For every world-famous name with a world famous fortune,
such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, there are hundreds
of other individuals who have moved the IT industry and its
technology inexorably forward.
Fame and fortune has rarely been their immediate spur. A passion
for changing the world through technology is the hallmark of the IT
Greats. Sometimes they have changed technology, sometimes they have
transformed the way technology is marketed or radically altered the
way IT is perceived by society.
Some have been involved in great leaps forward, some have made
incremental changes that have stood the test of time.
Whatever the case, our industry is truly one where we all stand
on the shoulders of giants, and we are proud to pay tribute to some
of them in the results of our IT Greats poll.
Top 10 greatest IT people
1. Steve Jobs
2. Tim Berners-Lee
3. Bill Gates
4. James Gosling
5. Linus Torvalds
6. Richard Stallman
7. Arthur C Clark
8. Ted Codd
9. Steve Shirley
10. Martha Lane Fox
1. Steve Jobs: innovator who enjoyed a second bite of
the apple
Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple
Computer, topped the Computer Weekly 40th anniversary poll due to
the devoted following he has generated through his pioneering work
in personal computing and product design.
Jobs was born in 1955 in San Francisco, and during his high
school years he showed his early enthusiasm for computing by
attending after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in
Palo Alto, California. He met fellow Apple founder Steve Wozniak
during a summer job at HP.
In the autumn of 1974, Jobs, who had dropped out of university
after one term, began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer
Club with Steve Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a
manufacturer of popular video games.
At the age of 21 Jobs saw a computer that Wozniak had designed
for his own use and convinced his friend to market the product.
Apple Computer was founded as a partnership on 1 April 1976.
Though the initial plan was to sell just printed circuit boards,
Jobs and Wozniak ended up creating a batch of completely assembled
computers, and entered the personal computer business.
Their second machine, the Apple II, was introduced the following
year and became a huge success, turning Apple into an important
player in the nascent personal computer industry.
In 1983 Apple launched the Lisa, the first PC with a graphical
user interface – an essential element in making computing
accessible to the masses. It flopped because of its prohibitive
price, but the next year Apple launched the distinct, lower priced
Macintosh and it became the first commercially successful GUI
machine.
Despite his success in founding Apple, Jobs left following a
boardroom row in 1985. But his influence on the computer industry
did not end there.
Jobs moved on to found Next Computer, then in 1986 he bought
little known The Graphics Group from Lucasfilm, which achieved
global dominance in animated feature films during the 1990s, after
being renamed Pixar.
Much of Next’s technology had limited commercial success, but it
laid the foundation for future computing developments. The company
pioneered the object-oriented software development system, Ethernet
port connectivity and collaborative software. It was the Next
interface builder that allowed Tim Berners-Lee to develop the
original world-wide web system at Cern.
Without Jobs, Apple had stumbled. Market share fell while it
struggled to release new operating systems. Its answer was to buy
Jobs’ company Next, together with its innovative operating system,
and welcome back its charismatic former CEO.
On returning to Apple, Jobs drove the company ever deeper into
the consumer electronics and computing market, launching the iMac
and iPod.
Whether Jobs’ next creation changes the world like the Apple II,
or turns out to bomb like the Apple Lisa, his place in computing
history is guaranteed.
2. Tim Berners-Lee: father of the web and champion of IT
freedom
Dotcoms, bloggers and Google all have one man to thank for
their place in the 21st century world. In 1990,
Tim Berners-Lee made the imaginative leap to combine the internet
with the hypertext concept, and the worldwide web was born.
Born in 1955 in London, Berners-Lee’s parents were both
mathematicians who were employed together on the team that built
the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers.
After attending school in London, Berners-Lee went on to study
physics at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he built a computer with
a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old
television. While at Oxford, he was caught hacking with a friend
and was subsequently banned from using the university
computer.
He worked at Plessey Telecommunications from 1976 as a programmer
and in 1980 began working as an independent contractor at the
European nuclear research centre Cern.
In 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 called Enquire.
He joined Cern on a full-time basis in 1984 as a fellow. In
1989, Cern was the largest internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee
saw an opportunity. “I just had to take the hypertext idea and
connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas,” he said, and the worldwide
web was born.
He wrote his initial proposal in March of 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 worldwide web, for which he designed and built the first
web browser and editor (called World-wide Web and developed on
Nextstep) and the first web server called Hypertext Transfer
Protocol Daemon (HTTPD).
The first website built was at
http://info.cern.ch/ and was put
online on 6 August 1991. The URL is still in use today. It provided
an explanation of the worldwide web, how one could own a browser
and how to set up a web server. It was also the world’s first web
directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other
websites.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various
companies willing to create standards and recommendations to
improve the quality of the web.
Berners-Lee made his ideas available freely, with no patent and
no royalties due. He is now the director of W3C, a senior
researcher at MIT’s CSail, and professor of computer science at
Southampton University.
3. Bill Gates: mixing maths and money to build
microsoft
As joint founder of the world’s biggest software company,
Microsoft, Bill Gates’s approach to technology and business was
instrumental in making technology available to the masses.
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington in 1955 to a wealthy
family: his father was a prominent lawyer and his mother served on
the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and The United
Way.
At school Gates excelled in mathematics and the sciences and by
the age of 13 he was deeply engrossed in software programming.
