http://www.networkcomputing.com/1119/1119f1people_intro.html
> The 10 Most Important People of the Decade
>
> October 2, 2000
> By Art Wittmann
>
> There's something about the computing industry that lends itself
> to incredible achievements by individuals. Yet there is no mold
> for the movers and shakers in this market.
>
> Take, for example, the top three picks on our "Most Influential
> People of the Decade" list and how they made their marks on the
> industry. They came from different fields, were motivated by
> different factors and were supported by different communities.
> Yet despite the wildly varied genesis of their ideas, each has
> had a profound effect on the way we build networks and carry out
> business. Even as our industry matures, individuals with vision
> will continue to rock its foundation. As you read the following
> profiles of the 10 people we consider the cr�me de la cr�me, try
> to imagine who will be the next individual to lead our industry
> in a totally new and unimagined direction.
>
> Here is our list:
>
> # 1: Tim Berners-Lee
> # 2: Bill Gates
> # 3: Linus Torvalds
> # 4: Jim Clark
> # 5: Larry Ellison
> # 6: Lou Gerstner
> # 7: Steve Jobs
> # 8: Elias Levy
> # 9: Rep. Rick Boucher
> # 10: Vinod Khosla
Yeah Tim!
Below are the writeups on Tim and Linus; others are linked from
the URI above.
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1119/1119f1people_1.html
| Number 1: Tim Berners-Lee
|
| October 2, 2000
| By Mike Lee
|
| Tim Berners-Lee is the man who gave us the World Wide Web. Not
| only is he responsible for the killer invention of the past
| decade, he also worked tirelessly to promote it, and he continues
| to foster the Web as an open and freely available medium.
|
| In other, more self-serving hands, his invention might have
| become just a proprietary application that would have failed to
| achieve widespread adoption. And in less patient hands, it might
| not have survived its initial growing pains.
|
| Berners-Lee created the Web while at CERN (the European
| Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Switzerland in 1990, as a
| method of keeping documentation current and available to the
| multitudes of researchers there. Some technologies for
| distributing information over a network were available, and
| implementations of hypertext applications abounded. Until then,
| however, no one had thought to connect the two. Berners-Lee
| created a simple implementation of hypertext called HTML
| (Hypertext Markup Language), and extended it with the URI
| (Uniform Resource Identifier), so that hypertext links could be
| created not only within one document or on a single computer, but
| among networked computers. For a communications protocol, he
| devised HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to move data between a
| Web server and a client.
|
| He did this on his NeXT computer, named info.cern.ch, including
| creating the first Web browser, aptly called WorldWideWeb.
| Berners-Lee's concept of the Web was primarily as a collaborative
| environment, so the first browser incorporated both browsing and
| editing components, and was intended to be as much a
| collaborative document-creation environment as it was a tool to
| find information.
|
| Berners-Lee's innovations received a cool reception from CERN
| management, but they took off in the general Internet community.
| In 1994, he left CERN for MIT and helped create the World Wide
| Web Consortium (W3C), which he still heads as director. The W3C
| is something of a think tank for new Web-related technologies,
| with the goal of ensuring openness and interoperability. Among
| the W3C's most notable recent work is XML (Extensible Markup
| Language), which enables two-way communication between Web
| servers, thus facilitating the use of complex applications;
| XHTML, a new version of HTML based on XML; P3P (Platform for
| Privacy Preferences), intended to give users more control over
| the use of their personal information on the Web; and RDF
| (Resource Description Framework), a standardized method for
| annotating Web pages to enable more meaningful searches. All
| these standards are aimed at making the Web a more flexible and
| productive medium for sharing information among both users and
| computers.
|
| Berners-Lee's vision for the Web and the focus of his work have
| changed somewhat over the years. Of all the protocols and
| concepts he has devised, he cites the URI as his most important
| contribution because it defines a method for locating information
| anywhere. Today he is the champion of an idea called the Semantic
| Web, the goal of which is to represent the data available on the
| Web not only in a human-readable format, but also in formats that
| make it easier for computers to meaningfully act on information
| in Web pages. Through improved structuring of information, new
| applications are enabled, and old applications, such as search
| engines, are vastly improved. The work of the W3C and Berners-Lee
| constitutes the building blocks for an even better Web than we
| know today.
|
| Without question, the technology of the Web will continue to
| morph and improve to meet future needs and solve new challenges.
| No doubt Berners-Lee will be happily steeped in the details of
| that evolution. We wouldn't be at all surprised to see him on
| this list again 10 years hence.
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1119/1119f1people_3.html
] Number 3: Linus Torvalds
]
] October 2, 2000
] By Gregory Yerxa
]
] Linus Torvalds -- a shy, Swedish-speaking Finnish university
] student--did what no one else has been able to do: By creating an
] operating system and throwing its continued development to a
] throng of programmers who simply love to create good programs, he
] got the attention of big companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun
] and many other PC makers and, most significant, Microsoft.
]
] Frustrated with the established operating systems, Torvalds
] banged out a freely distributed alternative operating system and
] spawned the Linux revolution.
]
] That was in 1991, and to this day he remains the self-proclaimed
] director and filter of features and technologies that go into the
] core Linux operating system.
]
] There's no doubt that Torvalds has been a major force in
] computing and networking. His operating system started out as the
] catalysts of most revolutions do--quietly. But as interest in
] Linux grew, so did its commercial potential. Determined to share
] and improve on his project to the greatest extent possible,
] Torvalds committed commercial suicide and conjured up a copyright
] that would prohibit anyone--including himself--from using his
] creation for capital gain. So extensive and complete was the
] original copyright that within months he changed it to a less
] restrictive GNU General Public License (GPL), a move he says was
] the best thing he ever did. Who are we to disagree?
]
] Torvalds' decision to freely distribute his work stands in stark
] contrast to the practices of the day. While IPO fever hadn't yet
] risen to the pitch of recent years, programmers commonly cashed
] in on their personal creations. In the early 1990s--at the same
] time Microsoft was seeing incredible commercial successes--the
] Linux movement steadily navigated the pitfalls of GPL development
] and made refinement after refinement.
]
] Attracting the do-it-yourself types of programmers, engineers and
] IT professionals, Linux began to make inroads, first into
] educational IT shops, and then into the deep recesses of the
] corporate enterprise.
]
] In the past three or four years, we've started to see the impact
] of Torvalds' philosophies on day-to-day business. His concern for
] the bottom-line functionality of any project he becomes involved
] with is commonplace within the GPL community, where programmers
] would rather redo something poorly implemented--potentially
] causing other functionality to be lost--than continue with
] something less than optimum.
]
] Unencumbered by a long product history--and by customers
] demanding that future development not affect their in-house
] applications--Linux has developed into a rich operating system
] with a feature list that reads like the best of the best of
] computer-science research and development. But with widespread
] deployment come the shackles of an installed customer base, and
] Linux is no exception to that rule. How Torvalds and the host of
] Linux developers deal with the success of their creation will be
] interesting to watch in the coming years.
]
] While his past work rivals that of the most prominent systems
] houses, Torvalds' latest project takes aim at another technology
] with a leader no less powerful: Torvalds is a programmer at
] Transmeta Corp., whose innovative Crusoe processors are poised to
] take on the coveted chip market, which is so completely dominated
] by Intel. Could Transmeta be the next giant slayer? If the
] company has managed to corral a team with the perspective and
] drive of Torvalds, Intel had better be worried.
--
Gerald Oskoboiny <
[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/