Who Are The All-Time Heroes of i-Technology?

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If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing...Twice?

suedunnell wrote: Hi Again - I should add my name to comment #1 above and ask that if anyone has questions, they can either post them here or ask me directly: Sue Dunnell PowerBuilder Product Manager 978 287 1752 sue.dunnell@sybase.com

Jul. 3, 2009 03:52 PM EDT

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Jon Gay

Brief Description: The "Father of Flash"

Further Details:

When Jonathan Gay wrote "FutureSplash Animator" in 1995 along with Robert Tatsumi, he could hardly have imagined the impact the program would have on Web design. Rechristened "Flash" by Macromedia, the program leveraged vector graphics to deliver smooth motion in a file small enough to be distributed on the early, bandwidth-challenged Web.

For a while after the Macromedia-Adobe merger, Gay still guided Adobe's Flash's development, focusing on extending Flash to support richer communications in a networked world. But he subsequently left to launch a startup with Tatsumi.

Gay is on record as saying that Flash began with a few bits of colored plastic, namely the LEGO bricks he grew up playing with as a child (back when there were no LEGO men or whales or complicated accessory packs - just rectangular blocks and a few wheels).

"Those bits of colored plastic," Gay explains, "taught me the basics of engineering design, how to choose a design problem, and the process of iterative refinement. Even better, they helped me express my early passion for building things."

He began his career in computing writing games, then moved to building graphics editors. Here is how he and Robert Tatsumi turned their ideas into reality:

"In the summer of 1995, we were at SIGGRAPH and got lots of feedback from people that we should turn SmartSketch into an animation product. We were starting to hear about the Internet and the Web, and it seemed possible that the Internet would become popular enough that people would want to send graphics and animation over it. So we began to add animation to SmartSketch.
At the time, the only way to extend a Web browser to play back animation was through Java. So we wrote a simple animation player that used Java and was horribly slow. We stubbornly kept at it though, and in the fall, Netscape came out with their plug-in API. Finally, we had a way to extend the Web browser with decent performance (this was the ancestor of Macromedia Flash Player).
As it grew close to shipping time, we changed the name of our software to FutureSplash Animator to focus more on its animation capabilities. We also were growing tired of running a company that didn't have much money to spend, and began trying to sell our technology. After an unsuccessful pitch to Adobe and turning down a bid from Fractal Design, we shipped FutureSplash Animator in the summer (May) of 1996.
Our big success came in August of 1996. Microsoft was working on MSN and wanted to create the most TV-like experience on the Internet. They became big fans of FutureSplash and adopted the technology. I'm still amazed that they made their launch of MSN dependent on a new animation technology from a six-person company!
Our other high-profile client was Disney Online. They were using FutureSplash to build animation and the user interface for the Disney Daily Blast. Disney was also working with Macromedia Shockwave.
In November of 1996, Macromedia had heard enough about us through their relationship with Disney and approached us about working together. We had been running FutureWave for four years with a total investment of $500,000. The idea of having a larger company's resources to help us get FutureSplash established seemed like a good one. So in December 1996, we sold FutureWave Software to Macromedia, and FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia Flash 1.0."

By 2001 there were 50 people building Flash instead of 3 when they started FutureWave and it has evolved from a simple Web drawing and animation package to a complete multimedia development environment. Flash has become synonymous with animation on the Internet. Flash Player is now reputedly the most widely distributed piece of software on the Internet-ahead of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Real Player.

Published Feb. 5, 2007— Reads 149,664 — Feedback 48
Copyright © 2007 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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▪ Does i-Technology Matter?

▪ Where's i-Technology Headed in 2007?

▪ Who Are the Top 100 i-Technology Heroes?

▪ Sun Co-Founder to Lead Cloud Start-Up

▪ Brad Templeton: Pioneer Whose Company Began the Dot-Com Era

About Jeremy Geelan
Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the all-new International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series, of the International Virtualization Conference & Expo series, of AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series, and of the long-running SOAWorld Conference & Expo series. He's founder of Cloud Computing Journal, Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other leading SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.

