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People Behind Technologies that Created Ground for Innovations

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PCQ Bureau
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There are countries where Internet access is fundamental right. So strong is this medium of information sharing that story of Internet is the one we all should know. In early stages Internet was not that easy to access. What brought about a huge shift in its popularity was the browser.

WWW: Tim Berners Lee

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The story o World Wide Web lies in the idea of Berners-Lee, He thought about joining hypertext with Internet. While being an independent contractor at CERN- The European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, 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. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet. 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 (running on the NeXTSTEP OS), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon). Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/ TheProject.html.

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari all these are common names these days and act as our window to Internet. But from where did all these browsers start their journey is what we are going to explore about.

Browser: Marc Andreessen

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While working at the University's (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Andreessen became familiar with Tim Berners-Lee's open standards for the World Wide Web. He and a full-time salaried co-worker Eric Bina worked on creating a user-friendly browser with integrated graphics that would work on a wide range of computers. The resulting code was the Mosaic web browser. After finishing his graduation from the university in 1993, Andreessen moved to California to work at Enterprise Integration Technologies, here he met with Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and suggested starting an Internet software company which led to Mosaic Communications Corporation with Andreessen as cofounder and vice president of technology. Mosaic Communications changed its name to Netscape Communications as The University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, so Mosaic Communications changed its name to Netscape Communications, with Netscape Navigator as its flagship web browser.

Even if you are not a programmer but had some subjects back in school days related to basic programming then you must have studied C programming language. This is the language we all start from and is still amongst the most popular language and also paved way for other popular languages.

C: Denis Ritchie

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Dennis Ritchie, known as the father of UNIX OS and C programming, was born in Bronxville, New York to Alistair, an engineer at Bell Labs, and Jean McGee Ritchie, a housewife. He attended high school in New Jersey and went to Harvard, where he majored in applied mathematics. During his school days he attended lectures on the working of Univac 1, a Harvard's computer system, stirring his curiosity about computers. It was this curiosity that led him to take-up a small job at MIT labs, during his Harvard days, from where he completed his PhD in 1968. Like his father, he joined Bell Labs in 1967 and came in contact with Ken Thompson, an electrical engineer, with whom he later invented UNIX and C programming. Ritchie's work was recognized and awarded the 1983 Turing award of the Association of Computing Machinery, popularly known as the Nobel Prize of computing. He was also a fellow at the Computer History Museum and received the National Medal of Technology from former President Bill Clinton in 1999.

This language derives much of its syntax from C and C++. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture.

Java: James Gosling

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The brain behind java, James Gosling, was born in 195. After completing his graduation in Computer Science from University of Calgary, he did PhD from Carnegie Melon on The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints. He joined Sun Microsystems in 1984 and spend decades with them, where he developed the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. Later, he made major assistances to several other software systems, such as News and Gosling Emacs. For inventing Java he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. He co-wrote 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 highest civilian honour in Canada.

Sf.net, download.com are few of the sites filled with open source and free software that could be compared to any proprietary software and that too free of cost. This concept of free software movement was all an idea of Richar Stallman.

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GNU: Richard Stallman

Free software advocate and activist Richard Stallman is a rare computer programmer who has devoted his life to making software free for users and in 1985, he founded the free software foundation to support free software movement. Son of Daniel Stallman and Alice Lippman, he was born in 1953 in New York. His first experience with computers was while in high school at the IBM New York Scientific Center. He was hired for the summer to write a numerical analysis program in FORTRAN. He completed the task after a couple of weeks and spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL. In 1971, he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, RMS. Stallman joined MIT as a graduate student, but didn't go for doctorate in physics to keep his attention on programming at the MIT AI Laboratory. As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects like TECO, Emacs, and the Lisp machine Operating System. He increasingly became an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab, and when MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password system in 1977, Stallman decrypted the passwords and mailed them to users with a suggestion to change it to the empty string instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems.

There are plethora of Free operating systems that you can download and use on your machine that too free of cost. Being open source there is infinite customization that one could do with Linux and all this has given birth to Linux distributions also known as 'distros' that run some of the most critical apps

that we use everyday.

Linux: Linus Torvalds

One of the most popular faces of Finland, the land of Nokia, is Linus Torvalds. Acclaimed as one of the greatest programmers of 21st century, Torvalds revolutionised computer programming when he invented Linux- the UNIX like OS. Born in Helsinki, on Dec 28, 1969 in a journalist family to Anna and Nils Torvalds, Linus was named after Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, an American chemist. As a child, he was greatly inspired by his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki. In 1970s, he bought a PC, a Commodore Vic 20. Linus soon grew bored with the few programs it had and started creating new ones, first using the BASIC programming language and then using the much more difficult but also more powerful assembly language. It was during his study in computer science at Helsinki University, when he created Linux OS kernel. When exposed to UNIX OS, he was disappointed to find that its 16-bit design was not well adapted to the 32-bit cheap and popular Intel 386 for PCs. This led him to create a free kernel as the existing one was not open to modification. He later said that if either the GNU or 386BSD kernels were available at the time, he wouldn't have written Linux.

We all use applications but we rarely give thought to how this data is stored so that retrieval of same is quick. Now if we take companies with huge user database in context the time of retrieval becomes business critical. A real breakthrough in this direction was RDBMS.

RDBMS: Edgar F. Codd

English computer scientist Edgar Frank Codd was born in 1923 in Portland, England. After completing school in 1942, he joined the Royal Air Force where he became a captain. When the war was over, Codd resumed his academic career and in 1948 was awarded a B.A. in mathematics from Oxford University. In 1949, he moved to US and joined IBM as a mathematical programmer for the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, a huge tube-based computer that had the speed and flexibility to solve many of the largest scientific problems of its day. After earning his doctorate in computer science at the University of Michigan in 1967 under a full scholarship from IBM, Codd moved to IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory in San Jose, where he conceived his relational model. His invention made a landmark change in our data transactions. Activities, such as using bank accounts and credit cards, trading stock, making travel reservations or online auctions, are built on relational databases based on the mathematical theory that Codd first published in 1970 when he worked at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory. He was awarded the Turing Award in 1981, and was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1994. Codd died of heart failure at his home in Williams Island, Florida, at the age of 79 on April 18, 2003.

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