Seven Tech visionaries: The Web, wireless and code-breaking

With the recent death of Steve Jobs, we turn our thoughts to some of the visionaries who have revolutionised the world of technology. There’s no doubt that, of course, Jobs and Bill Gates are on the list, but who else deserves recognition for their contributions? You might find some of our choices surprising! Sir Tim Berners-Lee Getting round the internet in the late 80s was, it has to be said, a bit of a chore. To really use the network, you needed to know arcane Unix commands. The person who made our lives easier by creating the Web was Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Much of what is possible with the web was possible, but the technical hurdle was high. [caption id=“attachment_56714” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Noah Seelam/AFP”]  [/caption] Sir Tim was working at CERN in Geneva, which happened to be the biggest internet node at the time, and he wanted to create a system to help the sprawling research organisation share information. He said, “The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.” He put together the idea of hypertext, (the links that we’re all familiar with now), with some other existing protocols and created the Word Wide Web. Sir Tim also saw the Web not only as a place to read and view content but also create it.  When it comes to world-changing ideas, Sir Tim’s is right up there. Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper She’s one of the most important computer scientists that you’ve probably never heard of, but Grace Hopper was a pioneer of programming. She came up with some of the core concepts that computer programmers now take for granted. A profile on the Yale Computer Science website says of Hopper:

She believed that “we’ve always done it that way” was not necessarily a good reason to continue to do so.'"

She developed the first compiler, which converts human-readable programming languages into computer-readable machine code. Hopper also came up with the idea that you should be able to programme in the same language across different types of computers. When a committee was formed to create just such a language, COBOL, Hopper was their technical consultant. She continued to develop COBOL, developing a validator and compiler for it, and she was also a pioneering advocate for programming standards. As recognition of her achievements, she received the first ever “Computer Science Man-of-the-Year Award” from the Data Processing Management Association in 1969. Just remember, the first computer science man-of-the-year was in fact a woman! Alan Turing Born in 1912, Alan Turing is widely considered to be the father of both computer science and artificial intelligence. The famous Turing Machine was a thought experiment which allowed him to examine in depth the concepts of ‘algorithms’ and ‘computation’, without which modern computing would not be possible. During the Second World War, Turing worked on code breaking at Bletchley Park, devising several methods for breaking German ciphers. He worked with Gordon Welcheman to create the Bombe, an electromechanical machine that was capable of breaking messages encrypted by the German Enigma machine. Breaking these messages helped turn the tide of the war, allowing Britain and her allies protect supply convoys from the US. Without the Bombe breaking the German codes, World War II might have ended very differently. Hedy Lamarr If you’ve ever used wifi or a cordless telephone, you have Hedy Lamarr to thank for the fact that it works. An actress who fled her native Austria, and a controlling Nazi-collaborator husband, in 1937, Lamarr became a Hollywood starlet. She once said: “Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was far more than a pretty face. A talented mathematician, Lamarr worked with her neighbour and avant garde composer George Antheil on a method for the automated control of musical instruments, including the player piano. This they developed into a “secret communications system” based on frequency hopping, gaining a patent for the invention in 1942. Her invention later became the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as that used in wifi networks and some cordless and wireless telephones. Steve Jobs Co-founder of Apple Inc with Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs was one of the first people to see the possibilities of a mouse and a graphical user interface developed by Xerox PARC. The Macintosh computer was the result. The Mac became a firm favourite with designers partly because of its innovative operating system, and partly because of the emphasis on typography and design. After being forced out of Apple in 1985, Jobs founded another computing company, NeXT and then Pixar Animation Studios. He returned to Apple in 1996 when the ailing company he founded acquired NeXT and wound up back in the CEO seat. Only four years ago, Apple produced the iPhone, a revolutionary smartphone with an innovative touch-based interface. The iPad used the same concept, and has been widely seen as creating the tablet market that PC manufacturers had been trying, unsuccessfully, to jump-start for years. Bill Gates Probably the best-known technology entrepreneur in the world, Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in the mid-70s. Like Steve Jobs, he never finished his universities studies. Microsoft began with Gates and Allen developing a BASIC interpreter for the then new Altair 8800 microcomputer. A deal with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the maker of the Altair 8800, saw the software distributed as Altair BASIC. Microsoft’s big break came when IBM approached them to write a BASIC interpreter for their new computer, the IBM PC. In a canny move, Gates retained copyright on the software, allowing them to licence it to any hardware vendor making IBM clones. It made Microsoft the overwhelmingly dominant operating system, and the company’s Windows runs more than 85% of personal computers in the world. Microsoft released the first version of Windows in 1985 and Gates transitioned to a more managerial role. These days he focuses more on philanthropic work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Sergey Brin & Larry Page Russian-born Sergey Brin and American Larry Page met at Stanford, where both were working towards their PhDs. Page was considering studying the mathematical properties of the web, using the idea that links and backlinks were a form of citation, as used in scientific publishing, which could provide information about the page. Brin had been working on a data mining program. Together, they worked on the PageRank algorithm that underpinned the Google search engine. Whether you’re a fan of Google or feel that their size has started to damage their ability not to be evil, as per their motto, there’s no doubting that Brin and Page have revolutionised the way that we find information on the web. Like any list, though, ours is quite arbitrary. There are many revolutionary thinkers in tech that we haven’t mentioned, especially those outside of the, dare I say it, American mainstream. So who do you think should be added to our list? Who are the tech revolutionaries in India?