My Science School

         American computer programmer Ward Cunningham is most famous for his idea of Wiki. This wizard is an expert in both design patterns and programming and started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994. It was installed on the website of his Cunningham & Cunningham Inc, on March 25th, 1995. The company is renowned for object-oriented programming.

           Cunningham received his masters’ degree from the Purdue University. During his career, Cunningham has held top posts in various technology firms, including the Microsoft Corporation and About Us, where he was the Chief Technology Officer.

           In 1993, Cunningham co-founded the Hillside Group, an educational non-profit organization to help software developers.

           He has also authored a book on wikis titled ‘The Wiki Way’, and was the keynote speaker at the first three editions of the WikiSym conference series on wiki research and practice too. Cunningham is also credited to have made significant contribution to software design patterns.

 

          American technology entrepreneur and philanthropist David Bohnett carved a special place in the history of information technology with the Initiative of ‘GeoCities’.

           The site, highly successful since it was introduced in 1994, is known to be the first social networking arena in the world. A forerunner of Facebook and MySpace, GeoCities provided its users a wide variety of innovative activities, including creation of free web pages, connecting with friends, expressing interests, and engaging in e-commerce.

           In 1999, when GeoCities became the third most visited website on the World Wide Web, it was acquired by Yahoo! At present, its service is available in Japan only.

           A year before the take-over, David Bohnett founded the Baroda Ventures, a venture capital firm based at Los Angeles, that makes investments in tech-related initiatives. 

With the advancement of technology, users have been presented with different kinds of online chat programs. They help communicate with any person sitting in any part of world, breaking barriers of time and space.

Such a possibility would not have become real if not for the Finnish computer scientist Jarkko Oikarinen. He was the inventor of the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the first internet chat program in the world.

It was in 1988 that Oikarinen developed the Internet Relay Chat, while working at the University of Oulu. He earned the nickname ‘WiZ’ with this invention.

Developed over four years, IRC is an application facilitating communication in the form of text. It is currently the most widely used chat systems. Although designed for group communication, IRC also allows one to one chats as well as data transfer.

Oikarinen has held top posts in many firms, including Nokia, where he served as the general manager. Presently, he works for the Google Hangouts project in Sweden.

 

       Marc Lowell Andreessen was born on July 9th, 1971 in Iowa to Patricia and Lowell Andreessen.

        During his high school days, Andreessen was recognized as a creative intellect. While pursuing his undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign, Andreessen worked at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University from where he designed the web browser Mosaic, along with his colleague Eric Bana. It was the first widely used web browser. Owing to objection from the University, Mosaic was later renamed as Netscape Navigator and the company was called Netscape Communications.

           Andreessen was only 24 years old when Netscape went public. It is believed that by then, his company was worth 56 million US dollars.

           Since then, Andreessen has launched many internet-related initiatives including Loud-cloud Inc., and Ning, and has also held various posts in firms across the world.

           During 2005-09, Andreessen invested millions in various start ups, including Twitter. He and his partner Ben Horowitz thus earned the name ‘super angel investors’.

           For his contributions, Andreessen entered the Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012. A year later, he was one of the five Internet and Web pioneers who were awarded the first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, recognizing “outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world.”

          Marc Andreessen is an American inventor best known for developing Mosaic, the first widely used web browser. He also co-founded Netscape Communications.

          During his under graduation at the University of Illinois, Andreessen worked at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and got himself acquainted with Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of open standards for the World Wide Web. Andreessen, along with Eric Bina, then worked on creating a user friendly browser that could be worked on a wide range of computers. That was the birth of the Mosaic Web Browser, in 1993.

          He then founded the Mosaic Communications Corporation, and worked on the commercial possibilities of the Mosaic browser. However, after the University of Illinois objected to the use of the company name, it was changed to Netscape Communications, and the web browser got a new name - the Netscape Navigator.

          In October 2005, Andreessen along with entrepreneur Gina Bianchini launched Ning, a venture that provides platform for social networking sites. 

At a time when communication has evolved into different levels, no conversation is complete without smileys and emoticons. Today, one can express joy and sorrow without really using words, thanks to those cute images and their founder.

It was Scott Fahlman who is credited with the introduction of smileys. They first appeared on September 19th, 1982.

These interesting smiley faces spread from the university to other schools in no time. Years later, these characters turned into images that we now see on phones, computers, and various apps.

Fahlman, a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, is also known for programming languages like Dylan. Image processing, document classification, planning and the use of parallel machines to solve artificial intelligence problems are some of the other areas in which Fahlman has proved his expertise.

 

The history of information technology cannot be complete without the name of Michael S. Hart. He was the founder of the first e-book, as well as the Project Gutenberg (PG), the first attempt to make e-books freely available on the internet. The project was named after Johannes Gutenberg, the 15th century inventor of the printing press.

Hart’s efforts to build a digital platform began in 1971 with the digitalization of the US Declaration of Independence while at the University of Illinois.

Hart published e-books through the ARPANET, and played a key role in digitalizing literature too. In his digital library (PG) were posted classics including the Bible, and works of Homer, Shakespeare and Mark Twain? His invention thus paved the way for modern e-books.

On September 6th, 2011, Hart died of a heart attack, at the age of 64.

        Raymond Samuel Tomlinson, or Ray Tomlinson, was born on April 23rd, 1941 in New York. He pursued his studies at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the oldest technological university in the USA, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

        He was also a long time computer engineer for the Bolt, Beranek and Newman Technologies, the firm that had received the contract to create ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet.

