The world has been changing and as of now it has changed significantly. I am hereby listing few of the people who have brought upon some brighter changes to the world in the field of computers and technology....
- Tim Berners Lee - Inventor of WORLD WIDE WEB.
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, is a British engineer and computer scientist and MIT professor credited with inventing the World Wide Web, making the first proposal for it in March 1989. On 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student at CERN, he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet.
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. In April 2009, he was elected as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, based in Washington, D.C.
While an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE. After leaving CERN in 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, England, but returned to CERN in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web." He wrote his initial proposal in March 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first Web browser, which also functioned as an editor (World Wide Web, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).
The first Web site built was at CERN, and was first put on line on 6 August 1991.
The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere. The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!—from Tim Berners-Lee’s first message
- William Henry "Bill" Gates III - Chairman of Microsoft Corporation.
He had an early interest in software and began programming computers at the age of thirteen. In 1973, Bill Gates became a student at Harvard University, where he meet Steve Ballmer (now Microsoft’s chief executive officer). While still a Harvard undergraduate, Bill Gates wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the MITS Altair microcomputer.
Did you know that as young teenagers Bill Gates and Paul Allen ran a small company called Traf-O-Data and sold a computer to the city of Seattle that could count city traffic?
In 1975, before graduation Gates left Harvard to form Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. The pair planned to develop software for the newly emerging personal computer market.
Bill Gate’s company Microsoft became famous for their computer operating systems and killer business deals. For example, Bill Gates talked IBM into letting Microsoft retain the licensing rights to MS-DOS an operating system, that IBM needed for their new personal computer. Gates proceeded to make a fortune from the licensing of MS-DOS.
On November 10, 1983, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Microsoft Corporation formally announced Microsoft Windows, a next-generation operating system.
On January 1, 1994, Bill Gates married Melinda French Gates. They have three children.
| 1983 | Microsoft Windows was announced November 10, 1983 and sells for $100.00. |
| 1985 | Microsoft Windows 1.0 is introduced in November, 1985 and is initially sold for $100.00. |
| 1987 | Microsoft Windows 1.0 is introduced in November, 1985 and is initially sold for $100.00. |
| 1987 | Microsoft Windows/386 or Windows 386 is introduced December 9, 1987 and is initially sold for $100.00. |
| 1988 | Microsoft Windows/286 or Windows 286 is introduced June, 1988 and is initially sold for $100.00. |
| 1990 | Microsoft Windows 3.0 was released May, 22 1990. Microsoft Windows 3.0 full version was priced at $149.95 and the upgrade version was priced at $79.95 |
| 1991 | Following its decision not to develop operating systems cooperatively with IBM, Microsoft changes the name of OS/2 to Windows NT. |
| 1991 | Microsoft Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.0a with multimedia was released October, 1991. |
| 1992 | Microsoft Windows 3.1 was released April, 1992 and sells more than 1 Million copies within the first two months of its release. |
| 1992 | Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.1 was released October, 1992. |
| 1993 | Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 was released July 27, 1993. |
| 1993 | The number of licensed users of Microsoft Windows now totals more than 25 Million. |
| 1994 | Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was released February, 1994. |
| 1994 | Microsoft Windows NT 3.5 was released September 21, 1994. |
| 1995 | Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 was released May 30, 1995. |
| 1995 | Microsoft Windows 95 was released August 24, 1995 and sells more than 1 Million copies within 4 days. |
| 1996 | Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 was released July 29, 1996. |
| 1996 | Microsoft Windows CE 1.0 was released November, 1996. |
| 1997 | Microsoft Windows CE 2.0 was released November, 1997. |
| 1998 | Microsoft Windows 98 was released June, 1998. |
| 1998 | Microsoft Windows CE 2.1 was released July, 1998. |
| 1998 | In October of 1998 Microsoft announced that future releases of Windows NT would no longer have the initials of NT and that the next edition would be Windows 2000. |
| 1999 | Microsoft Windows 98 SE (Second Edition) was released May 5, 1999. |
| 1999 | Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 was released 1999. |
| 2000 | On January 4th at CES Bill Gates announces the new version of Windows CE will be called Pocket PC. |
| 2000 | Microsoft Windows 2000 was released February 17, 2000. |
| 2000 | Microsoft Windows ME (Millennium) released June 19, 2000. |
| 2001 | Microsoft Windows XP is released October 25, 2001. |
| 2001 | Microsoft Windows XP 64-Bit Edition (Version 2002) for Itanium systems is released March 28, 2003. |
| 2003 | Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is released March 28, 2003. |
| 2003 | Microsoft Windows XP 64-Bit Edition (Version 2003) for Itanium 2 systems is released on March 28, 2003. |
| 2003 | Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2003 is released on December 18, 2003. |
| 2004 | Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is released on October 12, 2004. |
| 2005 | Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is released on April 24, 2005. |
| 2005 | Microsoft announces it’s next operating system, codenamed “Longhorn” will be named Windows Vista on July 23, 2005. |
| 2006 | Microsoft releases Microsoft Windows Vista to corporations on November 30, 2006. |
| 2007 | Microsoft releases Microsoft Windows Vista and Office 2007 to the general public January 30, 2007. |
- Steve Jobs and Steve Woznaik - Apple Inc. (formally Apple Computers Inc.)
