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In garages, dorm rooms, and university laboratories, technology pioneers tinkered and dreamed. Although their ideas and inventions might have been modest at first, their imaginations knew no bounds, and their innovations dramatically changed the world.
The first-ever Windows IT Pro Hall of Fame honors those innovators. The list of people who have contributed to the development of the IT industry is a long one, and selecting the inductees for the 2004 Hall of Fame wasn't an easy task. We picked 34 people whose contributions have significantly shaped the IT industry that you, the IT pro, are part of today. Several of our inductees are National Medal of Technology recipients. (To find out who received the medal, see the Web sidebar, "National Medal of Technology Laureates," http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 44449.) Our list is broken down into four categories of innovations: programming languages, hardware, software, and networking and communications.
Programming Language Innovators
John Backus
John Backus' father wanted him to be a chemist, and although he studied chemistry for a while, Backus didn't like the lab work. After a stint in the Army, he enrolled at Columbia University to study math. In 1949, IBM hired him to work on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC). In 1953, Backus proposed an idea for a programming language for IBM's newest computer, the 704, and in 1954 published a paper called "Preliminary Report, Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating Systems, FORTRAN." Considered the first high-level computer programming language, FORTRAN remains the preeminent programming language for physicists and mathematicians.
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper was a mathematics professor at Vassar College when World War II broke out. She entered the Naval Reserve in 1943 and was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she worked on the Harvard Mark I, Mark II, and Mark III computers. At Eckert-Mauchley Computer, she developed the A-0 and B-0 compilers. In 1959, she designed COBOL (from Common Business-Oriented Language), the first standardized, universal computer language which is still in widespread use. Hopper reached the rank of Rear Admiral in 1985 and became a senior consultant at Digital Equipment Company (DEC).
John G. Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz
In the early 1960s, Dartmouth College Professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz decided to develop a simplified programming language to help nonscience students use computers. Their language, BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instructional Code), was so simple that they thought students should be able to write a program after just three lectures. But after two lectures, their students decided that the third was unnecessary. Kemeny and Kurtz never copyrighted or patented BASIC, so it remained in the public domain. Many companies, including Microsoft, have used the language to make millions of dollars.
Alan Cooper
Alan Cooper, known as the father of Visual Basic (VB), intended to create a Windows shell construction set, not a programming language. Cooper expanded his idea, which he originally called Tripod and renamed Ruby, to let developers customize and deploy a Windows-based interface to groups of users. He sold Ruby to Microsoft, which used the shell program as the visual part of a new development language and replaced the back-end language with QuickBasic. The result was VB.
Hardware Innovators
William Hewlett and Douglas Packard
A camping and fishing trip in the Colorado mountains in 1934 launched the friendship of Stanford University graduates William Hewlett and Douglas Packard. In 1938, Packard and his wife moved into a house in Palo Alto, California; Hewlett rented the cottage behind the house. In Packard's garage, the two men, who started with $538 in working capital, built their first product—a resistance-capacitance oscillator. The following year, they founded HP, which is recognized as the symbolic founder of Silicon Valley.
Andrew Groce, Gordon Moore, and Robert Noyce
Three men, all innovators in their own rights, came together in 1968 to form Intel, the company that would become the microprocessor giant and revolutionize the industry. Robert Noyce invented the IC and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Gordon Moore is widely known for Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on an IC will double every 2 years. In 1997, Andrew Grove was named TIME's Man of the Year for being the "person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and innovative potential of microchips."
Doug Engelbart
In 1968, Doug Engelbart gave what industry legend now calls the "mother of all demos" when he demonstrated interactive computing at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. The demo was the first to feature Engelbart's invention—the computer mouse device, hypermedia, and on-screen video; he received a standing ovation. A man ahead of his time, Engelbart was known for his "far-out" ideas, which often didn't see commercial application until decades later.
Al Shugart
Known as the Disk Drive King, Al Shugart got his start designing hard disks when he joined IBM the day after he graduated from college. At IBM, he helped develop a rigid disk drive, the 305 RAMAC, the first commercial disk drive with moving read/write heads. In 1973, he started Shugart Associates, a floppy disk manufacturing company. He went on to form Seagate Technologies in 1979 and built the company into the world's largest manufacturer of disk drives.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
Two California teenagers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were regular attendees at meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, where Altair computer enthusiasts shared ideas. Inspired by the group, they built the first Apple I computer in Jobs' garage. After HP turned down the machine, Jobs and Wozniak teamed up to form Apple Computer in 1976. They sold Jobs' VW bus and Wozniak's HP calculator to raise the funds to start production on the Apple I. A later Apple computer, the Macintosh, released in 1984, launched a revolution with its innovative OS.
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