            His invention of the email in the early 1970s had been path breaking, although coincidental. His later interviews reveal that Tomlinson, after showing his invention to a colleague has famously said- “Don't tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on”. The first email, thus, was not given enough importance, and is believed to be something like ‘QWERTYUIOP’.

            Tomlinson received several international awards for his landmark achievements.

            On March 5th, 2016, Tomlinson died of heart attack at his home in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

 

         The history of communication would not have been what it is today, if not for Ray Tomlinson. As many of you would know, he implemented the first email program in the world, on the ARPANET system.

          In 1967, he joined the Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) Technologies where he made his email breakthrough. The invention allowed people to send messages from one computer to another.

           At BBN Technologies, Tomlinson was working on a local electronic message program titled SNDMSG, which the ARPANET programmers were using on the network computers. This technology enabled sending emails between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Till then, mails could be sent only to others who used the same computer.

            The first email sent was not preserved, and is known to be something like 'QWERTYUIOP’.

            The ‘@’ sign on the Internet map is also contribution made by Tomlinson. The sign was used to separate the username from the name of their machine.

          Tim Berners-Lee was born on June 8th, 1955 in London to Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee. His parents were both computer programmers who had worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercially built computer.

          After schooling, Tim Berners-Lee pursued studies at the Queen’s College in Oxford, where he received a degree in physics.

          Prior to his employment at CERN, Lee worked as an engineer at Plessey, a telecommunication company. At CERN, he was an independent contractor who later proposed a project that facilitated sharing of information among researchers. This later led to the founding of the World Wide Web.

          A genius with high humanitarian values, Lee’s contribution to the world is immense. His World Wide Web Foundation seeks to ensure that the Web serves humanity.

 

          British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web has indeed been a landmark in world history. He designed a system which helped users across the world to view web pages through the Internet.

            It was while working at CERN, the European organization for Nuclear Research, that Lee first described the concept of a global system based on ‘hypertext’ that allowed users anywhere in the world to share information.

             In 1989, he put forth the idea of linking hypertext with the internet to create a system for sharing information globally. The system was named World Wide Web.

               On August 6th, 1991, the world’s first website- http:// info.cern.ch - was launched, explaining the concept of the World Wide Web.

               In a move to create a platform for the technical development of the Web, Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994. 

    Bob Kahn was born on December 23rd, 1938 in New York to Lawrence Kahn and Beatrice Pauline.

      Noted as academically brilliant, Kahn earned his BEE in Electrical Engineering from the City College of New York and PhD in the same subject from Princeton University. Two years later, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor.

      By 1972, Kahn moved to DARPA, and became the Director of its Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). It was then that he put forth the idea of open-networking, and co-invented the TCP and IP protocols along with Vint Cerf for connecting diverse computer networks.

      Dr. Kahn has also served as the president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a group for the development of network technologies for the public.

      He was honoured by the US National Academy of Engineering with the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2001. The Turing Award, Marconi Prize, Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, and the Presidential Medal for Freedom are among the many awards Kahn has received till date. 

         Robert Elliot Kahn, popularly known as Bob Kahn, is yet another prominent figure who shaped the history of information technology. Along with Vint Cerf, Kahn designed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. These two together form the fundamental communication protocols of the Internet.

         For this invention, and other contributions made to the field, Kahn and Cerf shared the title of the ‘fathers of the Internet’.

          In 1972, Kahn started working at the Information Processing Techniques Office in the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

          He successfully demonstrated ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) by connecting 20 different computers at the International Communication Conference. ARPANET is one of the earliest forms of the modern day Internet.

          Kahn thus played a major role in forming the basis of open networking. It means, helping computers and networks all over the world to communicate with each other, regardless of the hardware and software used in each of them. 

          Vint Cerf is undoubtedly one of the most important personalities of the 20th century. He was born on June 23, 1943 in Connecticut, USA to Vinton Thurston Cerf, an employee in an aeronautical company, and Muriel Cerf.

           An outstanding student, he received his early education at the Van Nuys High School, where he studied along with future computer scientists Jon Postel and Steve Crocker. After his schooling, Cerf went to Stanford University where he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics. Subsequently, he joined the IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) as a systems engineer.

            Two years later, he quit this job, and pursued an MS degree at the University of California. It was then that Cerf met Robert Kahn, who later became the co-founder of Internet Protocols.

            In 1972, Cerf earned a PhD in computer science from the Stanford University, and started working as an assistant professor there.

            It was in 1976 that Cerf joined the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Along with Kahn, he founded the Internet Society in 1992.

            Cerf’s contributions to the world of IT are incomparable. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Internet is something we are all familiar with today. In fact, it is considered to be the most important development of the 20th century which brought the world to our fingertips. So, who was the master-brain behind this major innovation?

          Let’s get to know him- Vinton Gray Cerf or Vint Cerf. Regarded as a pioneer in the field of information technology, Cerf is one of the fathers of the Internet. Along with another computer scientist Robert Elliot Kahn, Cerf designed Internet protocols named Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP).

          Cerf’s career as a computer expert began with the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where he played a key role in internet development and security technology. Later, he also led the engineering of the first commercial email service named MCI Mail. He won the prestigious A.M Turing Award, or what is known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, in 2004.