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Drool, Britannia? Is the UK Failing the Cloud?

By Roger Strukhoff

Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud. We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.

Jan. 8, 2012 11:38 AM EST

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Searching for the Twenty Top Software People in the World

By: Jeremy Geelan

Dec. 21, 2004 12:00 AM

Sung and Unsung i-Technology Heroes

Who's Missing from SYS-CON's i-Technology Top Twenty?"

Our search for the Twenty Top Software People in the World is nearing completion. In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final "cut" to you, so here are the top 40 nominations in alphabetical order.

Our aim this time round is to whittle this 40 down to our final twenty, not (yet) to arrange those twenty in any order of preference. All you need to do to vote is to go to the Further Details page of any nominee you'd like to see end up in the top half of the poll when we close voting on Christmas Eve, December 24, and cast your vote or votes. To access the Further Details of each nominee just click on their name. Happy voting!

In alphabetical order the nominees are:

Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web

Joshua Bloch: Formerly at Sun, where he helped architect Java's core platform; now at Google

Grady Booch: One of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language

Adam Bosworth: Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; then BEA, now Google

Don Box: Coauthor of SOAP

Stewart Brand: Cofounder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board

Tim Bray: One of the prime movers of XML, now with Sun

Dan Bricklin: Cocreator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet

Larry Brilliant: Cofounder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board

Sergey Brin: Son-of-college-math-professor turned cofounder of Google, Inc.

Dave Cutler: The brains behind VMS; hired away by Microsoft for Windows NT

Don Ferguson: Inventor of the J2EE application server at IBM

Roy T. Fielding: Primary architect of HTTP 1.1 and a founder of the Apache Web server

Bob Frankston: Cocreator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet

Jon Gay: The "Father of Flash"

James Gosling: "Father of Java" (though not its sole parent)

Anders Hejlsberg: Genius behind the Turbo Pascal compiler, subsequently "Father of C#"

Daniel W. Hillis: VP of R&D at the Walt Disney Company; cofounder, Thinking Machines

Miguel de Icaza: Now with Novell, cofounder of Ximian

Martin Fowler: Famous for work on refactoring, XP, and UML

Bill Joy: Cofounder and former chief scientist of Sun; main author of Berkeley Unix

Mitch Kapor: Designer of Lotus 1-2-3, founder of Lotus Development Corporation

Brian Kernighan: One of the creators of the AWK and AMPL languages

Mitchell Kertzman: Former programmer, founder, and CEO of Powersoft (later Sybase)

Klaus Knopper: Prime mover of Knoppix, a Linux distro that runs directly from a CD

Craig McClanahan: Of Tomcat, Struts, and JSF fame

Nathan Myhrvold: Theoretical and mathematical physicist, former CTO at Microsoft

Tim O'Reilly: Publisher, open source advocate; believer that great technology needs great books

Jean Paoli: One of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the W3C; now with Microsoft

John Patrick: Former VP of Internet technology at IBM, now "e-tired"

Rob Pike: An early developer of Unix and windowing system (GUI) technology

Dennis Ritchie: Creator of C and coinventor of Unix

Richard Stallman: Free software movement's leading figure; founder of the GNU Project

Bjarne Stroustrup: The designer and original implementor of C++

Andy Tanenbaum: Professor of computer science, author of Minix

Ken Thompson: Coinventor of Unix

Linus Torvalds: "Benevolent dictator" of the Linux kernel

Alan Turing: Mathematician; author of the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"

Guido van Rossum: Author of the Python programming language

Ann Winblad: Former programmer, cofounder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners

Do vote, and we'll bring you the full results - including a selection of such additional comments on the nominations as you may care to leave via our feedback system - in the January 2005 issue of JDJ.

Sung and Unsung i-Technology Heroes

Who's Missing from SYS-CON's i-Technology Top Twenty?"

Published Dec. 21, 2004— Reads 276,787 — Feedback 151
Copyright © 2004 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

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About Jeremy Geelan
Jeremy Geelan is President & COO of Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of Cloud Expo's "Power Panels" on SYS-CON.TV.

