Father of Computer
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage,(26 December 1791 London, England – 18 October 1871 Marylebone, London, England) was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum. In 1991 a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked. Nine years later, the Science Museum completed the printer Babbage had designed for the difference engine, an astonishingly complex device for the 19th century. Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs.
The birthplace of Charles Babbage is disputed, but he was most likely born in 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, England. A blue plaque on the junction of Larcom Street and Walworth Road commemorates the event. Babbage's date of birth was given in his obituary in The Times as 26 December 1792.
Creator of C
Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie is best known as the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, and as co-author of the definitive book on C, The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as 'K/R' or K&R
He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.
Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated from Harvard with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs' Computing Sciences Research Center.
Creator of C++
Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup ( born December 30, 1950 in Aarhus, Denmark) is a computer scientist and the College of Engineering Chair Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He is most notable for developing the C++ programming language. A rough English attempt at pronunciation of his name would be "B-yar-ne Strov-stroop".
Stroustrup developed C++ in 1979, Stroustrup also wrote what many consider to be the standard text for the language. The C++ Programming Language, which is now in its third edition. The text has been revised twice to reflect the evolution of the language and the work of the C++ standards committee.
Stroustrup has a cand. scient. (the Danish equivalent to a master's degree) in mathematics and computer science (1975) from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and a Ph.D. in computer science (1979) from the University of Cambridge, England. He was the head of AT&T Lab's Large-scale Programming Research department, from its creation until late 2002. Stroustrup was elected member of The National Academy of Engineering in 2004. He is a Fellow of the ACM (1994) and an IEEE Fellow. He currently works at Texas A&M University as a Professor where he holds the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science.
Father of the Java
James Gosling
James A. Gosling, O.C., Ph.D. (born May 19, 1955 near Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is a famous software developer, best known as the father of the Java programming language.
In 1977, James Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. In 1983, he earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his doctoral thesis was titled "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints". While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of emacs (gosmacs), and before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix while at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several compilers and mail systems.
Since 1984, Gosling has been with Sun Microsystems, and is generally known best as the founder of the Java programming language.
He is generally credited as the inventor of the Java programming language in 1991. He did the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. He also cowrote the "bundle" program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment. In 2007, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. The Order is Canada's highest civilian honour. Officers are the second highest grade.
Chairman of Microsoft
Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955)[3] is an American business magnate, philanthropist, the world's third richest person (as of 2008) and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 9 percent of the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is admired by many, a large number of industry insiders criticize his business tactics, which they consider anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.
Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January, 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. After announcing in June, 2006 his intention to retire from Microsoft to work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full time, he gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates last day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains as non-executive chairman of Microsoft.
Inventor of RDBMS
Edgar Ted Codd
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd (August 23, 1923 – April 18, 2003) was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most memorable achievement.
Edgar Frank Codd was born on the Isle of Portland, in England. After attending Poole Grammar School, he studied mathematics and chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford, before serving as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. In 1948, he moved to New York to work for IBM as a mathematical programmer. In 1953, angered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Codd moved to Ottawa, Canada. A decade later he returned to the U.S. and received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Two years later he moved to San Jose, California to work at IBM's Almaden Research Center, where he continued to work until the 1980s. During the 1990s, his health deteriorated and he ceased work.
Codd received the Turing Award in 1981 and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Codd died of heart failure at his home in Williams Island, Florida at the age of 79 on Friday, April 18, 2003.
Lead architect of C sharp (C #)
Anders Hejlsberg
Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960) is a prominent Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He currently works for Microsoft, where he is the lead architect of the C# programming language.
Hejlsberg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark but did not graduate [citation needed]. While at the university in 1980 he began writing programs for the Nascom microcomputer, including a Pascal compiler which was initially marketed as the Blue Label Pascal compiler for the Nascom-2. However, he soon rewrote it for CP/M and MS-DOS, marketing it first as Compas Pascal and later as PolyPascal. Later the product was licensed to Borland, and integrated into an IDE to become the Turbo Pascal system. Turbo Pascal competed with PolyPascal. The compiler itself was largely inspired by the "Tiny Pascal" compiler in Niklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", one of the most influential computer science books of the time. Anders and his partners ran a computer store in Copenhagen and marketed accounting systems. Their company, PolyData was the distributor for Microsoft products in Denmark which put them at odds with Borland. Philippe Kahn and Anders first met in 1986, for all those years, Niels Jensen had successfully handled the relationship between Borland and Polydata.
He received the 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award for his work on Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework.
Together with Shon Katzenberger, Scott Wiltamuth, Todd Proebsting, Erik Meijer, Peter Hallam and Peter Sollich, Anders was recently awarded a Technical Recognition Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement for their work on the C# language. A video about this is available at Outstanding Technical Achievement: C# Team.
Creator of Java Script
Brendan Eich
Brendan Eich (born 1961) is a computer programmer and creator of the JavaScript programming language. He is the Chief Technology Officer at the Mozilla Corporation.
Brendan Eich received his bachelor's degree in math and computer science at Santa Clara University. He received his master's degree in 1986 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Eich started his career at Silicon Graphics, working for seven years on operating system and network code. He then worked for three years at MicroUnity Systems Engineering writing microkernel and DSP code, and doing the first MIPS R4000 port of gcc.
Eich is best known for his work on Netscape and Mozilla. He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995, working on JavaScript (originally called Mocha, then called LiveScript) for the Netscape Navigator web browser. He then helped found
mozilla.org in early 1998, serving as chief architect. When AOL shut down the Netscape browser unit in July 2003, Eich helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation.