With other school mates he began programming and bug fixing for
the Computer Center Corporation, and in 1970 Gates formed a venture
with fellow school student and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen,
called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters using the Intel 8008
processor.
In 1973, Gates enrolled at Harvard University, where he met
future business partner Steve Ballmer. Their first venture was to
develop a version of the Basic programming language for the Altair
8800, one of the first microcomputers.
Soon afterwards Gates left Harvard to found “Micro-Soft”, which
later became Microsoft Corporation, with Allen. Microsoft took off
when Gates began licensing his MS-Dos operating systems to
manufacturers of IBM PC clones. Its drive to global dominance
continued with the development of Windows, its version of the
graphical user interface, as an addition to its Dos command
line.
By the early 1990s, Windows had driven other Dos-based GUIs like
Gem and Geos out of the market. It performed a similar feat with
the Office productivity suite.
Gates fought hard to establish Microsoft’s dominant position in
the software industry and has fought even harder to defend it. His
ability to get Microsoft software pre-installed on most PCs shipped
in the world made Microsoft the world’s largest software house and
Gates one of the world’s richest men. It also meant Microsoft found
itself on the wrong end of anti-trust legislation in both the US
and Europe.
Gates stood down as chief executive of Microsoft in 2000 to
focus on software development and on 16 June 2006, he announced
that he would move to a part-time role with Microsoft in 2008 to
focus on his philanthropic work.
Since 2000, Gates has given away about £15.5bn, a third of his
wealth, to charity. Such is his fame in the world outside
computing,fictional Gates characters have appeared in cartoons
including the Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy.
4. James Gosling
Of your choice of the most influential people in IT, James
Gosling is the true geek. Unlike Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, neither
of whom finished college, Gosling completed a PhD in computer
science and contributed to software innovation at a technical
level.
Born in 1955 near Calgary, Canada, Gosling is best known as the
father of the Java programming language, the first programme
language designed with the internet in mind and which could adapt
to highly distributed applications.
Gosling received a BSc in computer science from the University
of Calgary in 1977, and while working towards his doctorate he
created the original version of the Emacs text editor for Unix
(Gosmacs). He also built a multi-processor version of Unix, as well
as several compilers and mail systems before starting work in the
industry.
In 1984, Gosling joined Sun Microsystems, where he is currently
chief technology officer in the developer product group.
In the early 1990s, Gosling initiated and led a project
code-named Green that eventually became Java. Green aimed to
develop software that would run on a variety of computing devices
without having to be customised for each one.
Although much of the technology developed as part of Green never
saw the light of day, Gosling realised that some of the underlying
principles they had created would be very useful in the internet
age.
Sun formally launched Java in 1995. Gosling did the original
design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual
machine. For this achievement he was elected to the US National
Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to
several other software systems, such as Newa and Gosling Emacs.
Although some critics say Java has not lived up to its initial
"write-once-run-anywhere" claim, Gosling's success in the Computer
Weekly polls is precisely because Java has allowed the creation of
robust, reusable code which runs on devices as diverse at mobile
phones, PCs and mainframes.
5. Linus Torvalds
As the creator of the Linux operating system, Linus Torvalds has
been a driving force behind the whole open source movement, which
represents not only an ever increasing challenge to proprietary
software, but is also the inspiration for the industry to move to
open standards.
Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is
incorporated into the Linux kernel.
6. Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, an
initiative to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which
is free software. Stallman has written several popular tools,
created the GNU licence and campaigns against software patents.
7. Arthur C Clarke
2001: A Space Odyssey writer Arthur C Clarke has consistently
been ahead of his time in predicting how technology will change the
world. Most notably, in 1945 he suggested that geostationary
satellites would make ideal telecoms relays.
8. Ted Codd
Ted Codd created 12 rules on which every relational database is
built - an essential ingredient for building business computer
systems.
9. Steve Shirley
Steve Shirley was an early champion of women in IT. She founded
the company now known as Xansa, pioneered new work practices and in
doing so created new opportunities for women in technology.
10. Martha Lane Fox
With Brent Hoberman, Martha Lane Fox created Lastminute.com in
1998, and as "the face" of Lastminute raised the profile of
e-commerce ever higher in the public consciousness.
Readers hail Dilbert the guru of corporate
culture
According to Computer Weekly readers, Dilbert, which features
every week on the back pages of the magazine, has more insight into
corporate life and organisation than any number of highly paid
management consultants could ever achieve.
Written and drawn by Scott Adams, Dilbert portrays corporate
culture as a world of bureaucracy for its own sake, where
employees' skills and efforts are not rewarded. Much of the humour
emerges from the characters wrestling with the obviously ridiculous
decisions and behaviour of management.
1955: a good year for computing
The top four people in our poll were all born in 1955, making it
a very beneficial year for the world of computing.
It may have been a good year for computing, but 1955 was a sad
year for science, as Albert Einstein died on 18 April.
It was also the year that the first McDonald's fast food
franchise was opened: we'll leave you to make up you own mind about
that one.
Your big names
Outside the main choices for greatest hardware, the most popular
readers' suggestions were:
1. Ken Olsen, founder of Dec, who invented the minicomputer
2. Clive Sinclair, home computer visionary
3. Vint Cerf, one of the internet's founding fathers
4. Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
5. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle
6. Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder
7. Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language
8. Donald Davies, co-inventor of packet switching
9. Ken Thompson, co-creator of Unix
10. Grace Hopper, Cobol pioneer
Read article:
Journey to the future
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