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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?"
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 :)
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Informatus Technologicus
tim berners-lee
alan turing
larry wall
bill gates ??
steve wozniak
jay miner
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
John Carmack started the genre of 3D games on the PC. When it comes to games, who else do you think of?
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"?
. 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 Tananbaum was wrong to say that Linux is obsolete, but he was correct that it is of little academic interest.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.
He wrote the first web browser and server
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
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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.
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
Here's a brief profile on Apple.com: http://www.apple.com/creative/stories/atkinson/
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Dijkstra considered harmful.
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Dave Cutler, architect of RSX-11, VMS, and Windows NT. (For better and worse, in that order!)
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.
Bush Lies Watch
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--....
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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.
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
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.
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