We asked Computer Weekly readers to vote for who they
consider to be the greatest people and technologies of the past 40
years of IT. Myles Hewitt and Cliff Saran
introduce the results
To mark our 40th anniversary Computer Weekly asked you, our
readers, to vote for the individuals, organisations, hardware and
software that have had the most beneficial impact on our industry
over the past four decades.
In each of the four categories in our IT Greats poll we asked
you to select from a shortlist of 10 choices, representative of the
spectrum of IT developments during the first 40 years of Computer
Weekly.
Everything from the personalities who have driven IT's
remarkable growth to hardware breakthroughs, innovative programming
and software architectures, the rise and fall of giant hardware and
software companies, and the impact of the online revolution.
We also asked you to add your own suggestions, and your
nominations have highlighted the enormous range of people,
technologies and organisations that have placed our industry not
only at the heart of almost every business and every service on the
planet, but in the homes and even the pockets of billions of
individuals around the globe.
On the following 12 pages we reveal the results of the IT Greats
poll and review the contributions to IT made by the winners and the
runners-up, together with a look at what readers saw as the other
major forces in IT.
IT has made a long and fascinating journey from the early days
of commercial IT, or data processing as it was known back in the
1960s and 1970s. However, the trends which have resulted in today's
ever more connected IT world were clearly visible back in 1966 when
Computer Weekly was first published.
The front page news in Computer Weekly's first edition was that
the Atomic Energy Authority had installed 160 remote keyboard
stations to connect to its IBM 360 mainframe in Harwell, while
abroad the Oscar Sinigaglia steelworks in Italy linked its Univac
1004 computers over a 50-bits-per-second network.
In those days before social and legislative change, advertisers
had no embarrassment in advertising, for example, for computer
programmers who should be "men in the age range 23 to 28
years".
Today, while technology has forged ahead, the dearth of women
working in IT and the fact that it has taken this long to bring in
anti-ageism legislation demonstrate that it is a lot easier to
change technologies than it is to change attitudes.
Meanwhile, inflation has made salaries sound a bit more
attractive. The starting salary for those 23 to 28-year-old male
programmers had a lower limit of £735 per year.
But at least most employers were willing to train in those days.
The advertisement for a "male" supervisor "to control and
co-ordinate the day-to-day operation of an IBM punched card
installation" was promised "thorough training in computer
techniques".
Such in-depth training was quite usual in the 1960s and 1970s,
with employers accepting that building staff skills could only
benefit the whole industry.
It would be impossible for the 1966 computer programmer on his
starting salary of less than £1,000 to imagine the vast fortunes
and global fame of today's most successful IT innovators and
entrepreneurs.
IT Greats such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates often enjoy greater
fame worldwide than the biggest rock and film stars - and they
certainly have a lot more cash.
Innovators and industry leaders from earlier times, such as Ken
Olsen, inventor of the minicomputer, were certainly highly
respected within the industry, but they were far from famous in the
world outside, with lifestyles that appear almost frugal alongside
many of today's IT Greats.
When it comes to technology IT Greats, the importance of
connectivity cannot be underestimated - and that means connectivity
not simply between machines or software systems, but between the
people and the organisations that build them, often creating de
facto or mutually agreed standards in the process.
The fact that today we can connect to anyone else on the planet
using an IP link is testimony to the value of standards in making
IT pervasive. IBM is rightly an IT Great, not only dominating IT 40
years ago, but for many years before and since.
But with its use of PC-Dos, a version of MS-Dos, as the
operating system for the phenomenally successful IBM PC it also
single-handedly lifted another IT Great, Microsoft, from relative
obscurity to the starting grid for Bill Gates' drive for world
domination.
It is because of the innovative work of the early pioneers and
the technologies they created that we can reap the benefits of a
global network of powerful interconnected computers. But who and
what are the real IT Greats of the past 40 years - the most
significant personalities, the organisations with the greatest
influence, the revolutionary hardware and the most innovative
software?
Read article:
Journey to the future
Read article:
Who is the greatest
Read article:
Driving forces: Top 10 greatest IT people
Read article:
Chips with everything: Hardware top 10
Read article:
The soft machine at the heart of IT: Software top 10
Read article:
Innovation is the key to greatness: The top 10
organisations