unfortunately this ability seems to be missing today. We should all be running Plan9 with 17 system calls, not Linux with hundreds of system calls.

Wait a second...

[vasqzr]

Carmack has really done some great things in the 3D PC gaming industry. But I wouldn't give him all the credit as far as the full game is concerned.

The great art and music, killer levels, and fun factor that the rest of the iD team created are just as important.

As much as Daikatana haters would hate to hear, Romero was more of a driving force than Carmack. But then again, without Carmack's 3D genius....it's a catch-22

Guido van Rossum

[monopole]

For the invention of Python and because Guido is a cool name.

Re:Guido van Rossum

[DA-MAN]

Didn't Han Solo take care of this guy in the cantina?

Guido von Rossum

[jjkivilu]

For bringing Python to us. It's a god's gift.

Recent Additions:

[adamy]

Marin Fowler: Refactoring. Making code Maintainable.

Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides: AKA the Gang of Four

Kent Beck:

John Galt:

Michael

[ajw1976]

Michael Robertson - Lindows

Ward Christensen

[netringer]

He co-invented exactly what 'cher doing here, using a computerized bulletin board system or CBBS. While Randy Suess built the S-100 Z80 computer, Ward wrote CBBS in assembler in less than a month one snowy Chicago winter in 1975.

Ward later wrote the MODEM protocol which was the first file transfer protocol.

When I started sniffing around the computign scene we found that a lot of the things utilties that you needed to do things were already written and given away by Ward Christensen. He also invented freeware.

Gary Kildall

[littlea1]

I think that you should include Gary Kildall before any of the people that are alive. You can check more on: http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/kilda ll.html

Re:Gary Kildall

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely. I'm suprised only one person mentioned him.

Ted Nelson

[metamatic]

I can't believe nobody has mentioned Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext and hypermedia.

Re:Ted Nelson

[happyDave]

In Xanadu did Nelson-Khan
A hypertext docu-verse decree,
Where E, the sacred electricity, ran
through circuits measureless to man
too small for eye to see...

Oh forget it! Anybody else want to finish the pastiche?

Re:Ted Nelson

[IntlHarvester]

Don't forget that Ted Nelson also invented (or advocated) DRM and micropayments.

Re:Ted Nelson

[boots@work]

Wow, nice call.

It's amusing, and humbling, how often Slashdotters (or humains in general) manage to hold contradictory opinions like this.

--
John Paul Gaultier, pron Goat-ie-er. Concidence?

How about...

[anthony_dipierro]

whatever manager it is that lets you sit around pondering what to name your Conference rooms. Sounds like a pretty innovative concept.

Edsger Dijkstra

[jimmyCarter]

I may be wrong, but wasn't Dijkstra's famous paper entitled "GoTo Considered Harmful"?

Re:Edsger Dijkstra

[jpkunst]

Go To Statement Considered Harmful, by Edsger W. Dijkstra. Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148.

Re:Edsger Dijkstra

[jschrod]

Yes and no. It wasn't a paper, it was a letter to the Editor. Titles for letters are created by the editorial staff. So his famous letter was titled as such, but the title wasn't chosen by EJD.

Two Words..

[jimmyCarter]

Al Gore

Moderate me down if you want, trolls. I still find it funny.

Katz yes, but not THAT katz

[kilroy_hau]

How about Philip Katz the inventor of PK-Zip

The internet would not be the same without Zip compression, and he made the software Shareware.

Dave Cutler Fan Club

[cpeterso]

Don't forget the (defunct) Dave Cutler Fan Club . :-)

Douglas Engelbart

[Andrew Lockhart]

Taken from the MouseSite:

"...Engelbart and a group of young computer scientists and electrical engineers he assembled in the Augmentation Research Center at SRI were able to stage a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration of a networked computer system. This was the world debut of the computer mouse, 2-dimensional display editing, hypermedia--including in-file object addressing and linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, and on-screen video teleconferencing."

Basically Engelbart came up with the concept of the modern GUI and the means by which most people interact with it. While not strictly a software innovation I would consider this as falling under your criteria as its affect has been widespread.

Donald Becker

[Gothmolly]

For creating all the NIC drivers we use on our Linux boxen!

