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Heroes of the Computer Age
Roofus writes "Troubleshooters.com has an awesome article on the
Heroes of the Digital Age. Its got just about all the big names you can think of, and some you'd rather not think of :)
" (CT:Back to hauling couchs for me. Ugh)
Are there people more power mad than Bill Gates?
Yes, ther were: Steve Jobs of Apple and the Brooks Brothers suited clones who ran IBM. If you didn't have the pirated source code to unix, which wouldn't compile on any machine that you could afford, then getting an 8086 assembler and the BIOS listings to the original PC was a truly revolutionary act.
I confess, under the guise of Anonymous Cowardice, to have once rooted for Microsoft and the destruction of Apple and IBM. I renounced my allegiance with the arrival of Windows and the bullsh** "your code ain't going nowhere else" compiler mentality shoved down our throats by Mr. Gates.
Take your MFC and keep 'em, Bill. The now and future development models are now common property.
How could they leave off the inventor of the Internet? :) Without Al Gore we wouldn't have e-business, or online kiddie porn, or even /.!
For the clueless, this is meant completely toungue in cheek.
Did you catch the link in the URL section at the bottom to Microsoft's computer history timeline? Still hasn't loaded for me yet, so I can't say anything about it, but it oughta be interesting to compare what Microsoft considers worthy of inclusion to what we would consider worthy of inclusion...
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The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
Well Albequerque was where MITS was located. IIRC, Gates was at that time failing at Harvard and Allen was working for Honeywell. Gates convinced Allen to quit his job and go to Albequerque whilst Gates stayed in Cambridge. They developed a BASIC for the Altair using computers at Harvard, and managed to get some sort of deal with MITS.
;)
Although they had already developed some stuff (a car-counter, as Traf-O-Data, or something like that) they really weren't doing crap until the Altair came along. 4.1 seconds after deciding to sell their BASIC software, Bill decided that other people copying his software was bad. He has not yet come to the conclusion that his copying other people's software is bad.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Others have mentioned these guys, and I'll do so again. I saw at least one comment about K&R earlier (something silly about not belonging on the list, and yes, I know Brian Kernighan isn't Ken Thompson), and all I have to say about that, is you were WRONG.
What I really found fascinating is that the linked article includes a blurb like this:
Of course, C and Unix had formalized the chicken and egg development model years before, so he was on firm ground.
Hmmm... let's see... 'he cribbed an idea from two guys who had basically invented the predominant O/S kernel and language development model for the next several decades, but we'll ignore them...'. Christ, besides Kildall, several others on his list mentioned in conjunction with O/S's freely lifted ideas from Unix as well. Let's face it, if Unix and C don't exist, then Linux, Perl and Python likely don't exist either.
Let's see... the 2 guys directly responsible for the playground that 90% of the innovations in the article were born on don't rate a mention in the article... wow, that makes sense.
It's obvious that their list had a PC bias, but it's obvious from their comments about Marc Andreessen (sp?) that they do consider the net significant. So, why no mention of Jon Postel or Tim Berners-Lee?
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
I think, when you take a look at where this article was published, that the lack of a Unix focus makes sense. This person has a background similar to mine. My father was an electrical engineer and I was interested in programming (I had done some BASIC and some assembly on timesahre systems). My dad and I started building an S-100 bus based Z80 system from scratch (anyone here ever build a wire-wrap computer component?). From 1976 to 1978 we were designing, building, and testing.
Late in 1978 we started trying to boot the system. Failure after failure ensued as I debugged by boot BIOS code (Z80 assembler) and we debugged the hardware. (Tip for anyone who decides to build a computer from scratch: No tin sockets! Gold only!).
Finally, sometime late in 1978 we booted up CP/M 1.4 and ran a program. I think the only people who could ever have had a thrill just like that were the people who built the first computers in the 40's and 50's.
The fact that another, perhaps ulimately more important revolution involving Unix, C, and networking was going on at the same time does not make the pioneers of the "home computer" less important. In fact, when you hear the old timers of networking and Unix talk (and I've been using Unix of one sort or another since 1983 -- my old man came home with an Altos running [eek!] Xenix and said "this is important. Learn C." I sure as heck don't regret that!), they never imagined an Internet like the one today. The ubiquity of computing devices and their low cost is due to folks like Kildall as much as the power of internetworking is due to folks like Jon Postel and Ritchie and Thompson's Unix.
If you just view the "Heroes" list as coming from the hobbyist bias, the list makes a whole lot of sense.
On the negative side, I must admit that I cringed at "Mosaic, the first web browser" too... I used viola and cello before I ever heard of Mosaic.
I guess I just think that rather than flame this one for its bias, let's just keep listing the Net and Unix heroes.
Here are a few of mine (in no particular order and in no way meant to be complete):
Jon Postel
Tim Berners-Lee
Phil Karn
Brian Kernighan
Dennis Ritchie
Ken Thompson
Doug Comer & W. Richard Stevens (for explaining it all to the rest of us)
The article is a journalistic take on the pure PC world. All UNIX notables (except for Linus, who happened to be flavor-of-the-day) are missing. All PARC people who invented modern computing (mouse, bitmapped screen, object-oriented languages, etc.) are missing as well. Hardware people, Internet people, etc., etc. -- none present.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
No list of computer heroes could be complete without:
John McCarthy: creator of Lisp, the first programming language that didn't suck.
Ken Thompson: creator of the first operating system that didn't suck.
Dennis Ritchie: creator of a programming language that's good enough for most purposes. Not perfect, not great, but good enough.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
What a pile of crap! Tim had a web browser running on NeXT long before Marc started screwing up the web with random, poorly-conceieved crap like the IMG tag. It's taken years of work to fix some of Marc's bad ideas. It's taken more years to rid the Netscape browser of Marc's "tag soup" method of rendering HTML (closer to the "rendering" done in a slaughterhouse than a method of display.)
For him to get credit for "writing the first web browser" is so deeply offensive on so many levels. Hell, I remember using the "www" text browser long before Mosaic appeared. It was cooler than Gopher, but not as useful.
Revisionist history is a game played by those who are not even in Redmond.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Kaa made this point in a prior comment which was (IMHO)unduly moderated downward. I think in this modern age, we should not forget that a significant heritage was gifted to us by Alan Kay and company (indeed mice, GUI, modern oops and perhaps even the fundamental notion of a dedicated personal computer).
I confess that I did not truly appreciate the scope and quality of this work (though I did understand from a textbook point of view the substance and historical importance of it) until I saw how virtually complete was even a slavish recreation of the bare naked Smalltalk 80 system (found among the superb work at Apple and now Disney with the open source Squeak Smalltalk project.
Following Squeak's development made me appreciate more and more the significance of the building blocks for which these guys had poured the mortar.