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Hall of Fame Voting For Computer Museum of America
An anonymous reader writes "Public voting has opened for the Computer Museum of America Hall of Fame, which is looking to add 5 more members to the roster via a public vote. Previous inductees include Sid Meier (of Civilization fame), and among this years list of nominees is Linus himself. The full list, along with the voting area itself is over at HomeLAN."
that's some pretty tough competition out there, but these are the 5 I pick Bjarne Stroustrup Linus Torvalds Larry Ellison Philip R. Zimmerman James Clark
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
Where's RMS on this list? I would think he would deserve as much credit as Linus Torvalds.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
# Co-developer of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program
John Presper Eckert
# Co-designer and builder (with Mauchley, et.al.) of ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
Bob Frankston
# Co-developer of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program
John Mauchley
# Co-Designer of ENIAC, the first fully operational modern electronic computer (ran from 1945-1955)
Philip R. Zimmerman
# Author of Pretty Good Privacy, one of the first encryption programs available to the general public
Well, sure. But that's probably not the *only* reason he's there.
:) (am not complaining, though).
He's considered by many to be one of the pioneers of cyberpunk, and Neuromancer certainly did help popularise the genre. And that definitely is something. Cyberpunk ties in very closely with the hacker culture, and adding Gibson is a nice way of saying Thank You.
What's given there is merely an excerpt of the achievements, and is definitely not all of the reasons why those people are in the list.
That said, I should say that the list is pretty damned cool. They've added a whole lot of really cool people whom most people would not know/care about (Nelson, Noyce, Mauchley,Zuse, Philbrick, Tomlinson and the like).
And interestingly enough, RMS is missing from the list
Stewart Brand?? (Co-founder (with Larry Brilliant) of The WELL online service (1985))
Where's Ward Christensen, creator of the first BBS? (CBBS, 1978)
Where's Tom Jennings, creator of Fidonet?
Linus Torvalds - I don't need to say who he is - but why isn't he there either.
Now I can guarantee that I'll be modded down for this, but it's hard to put Linux in the same category as some of the people already on the list.
Clive Sinclair, for example, was a real innovator. He followed his own path and went off in bold directions. Ditto for Jay Miner. And Dennis Ritchie. But Linus, while an absolutely brilliant hacker, essentially started cloning Minix, then later decided to turn it into a full-blown UNIX kernel. Thompson, Kernighan, Ritchie, and others get credit for UNIX. And Tannenbaum gets credit for Minix. Linus's claim to fame is that Linux merged with the free software movement started by Stallman, and the result is that such software (under the monicker "open source"), became more commonplace. But again, Linus didn't come up with this. The gnu project was started eight years before Linux did.
The bottom line is that Linus is an excellent programmer and architect and he wrote a great piece code. But if he gets in the museum, then so should the Microsoft Excel team (which essentially copied earlier spreadsheets).
Andy Bechtolsheim
# Co-founder of Sun Microsystems
- One of the most impressing entrpreneurs of this time. Probably the only billionaire who still gets down and dirty..
Andy Grove
# Co-founder and former president of Intel
- Not only the founder of the most successfull IC company, but he also did real research (He has some very interesting papers on crucial topics related IC stability)
Konrad Zuse
# Inventor of the Z-1 through 3 machines, early program-controlled (using relays) computers
- Hands down, he build the first programmable computer. And does thus deserve credit.
John Von Neumann
# Designer of EDVAC and IAS computers
- I'd rather credit him for inventing the concept of modern computers.
Ken Thompson
# Co-developer (with Dennis Ritchie) of UNIX operating system for Bell Labs
# Co-led (with Dennis Ritchie) team that developed the C programming language
- Naturally.. sorry Linus, they were first!
Antivote:
Philo T. Farnsworth
# Inventor of modern television
-Statement is not true, this is an urban legend. I also do not see how this is related to computers?
George Philbrick
# Inventor of the first fully electronic analog computer in 1938
-Doubt that too, there were many at the same time. For example the V2 flight control computer..
Postel did more to create the underpinnings of the internet than Cerf, let alone the wankers who started "the WELL" and AOL(gack!)
-MattT *** Not speaking for my employer, or any other sentient beings ***
Erm. Sir Clive Sinclair might not be on the list because he was already inducted
About Linus, though, it depends on what criteria you think are necessary. Gates in in there and he, after all, bought MSDOS, rather than building it himself. Linus's achievement isn't purely technical, but that doesn't stop it being an acheivement worthy of recognition.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
heathen, prepare for flamewar!
ok, actually, no flamewar - but i can't agree with you. Don't get me wrong, i love Stephenson's work, i've read everything he's ever written - even the stuff that really wasn't that good like "Interface" and "The Big U". William Gibson invented a whole genre - or, if he didn't invent it, then he dragged it kicking and screaming into the light of day. After growing up on Asimov, Bradbury, Dick, Herbert, Heinlein, Simmons, and many more to numerous to mention, reading Gibson's "Neuromancer" woke me up to a whole new world of science-fiction - edgy, hip, cool. Personally i think his later work went from worse to worse (Idoru, All tomorrow's parties, Pattern recognition) but Snow Crash could not exist in a world without "Neuromancer". And, in my own very humble opinion: "Virtual Light" is a stroke of near genius: a book with almost no plot whatsoever that keeps you rivited through the descriptions of the author.
In fact, enough of this, i'm off to find my copy of Neuromancer and reread it right now.
#!/usr/bin/english
You've got to give RMS and ESR more credit than that. Stallman also wrote GCC, which is alive and well and still evolving. ESR's software offerings are all a little small, but his "Cathedral and the Bazaar" helped bring open source software to the commercial world. Mozilla would quite probably have never been written, if not for ESR's writings and evalgelism.
My vote is for Stallman over the other two, but they're all three entirely worthy.