Do you have two wings?

[bluGill]

I ask because it seems there are two classes of people: Those who have done a lot of theory work (Alan Turning), and those who are famious for modern programs (Linus). If you have a nateral division it would be worth using this seperation, even if it means renaming current rooms. (I'd retire the old names though, otherwise people will end up in the old room by habbit)

Guido van Rossum

[Anonymous Coward]

Guido, simply because all these Larry Wall nominations are making me sick.

Harlan Mills

[xp]

How about Harlan Mills. For more details on his work and insights into the software process visit read an excerpt from his book.

Kemeny and Kurtz

[Detritus]

John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, inventors of BASIC.

Tanenbaum

[MythMoth]

May I humbly suggest the good Dr Andrew S. Tanembaum ?

As well as being the creator of Minix (which in some senses can be considered the natural predecessor of Linux) he has written some of the best introductory computer science books around.

If you haven't read his pithy tomes on Computer Networks or Modern Operating Systems then you really ought to check them out.

Anyone who might feel inclined to disregard him because of that old spat with Linus should take a look at this entry in his FAQ:

What do you think of Linux?
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Linus for producing it. Before there was Linux there was MINIX, which had a 40,000-person newsgroup, most of whom were sending me email every day. I was going crazy with the endless stream of new features people were sending me. I kept refusing them all because I wanted to keep MINIX small enough for my students to understand in one semester. My consistent refusal to add all these new features is what inspired Linus to write Linux. Both of us are now happy with the results. The only person who is perhaps not so happy is Bill Gates. I think this is a good thing.

some names

[A Gremlin In Kremlin]

Alan M Turing, Marvin Minsky, Bill Gates, Bjarne Stroustrup...

Niklaus Wirth, chomsky, A. Aho, Richard W Stevens

[marcovje]

Some from the languages and compiler field:

- Niklaus Wirth
- Chomsky
- Authors of the legendary Dragon book
- Alfred Aho, (has several other texts)
- Ravi Sethi
- Heffrey D, Ullman

Unix and Network (TCP/IP illustrated Unix network programming advanced programming in the unix environment)
- Richard W Stevens

Kristen Nygaard

[qwaazy]

For his work on the programming language named Simula.

From: The History of Simula:
Although SIMULA never became widely used, the language has been highly influential on modern programming methodology. Among other things SIMULA introduced important object-oriented programming concepts like classes and objects, inheritance, and dynamic binding.

Recent candidates

[Anonymous Coward]

James Gosling: Popularized virtual machine architecture with Java.

Tatu Ylönen: He gave us more security through ssh.

David Gelentner: The idol and muse for so many software engineers who have been deeply affected by the beaty and simplicity of his designs (think Linda tuple spaces, Lifestreams, mind focus framework etc.).

My List

[Anonymous Coward]

John McCarthy - Lisp. The best programming language on Earth.

Richard Stallman - not just for the FSF (which isn't really a software innovation, I suppose), but for the stuff he did that created his credibility as a computer scientist - Emacs, GCC, and the "Truth Maintenance" technique of rulebases (used by just about every optimising compiler on the planet)

Dijsktra (sp?) - You know why.

Alonzo Church - The lambda calculus, basis of most of computer science.

Date + Codd - invented the relational database.

Jay Miner and Carl Sassenrath - Amiga hardware and software.

Ada Lovelace - saw what computers could be way back in the 19th century. Deserves better than having the awful Ada language named after her.

Bill Gates

[Lord Omlette]

has fought hard for our Freedom to Innovate! Surely he deserves a room of his own!

grace hopper and danny hillis

[r00tarded]

hopper for programming the Mark I, her first assignment sounds like the personification of the hacker mindset.

hillis for parallelism. it has had a profund effect on the way we build software.

see you in the Hopper or up by the Hills!, also check out Out of Their Minds a collection of profiles of 15 amazing Computer Scientists.

What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

Diffie, Helm, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman?

Bertrand Meyer (and...)

[AShocka]

Bertrand Meyer for his contribution to OO Software Engineering, Eiffel language and Design By Contract.

I think an honourable mention most go to Ted Nelson and Xanadu.