In August 2005, after serving as Lead Technologist and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Brendan became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation.
Founder of Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 7, 1998. Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy, and positive employee relations have been important tenets during Google's growth, the latter resulting in being identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine's #1 Best Place to Work. The company's unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil", although criticism of Google include concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, censorship, and discontinuation of services.
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (Russian: born August 21, 1973) is a Soviet Union-born American entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Larry Page.
Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the Google web search engine, now Google Inc., with Sergey Brin.
Founder of Yahoo
Jerry Yang and David Filo
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American public corporation incorporated and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, in Silicon Valley and a global Internet services company. It provides a range of products and services including a Web portal, a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and posting. It was founded by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 1, 1995.
Jerry Yang (traditional Chinese:simplified Chinese: pinyin: Yáng Zhìyun; born November 6, 1968) is an American entrepreneur and the Co-founder, CEO and Chief Yahoo! of Yahoo! Inc. As of 2008, his net worth is estimated to be US$2.3 billion and is ranked 524th among the richest people in the world according to Forbes.
David Filo (born 1966 in Wisconsin) is an American businessman and the co-founder of Yahoo! with Jerry Yang.
David Filo, at age 6, moved to Moss Bluff, Louisiana, a suburb of Lake Charles, Louisiana. He graduated from Sam Houston High School and then earned a BS in Computer Engineering from Tulane University (through the Dean's Honor Scholarship) and an MS from Stanford University.
Founder of Apple
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
Before Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple, he was an electronics hacker. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were known as outcasts while they were in high school. As a kid Stephen Wozniak would become so engrossed in mathematical ponderings his mother would have to shake him to bring him back to reality. By 1975, he was working at Hewlett-Packard and helping his friend Steve Jobs design video games for Atari. Wozniak had been buying computer time on a variety of minicomputers hosted by Call Computer, a time-sharing firm run by Alex Kamradt. The computer terminals available at that time were primarily paper-based; thermal printers like the Texas Instruments Silent 700 were state of the art. Wozniak had seen a 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine on how to build your own computer terminal. Using off-the-shelf parts, Wozniak designed the Computer Conversor, a 24-line by 40-column, uppercase-only video teletype that he could use to log on to the minicomputers at Call Computer. Alex Kamradt commissioned the design and sold a small number of them through his firm.
In 1975, Wozniak started attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. New microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 and the IMSAI inspired him to build a microprocessor into his video teletype and have a complete computer.
At the time the only microcomputer CPUs generally available were the $179 Intel 8080, and the $170 Motorola 6800. Wozniak preferred the 6800, but both were out of his price range. So he watched, and learned, and designed computers on paper, waiting for the day he could afford a CPU.
When MOS Technology released its $20 6502 chip in 1976, Wozniak wrote a version of BASIC for it, then began to design a computer for it to run on. The 6502 was designed by the same people who designed the 6800, as many in Silicon Valley left employers to form their own companies. Wozniak's earlier 6800 paper-computer needed only minor changes to run on the new chip.
Wozniak completed the machine and took it to Homebrew Computer Club meetings to show it off. At the meeting, Wozniak met his old friend Jobs, who was interested in the commercial potential of the small hobby machines. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had been friends for some time, having met in 1971, when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. Jobs managed to interest Wozniak in assembling a machine and selling it.
Creator of Perl
Larry Wall
Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976.
While in graduate school at UC Berkeley, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention afterwards of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible. Due to health reasons these plans were canceled, and they remained in the U.S., where Larry instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory after he finished grad school.
Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the nearly universally used patch program. He has won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest twice and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998.
Father of MP3 & founder of MPEG
Mr. Leonardo Chiariglione
Leonardo Chiariglione is an italian engineer, born in Almese (in the province of Turin, Piedmont). He is mostly known for his work in the areas of telecommunications and digital media. He earned a masters in Electronic Engineering at the Polytechnic of Turin (1967), then obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Tokyo in 1973, where he also learned to speak Japanese. Leonardo speaks seven languages including English and French.
From March 1971 until July 2003, he was with CSELT, the corporate research center of the Telecom Italia group. His final position there was Vice President, Multimedia, at Telecom Italia Lab, the new name given to CSELT in 2001.
He has led a number of European collaborative projects : IVICO - a RACE project investgating cost-effective integrated video codecs, COMIS - an ESPRIT project supporting the development of the MPEG-1 standard and EU 625 - VADIS a EUREKA project aiming at developing a European hardware and software technology for the MPEG-2 standard.
He has initiated various efforts to define internationally agreed specifications, such as DAVIC (the Digital Audio-Visual Council) in 1994 and FIPA (the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) in 1996.
But the project for which he is probably best known started in 1988, when he originated the ISO standardization activity known as MPEG (or Moving Pictures Experts Group) (officially ISO TC97/SC2/WG8/MPEG, now ISO IEC-JTC1/SC29/WG11), of which he has been the Convenor from the start. This group, with a membership of over 300 experts, representing 20 countries and various industries having a stake in digital audio and video, produced the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards that have facilitated the digital audio-visual revolution. Leonardo has received the IBC 1999 John Tucker Award, IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award (1999), and Kilby Foundation Award (1998). In 1999, he was asked to be the Executive Director of Secure Digital Music Initiative, a forum comprising hundreds of companies to develop specifications for secure digital music delivery technology.
Leonardo was appointed as Distinguished Invited Professor at Information and Communication University, Daejeon, Korea in 2004.