Reader Feedback: Page 1 of 11

#151	Dick Morley commented on 22 Feb 2005 re greatest software heros. The list concentrates on the desktop toys of the academics. where is CNC, Radar, embedded, Word processing etc Sigh
#150	jim scandale commented on 18 Jan 2005 For a list labeled "top 20 Software People" there are an awful lot of what I would call purely hardware people. No doubt that they contributed greatly but "software people" they're not. And Fred Brooks seems to have fallen off of the list. And Tony Hoare and Kernighan and Ritchie and Corbato etc. etc.
#149	Anonymous Fielding Fan commented on 7 Jan 2005 Roy Fielding was key in giving us the internet we know today. His contributions to HTTP and URI, REST, etc., open source Apache and in helping establish Apache.org as we know it, he has helped countless open source projects from both technical and legal means. He was key in creating the technology environment that not only allowed the WEB to grow, but also open source. Roy's work in Web Arch. in particular REST is proving to help sanity check current WebService efforts and fix huge flaws in SOAP: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/talks/webarch_9805/ http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/03/17/udell.html http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/12/01/restful-web.html
#148	conscientious objector commented on 15 Dec 2004 Donald Knuth Edsger Dykstra Nicklaus Wirth Leon Post Noam Chomsky on and on...
#147	conscientious objector commented on 15 Dec 2004 This reminds me of the VH1 top muscian lists. So many credible names left off the list and the inclusion of more recent popular names that this effort has no credibility at all.
#146	KarenAnne commented on 14 Dec 2004 Butler Lampson, and any number of other people from PARC. Ada, Lady Lovelace. You seem to think history started 20 years ago.
#145	Chiew Lee commented on 13 Dec 2004 how abt Richard Stevens ? he deserved to be on the list. everything is based on TCP/IP. cheers. chiew
#144	John Smith commented on 13 Dec 2004 <>Where is Warnock?
#143	Jenda commented on 13 Dec 2004 I wish these people at least fixed the bugs in their JavaScript. I get an error each time I submit some feedback. Guess they don't expect anyone to browse with JavaScript error popups turned on.
#142	Jenda commented on 13 Dec 2004 Mr A said: Not only did they put Turing side by side with, say, "Ann Winblad: Former programmer, cofounder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners" (???) -- he's not even getting the most votes! That's obvious. Most CS professionals refuse to vote for anyone in this poll.
#141	Jenda commented on 13 Dec 2004 anon babbled: Knuth, like a lot of these "top twenty", are just Ivory Tower academics with no real applications in industry. Yep, sure. Noone ever used Tex. Noone used the algorithms from that when writing their own DTP software. And most importantly noone ever learned programming from his "programming bible". You may be great in Quake, but you aparently know very little about programming and CS history. Back to the school boy!
#140	harshr commented on 13 Dec 2004 >>>I would challenge Tim Berners-Lee's positin >>>on this list since it is HTML that has also >>>brought us the Browser Wars, and the subsequent >>>HTML writer's hell of trying to get a page to >>>display properly on all the popular browsers, >>>and all versions thereof. It would be harsh to exclude Berners-lee just because HTML ain't perfect, IMO - without it we'd not be in a positin to be voting on these guys anyhow!
#139	HTMHell commented on 13 Dec 2004 I would challenge Tim Berners-Lee's positin on this list since it is HTML that has also brought us the Browser Wars, and the subsequent HTML writer's hell of trying to get a page to display properly on all the popular browsers, and all versions thereof. The name HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language, implies a rich set of features that don't exist in reality
#138	suggestion commented on 13 Dec 2004 The list would be enhanced by the addition of Chuck Moore, inventor of the ForthLanguage (http://www.forth.com)
#137	kai jones commented on 13 Dec 2004 In regard to your top twenty programmers, I am recommending Kjell Lindman of Lindman IT AB, Sweden. Kjell, or Kelly as he's known to his English speaking friends, is the architect behind DXTuners.com - a live, real time streaming radio site where you can control one of more than 50 radio's anywhere in the world, from the comfort of you own home. He designed and built the software platform himself and lately has expendaded the idea from being receivers only to having recently designed a control interface for a live internet transceiver using GSM audio encoding technology to reduce audio delays from around 30 seconds...to less than 2 seconds.