Grace Hopper

[chthon]

See subject

After the Pantheon

[TerryAtWork]

Of Turing and Von Neuman etc The King is Ken Thompson.

The reason is several fold.

1 - He was part of the team that invented C.

2 - He invented UNIX. Think about it. He invented UNIX. Everybody moons over Linus and ESR but Thompson INVENTED UNIX.....

3 - When I was getting my first computer education at Humber College in the mid seventies we were that taught everything was cut into 80 byte chunks, to fit the cards we were using. Even HASP (Houston Automatic Spooling Program) we used on the big 10 MB kettle-like 3030 disks on the IBM 370-145 computer spooled our cards in 80 byte chunks. I knew it was bullshit even then but I didn't have the education to do anything about it, but KT did. HE turned everything into a bit stream, and I think the UNIX people here will back me up on this.

With UNIX, everything is a bit stream. The card reader is a bit stream, the disk drive is a bit stream, everything is a bit stream.

And you know what? The mp3s you make are also a bit stream and nothing is allowed to interfere with the free flow of bit streams between computers that want them to flow.

Today's compressed music P2P piracy philosophy is created entirely by this concept. By the way - in his WIRED interview KT mentioned compressed a compressed music format called PAC. Apparently he turned that into a C program too, from FORTRAN. It's better than MP3, too. So why isn't it out there?

He also did multi processor computer chess, the precursor of Deep Whatever, that's today's best chess machine.

Is there ANYTHING KT hasn't hugely improved or even made practical where it wasn't before?

KT is the shit. He dwells upon Mount Olympus. He's number one on this list, or there better be a damn good reason why not.

So - what did you decide?

[sphealey]

Might be interesting to hear what names the original poster and his confederates decided on!

sPh

Not exactly a software guy.....

[Anonymous Coward]

but J.V. Atanasoff should be there. He was the first inventor of an electronic digital computer.....

Peter Norton

[Anonymous Coward]

In the mid-90s the Norton Utilities were indispensable. And Norton's attention to quality paid off for Symantec.

Kai Krause...

[hirnfurz]

...creator of Kai's Power Tools, the first really NEW and intuitive user interface.

comon people!

[claude_juan]

John McCarthy!

he created the most powerful yet underused language we have ever seen on a computer. he created it some 40+ years ago and it is still around today. thats special stuff.

lisp!

Jerry Weinberg

[dws]

I'd vote for Gerald M. (Jerry) Weinberg, author of The Psychology of Computer Programming (and 40 or so other good books) for reminding us that software is built by human beings.

My list

[Pseudonym]

Note: This list is biassed towards theoreticians and programming language/compiler people. In no particular order:

• Grace Murray Hopper
• Edsger Dijkstra
• Robert Tarjan
• Ronald Graham
• John Hopcroft
• Seymour Ginsberg
• Fred Brooks
• Guy Steele
• C.A.R. Hoare
• Dana Scott
• Ivan Sutherland
• Andrew Appel
• Bill Joy
• Niklaus Wirth
• Richard Karp
• Douglas Engelbart
• John Backus
• Marvin Minsky

My Top Innovators of software

[Oizoken]

Ada (programmer)
alexander Wirtz (pascal, modula, oberon)
Steve Jobs (apple/mac)
Bresenham (drawing primitives)
John Carmack (3d engine)
Allan turing (algorithms)
church (algorithms , church-turing thesis)
Bjarne strousstrup (c++)
Page (Google's PageRank)

not neccesarily in that order ofcourse

people that don't have anything to do with software but hardware:

moore (moore's 'law')
von neumann (von neumann model)
blaise pascal (automated calculator)
charles babbage (what did he do again? some automated machine?)

Don't forget Al Gore

[javery]

After all he invented the internet.

Which Mozilla Guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

> what is the name of the Mozilla guy?

Are you talking about Bina? Jamie Zawinski? Or the guy who made all of the magazine covers, & once was quoted as once defending how the number of bugs increased with each new release by saying ``We don't have time to do it right."

Name the men's bathroom after Gates, & the women's after him.

]]too lazy to log in from work[[

not von neumann

[Anonymous Coward]

he was the edison of the computer age