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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)
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)