Reader Feedback: Page 1 of 4

#48	Justin Hart commented on 18 Feb 2007 Vint Cerf's name is Vinton Cerf, not Vincent Cerf.
#47	pvdg commented on 9 Feb 2007 I'd begin with: N°1 : Charles Babbage (designed the first computer) N°2 : Konrad Zuse (built the first working computer)
#46	pvdg commented on 9 Feb 2007 What about Seymour Cray? Bill Gates was a "hero of i-Technology" and I didn't know? What technology did he invented?
#45	kjell krona commented on 6 Feb 2007 In your list of IT heroes, I am missing some of the important people involved in the Graphical User Interface, as first instantiated in Macintosh UI (and later was copied by Microsoft): Douglas Engelbart, who at SRI in the 60's invented, among other things, the idea of a mouse, overlapping windows, hypertext, outlining, video collaboration, and many other things that later inspired a lot of people to improve interaction with computers; Larry Tesler, who at Xerox Parc (working with Alan Kay on Smalltalk) invented among other things the modeless editor and, I believe, cut/copy/paste, and later moved to Apple and worked on the Lisa and Macintosh; Bill Atkinson, who wrote the "Quickdraw" graphics layer in Macintosh, proving that advanced bitmapped graphics was possible on a low-end processor; the orignal MacPaint, basically the predecessor to Photoshop, without which the graphical world today would be lost; and Apple HyperCard, which with its successors showed what "user programming" could mean, and accustomed people to the idea of "linking" pieces of information with clickable buttons, which subsequently exploded in the World Wide Web. - kjell
#44	Lars Arvestad commented on 6 Feb 2007 \|\| m6 commented on the 6 Feb 2007: \|\| Can someone explain to me why Jamie Z is \|\| a hero? The word "hero" should of course be used sparingly, and probably not in adjunction to "tech", but JWZ holds his place among the Big Hackers, IMHO. Some of his accomplishments, in no particular order: * XEmacs. He was one of (the?) main people making a user-friendly version of GNU Emacs. * XKeyCaps. This little application has really helped me getting a sane keyboard layout under X a few times. * Mosaic. I believe he was the main hacker on the Unix version of the first "real" browser. And one of the first employees at Netscape.
#43	fm6 commented on 6 Feb 2007 Can someone explain to me why Jamie Z is a hero? I only know him from reading his comments in the Netscape keyboard resource file when I was trying to get the browser to behave under Linux. These left me with a permanent dislike for the dude: instead of explaining the format of the file, he put in lengthy sarcastic (and misinformed) rants about the "mistakes" made by various Unix vendors in designing their keyboards.
#42	Ron Blessing commented on 5 Feb 2007 Every time I see one of the computer Hall of Fame articles in a magazine it seems to me there is always one glaring omission. I know there are many that have contributed but I feel like there are two people that deserve to be mentioned and always seem to be missed. Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, in my opinion, started what eventually led to our current Internet when they launched the first dialup Bulletin Board system called CBBS. In addition, Ward developed the first widespread file transfer protocol, XMODEM, which allowed files to be transferred error free between bulletin boards around the world. ...Ron Blessing
#41	Grady Booch commented on 5 Feb 2007 I'm quite flatted that you've numbered me among your top twenty all-time technology heroes. As for the Renaissance jazz bit, I play the Celtic harp, on which I perform a number of medieval and renaissance pieces. I once had an instructor who taught me some great improvisational skills, and thus the phrase, Renaissance jazz, for I like to do riffs off of really old themes. I think I would have been an itinerant musician or a priest if I were not doing software :-) Grady
#40	InOtherNews commented on 5 Feb 2007 Yakov Fain has devised his own version over here: http://yakovfain.javadevelopersjournal.com/who_are_the_heroes_of_itechno... in case anyone wants to take a look.
#39	More Nominees commented on 5 Feb 2007 There's a great supplemetary list by Mark Hinkle here: http://www.encoreopus.com/content/view/334/35/. Among the new names he adds are Jarkko Oikarinen, Bram Cohen, and Jerry Yang & David Filo, the founders of Yahoo!
#38	i-net user commented on 5 Feb 2007 Congratulaions, you have just insured that I will never willing used AJAX in any of my projects. Your pop-over add that blocks the article is annoying at best.
#37	Barry Threw commented on 5 Feb 2007 Vannevar Bush Norbert Weiner John Von Neumann Claude Shannon John Pierce
#36	kelley meck commented on 4 Feb 2007 You have to include Claude Shannon, and you might want to consider Oliver Selfridge. Shannon was the mathematician who figured information theory, and Selfridge started everything behind neural networks--which have never caught up with modal programming, but whose promise is unbounded.
#35	Lee Butler commented on 4 Feb 2007 You should also remember Michael J. Muuss. He developed "ping" and was instrumental in some of the developments of TCP/IP and Unix in the early days. He worked at the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory.
#34	Carsten Schlemm commented on 4 Feb 2007 Jeremy, I am a bit disappointed you forgot Konrad Zuse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuse). His problem is that he doesn't have an Anglosaxon name.... Judge for yourself. Cheers, Carsten