Steve Jobs had worked during the summer at an apple farm, and admired the Beatles’ record label, Apple. He also believed Apples to be the most perfect fruit. He and Steve Wozniak were trying to figure out a name for their new company, and they decided that if they couldn’t think of one by the end of the day that was better than Apple, they would choose Apple. They couldn’t think of anything better, so on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer, Inc. was born.
But they needed a logo. The first design included Sir Isaac Newton, a tree and a banner that said “Apple Computer.” Jobs decided they needed a less busy logo, one that would signify a brand. The second logo attempt was very similar to the current logo, but without the bite taken out of it. Jobs thought this logo looked too much like an orange. The third attempt was the logo that Apple still uses.
Douglas Engelbart, an American engineer working at the Stanford Research Institute, dreamt up the idea of a mouse driven graphical user interface back in 1960s. Researchers working for Xerox in Palo Alto California were inspired by Engelbart’s work, and they went on to create a machine called the ‘Alto’ in 1973. Eventually the Alto project led to the ‘Xerox Star 8010 Document Processor’ which was released commercially in 1981 for US$17,000 (about $40,000 in today’s money). Although interesting historically, only a handful were actually manufactured.
Steve Jobs, co owner of Apple Computers, visited Xerox in 1979 and left extremely impressed by the Alto. Over the next several years he hired many Xerox engineers, and invested many millions of dollars developing a marketable GUI based computer. In 1983 Apple finally released the $10,000 ‘Lisa’. It was far too expensive and failed completely, but a year later Apple was able to launch the much cheaper Macintosh which eventually became very popular. Although Jobs took the idea of mouse and graphical user interface from Xerox, there is no doubt that his team at Apple contributed a very great deal to development of the GUI (eg: Overlapping Windows, Dialogue Box, Trash Can).
In 1985, before the success of the Macintosh was clear, Apple’s board of directors forced 30 year old Steve Jobs to resign. The Lisa had failed, Apple was loosing ground in word-processing, there had been disagreements over costs and the hyperactive Jobs had become very hard to work with. In 1997 Apple brought Jobs back when it purchased NeXT.
- Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie - Creators of UNIX
Unix originated inthe Bell Laboratory of AT & T and University of California, and Berkley (UCB) in thye 1960s, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT & T Bell Labs, and General Electric Company worked on an experimental Operating System called Multics ( Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) Multics was an Interactive Operating System with many new capabilities including enhanced security. Since the progress was not sufficient AT & T pulled out of the Multics project in 1969.
in the later part f 1969 , Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, develeoped an Operating System called UNICS ( Uniplexed Information and Computing System). It was designed completetly in assembly language of PDP-7 and therefore was not portable. Brian Kernighan Invented the name Unics, which was later changed to UNIX.
To achieve the portability. Thompson thought of implementing the system in a higher level language, he rewrote the entire code of UNIX in a new language called B developed by him, Since the Language B did not give the satisfactory results, Dennis Ritchie again Developed a Higher level language called C, Thompson and Ritchie led a team of developers, and develped a new multi-tasking OS, Now known as Unix, In 1973 Unix was rewritten in the C Programming language and its licensed version was made available to Universities and commercial firms.
In the 1980s Copanies began to offer commercial versions of the Unix System for there own mini computers and workstations. Most of the UNIX versions were developed from AT & T, othrs were based on BSD ( Berkely Sftware Distribution)
During this period, Bill Joy, one of the leading developers of BSD, co-founded te Sun Microsystems in 1982. Microsoft developed its first Unix system for 16-bit Microcomputer called Xenix, Which could be run on a PC, later XENIX was sold to SCO (Santa Cruz Operations). in 1989 SCo developed its own version of OS called SCO UNIX.
in 1991, Linus Torvalds of Finland, developed an Operating System called Linux, which was based on Unix, Linux is an open source program, and its source code is freely available. Today Linux is very popular Operating System widely used on Desktops, Redhat linux, is one of the most popular falvors of Linux.
The Operating System’s we use today, be it Microsoft Windows, or Apple’s MAC OSX, is the part of the UNIX, that was Invented by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.
