Tags: tech, internet, inventors, Technology, web
10 great inventors of Internet technologies
pingdom We thought we’d pay homage to some of the people behind the Internet as we know it today.
Some of the obvious choices would include Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn for TCP/IP, Vannevar Bush for much of the conceptual thinking behind the Internet, Ted Nelson for coining the word hypertext, Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web, Marc Andreeseen for co-authoring Mosaic, and many others.
But why go for the obvious? We thought it would be fun to give some credit to a few lesser-known contributors to some technology or product that is a part of Internet history. These are guys who have made important contributions that affect us all but that may not have received the same accolades as others. So even though this didn’t exactly turn out to be a Father’s Day post, let’s take a look.
Some of the obvious choices would include Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn for TCP/IP, Vannevar Bush for much of the conceptual thinking behind the Internet, Ted Nelson for coining the word hypertext, Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web, Marc Andreeseen for co-authoring Mosaic, and many others.
But why go for the obvious? We thought it would be fun to give some credit to a few lesser-known contributors to some technology or product that is a part of Internet history. These are guys who have made important contributions that affect us all but that may not have received the same accolades as others. So even though this didn’t exactly turn out to be a Father’s Day post, let’s take a look.
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Ping: Mike Muuss
The simple little tool ping was created by Mike Muuss in 1983, apparently containing only 1,000 lines of code. It has since made its way into almost every operating system available today and is a valuable tool for network administrators around the world. - Up 1Down 0
BIND: Terry, Painter, Riggle and Zhou
BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is probably one of the most important pieces of software you didn’t know you use on a daily basis. It runs on the majority of the world’s Domain Name Servers. In the most recent survey by The Measurement Factory from October 2010, BIND ran on 34.2% of the almost 800,000 hosts that replied during the test. BIND was developed by Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou at the University of California, Berkeley in the early part of the 1980s. - Up 1Down 0
Smiley: Scott Fahlman
We should perhaps call it smiley emoticon instead but simply smiley has such a strong grip in our culture that we’ll stick to it. Scott Fahlman posted to a message board at Carnegie Mellon University on September 19, 1982, suggesting that ":-)" could be used to denote a joke and ":-(" used for something that is not a joke. Things took off from there and now we use these character sequences in most forms of text-based digital communication. - Up 1Down 1
Intel 4004: Faggin, Hoff, Mazor and Shima
It’s not directly related to the Internet the Intel 4004 has arguably had an immense impact on the development of the net. As the world’s first single chip microprocessor, we can today find direct and indirect descendents of the 4004 in computers, smartphones and tablets everywhere.
The chip was designed by Federico F*ggin, Ted Hoff and Stanley Mazor of Intel, and Masatoshi Shima of Busicom. The 4004 was introduced in 1971 and held 2,300 transistors. In comparison, Intel is talking about introducing Ivy Bridge, its next generation processors, in 2012, with 1.4 billion processors transistors. - Up 1Down 1
The @ sign: Ray Tomlinson
In 1971 Ray Tomlinson needed a character to separate the host from the user in an email address and looked down on his keyboard. He found the @ sign and called his choice "obvious." Today the at sign has spread way beyond email and can be found in social media, chat, discussion forums, and more. -
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