- Bill Hewlett and David Packard - Founders of HP
HP is the largest technology company in the world and operates in nearly every country. HP specializes in developing and manufacturing computing, storage, and networking hardware, software and services. Major product lines include personal computing devices, enterprise servers, related storage devices, as well as a diverse range of printers and other imaging products. Other product lines, including electronic test equipment and systems, medical electronic equipment, solid state components and instrumentation for chemical analysis were spun off as Agilent Technologies in 1999.
William (Bill) Hewlett and David (Dave) Packard both graduated in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor, Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression. Terman was considered a mentor to them in forming Hewlett-Packard. In 1939, Packard and Hewlett established Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Packard’s garage with an initial capital investment of US$538. Hewlett and Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett. Packard won the coin toss but named their electronics manufacturing enterprise the “Hewlett-Packard Company”. HP incorporated on August 18, 1947, and went public on November 6, 1957.
Of the many projects they worked on, their very first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator, the Model HP200A. Their innovation was the use of a small light bulb as a temperature dependent resistor in a critical portion of the circuit. This allowed them to sell the Model 200A for $54.40 when competitors were selling less stable oscillators for over $200. The Model 200 series of generators continued until at least 1972 as the 200AB, still tube-based but improved in design through the years. At 33 years, it was perhaps the longest-selling basic electronic design of all time.
One of the company’s earliest customers was The Walt Disney Company, which bought eight Model 200B oscillators (at $71.50 each) for use in certifying the Fantasound surround sound systems installed in theaters for the movie Fantasia.
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin - Founder of Google Inc.
Google began in 1996 as a project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry and Sergey were both studying at Stanford University California. In their research project they came up with a plan to make a search engine that ranked websites according to the number of other websites that linked to that site (and ultimately came up with the Google we have today). Before Google, search engines had ranked sites simply by the number of times the search term searched for appeared on the webpage, and the duo set out to make a more “aware” search engine.
The domain google.com was registered on September 14th 1997 and Google Corporation was formed a year later in September 1998.
Google started selling advertisements with its keyword searches in 2000, and so Google Adwords/Adsense was born. These advertisements used a system based on the pretence that you only paid for your advertising if some clicked on your ad link – hence the term Pay Per Click (PPC) was born.
The term PageRank was patented in September 2001 – this term is actually named after co-founder Larry Page and not, as some think, named because it is the rank of a page (webpage).
Also in 2001 co-founder Larry Page stood down as the CEO of Google and former CEO of Novel. Eric Schmidt. was appointed as the new CEO of Google.
Google moved its offices to its large Google estate (nicknamed GooglePlex) in Mountainview California in 2003, and is still based there today.
In 2004, Google launched its own free web-based email service, known as Gmail. This service was made to rival the free online mail services supplied by Yahoo and Microsoft (hotmail). This new free email service shook up the very foundation of free email with its enormous 1 GB of email storage which dwarfed its rivals’ ten-fold.
In 2004 Google launched Google Earth. Google Earth is an amazing creation that is a map of the earth based on satellite imagery. This interactive globe of the world allows you to type in a search for any place in the world and you will automatically be taken to that part of the world. The cool part is that with Google Earth you can zoom right in to street level and actually see your own street and even your house!
An interesting fact in the history of Google is that in September 2005, Google made a new partnership with a very interesting company – NASA. This involved building a 1-million square foot research and development centre at NASA’s Ames Research Center. This was interestingly followed a few months later by the launch of Google Mars and Google Moon: two Google maps style applications built on pictures of the moon and the planet Mars.
In 2006 Google launched Google Video. Google Video is a cool new search tool. As its title suggests Google video allows you to search the internet for videos. There are thousands of videos to make your search from; from personal homemade videos to TV shows made by the big television corporations.
In 2006 Google was added to the Oxford English dictionary as a verb – the verb “to Google” has become so popular that Google has even been worried that their brand name might lose their copyright and patent protections, and allow other companies to be able to legally use the Google brand in their own brand.
Google has a dominant controlling share of the search market. Google is the most widely used search engine on the internet with a 54% market share. Yahoo! Is Google’s closest rival with 23%, less than half of Google’s share, and MSN even falls far short of Yahoo!, lagging far behind in 3rd place with a 13% market share. If these figures aren’t impressive enough for Google, independent estimates say that more than 80% of search referrals come from Google – Google receives about a billion search requests per day – and with estimates that Google makes 12 cents for every search you perform, you can see that Google corporation is a very lucrative business!
With the many many applications and products that Google has
brought out, and the control it has over the internet it is
possible that Google will become a very very influential part
of all of lives in years to come.
- Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce - Founder of Intel Corporation.
Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’. But that was already trademarked by a hotel chain…So they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics… INTEL
The microprocessor has changed our lives in so many ways that it is difficult to recall how different things were before its invention. In the 1960s, computers filled entire rooms. Their expensive processing power was available only to a select few in government labs, research universities and large corporations. The mid-1960s development of the integrated circuit had enabled the miniaturization of electronic circuitry onto a single silicon chip, but the world was still skeptical. The large scale integration of transistors onto silicon was still an emerging business.
Intel is the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. The company is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, as Integrated Electronics Corporation and based in Santa Clara, California, USA. Intel also makes motherboard chipsets, network cards and ICs, flash memory, graphic chips, embedded processors, and other devices related to communications and computing. Founded by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, and widely associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove, Intel combines advanced chip design capability with a leading-edge manufacturing capability. Originally known primarily to engineers and technologists, Intel’s successful “Intel Inside” advertising campaign of the 1990s made it and its Pentium processor household names.
- Vinod Khosla, Andreas Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy and Scott Mc Nealy - Founders of SUN (StanfordUniversity Network) MicroSystems.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
On February 12, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of BSD, joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders.[10] The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network. Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.
Sun’s initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, for Sun Workstations (later Sun Worldwide). The symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA; Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the company’s current strategy.[15]
Sun’s logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word sun, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford University. The initial version of the logo had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner.
- Lawrence Joseph Ellison - Founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation.
Larry Ellison was born in New York City, in New York State to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-old unwed Jewish mother. At his mother's request, he was given to his mother's aunt and uncle in Chicago to raise. Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopted him when he was nine months old. Ellison did not learn the name of his mother or meet her until he was 48; the identity of his father is unknown.
Ellison graduated from Eugene Field Elementary School on Chicago's north side in January, 1958 and attended Sullivan High School at least through the fall of 1959 before moving to South Shore.
Ellison grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago's South Shore middle-class Jewish neighborhood. Ellison remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, a Russian Jew from the Crimea who adopted the name Ellison to honor his point of entry into the USA, Ellis Island. Louis, his father, was a modest government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression.
Ellison was a bright but inattentive student. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of his second year, after not taking his final exams because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending a summer in Northern California, where he lived with his friend Chuck Weiss, he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer designing. At 20 years of age, he moved to northern California permanently.
During the 1970s, Ellison worked for Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle".
Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." He founded Oracle in 1977, putting up a mere $1400 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979, the company was renamed Relational Software Inc., later renamed Oracle after the flagship product Oracle database. He had heard about the IBM System R database, also based on Codd's theories, and wanted Oracle to be compatible with it, but IBM made this impossible by refusing to share System R's code. The initial release of Oracle was Oracle 2; there was no Oracle 1. The release number was intended to imply that all of the bugs had been worked out of an earlier version.
In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of a mismatch between cash and revenues. This crisis, which almost resulted in Oracle's bankruptcy, came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses. This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also to settle out of court class action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison would later say that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."
Although IBM dominated the mainframe relational database market with its DB2 and SQL/DS database products, it delayed entering the market for a relational database on UNIX and Windows operating systems. This left the door open for Sybase, Oracle, and Informix (and eventually Microsoft) to dominate mid-range systems and microcomputers.
Around this time, Oracle fell behind Sybase. In 1990-1993, Sybase was the fastest growing database company and the database industry's darling vendor, but soon fell victim to its merger mania. Sybase's 1993 merger with Powersoft resulted in a loss of focus on its core database technology. In 1993, Sybase sold the rights to its database software running under the Windows operating system to Microsoft Corporation, which now markets it under the name "SQL Server."
In 1994, Informix Software overtook Sybase and became Oracle's most important rival. The intense war between Informix CEO Phil White and Ellison was front page Silicon Valley news for three years. In April, 1997, Informix announced a major revenue shortfall and earnings restatements; Phil White eventually landed in jail, and Informix was absorbed by IBM in 2000. Also in 1997, Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs came back to the company. Ellison resigned in 2002, saying that he did not have the time to attend necessary formal board meetings.
Once Informix and Sybase were defeated, Oracle enjoyed years of industry dominance until the rise of Microsoft SQL Server in the late 90s and IBM's acquisition of Informix Software in 2001 to complement their DB2 database. Today Oracle's main competition for new database licenses on UNIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems is with IBM's DB2, the open source database MySQL, and with Microsoft SQL Server (which only runs on Windows). IBM's DB2 still dominates the mainframe database market.
In April 2009, Oracle announced its intent to buy Sun Microsystems after a tug of war with IBM and Hewlett-Packard.The European Union has approved the acquisition by Oracle of Sun Microsystemson January 21, 2010 and has agreed that "Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products".
