Top 20 Heros Of Information Technology
Internet the place where the you can have a great appetite for the year long history, Roam the world, Stay Connected, this all happened with the efforts of the all of them.
From it’s birth in the lab of Tim Berners, to its evolution with the WWW its has got the world inside now.
NO ONE CAN REPLACE IT, NOTHING IS LIKE IT, AND IT HAS NO ALTERNATIVE
It is like a gold mine which is never ending, and with the passing time the craziest ideas in the human minds made this God gift, adorable to human beings.
To start with the list, Undoubtedly on 1st is
1.Sergey Brin and Larry Page– Google Inc.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Two PhDs from Stanford University started work in the garage of a friend’s. And they were defiantly not building steam engines!
They were, however, creating the internet’s most powerful search engine. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are arguably the world’s most successful Internet entrepreneurs and developers in history. This enabled them to earn billions, while assisting everyone from high school students to particle physicists have an easy time searching for information over the internet.
Google was first launched on Stanford’s website (google.stanford.edu) and then finally on Google.com in 1997. It is estimated that GOOGLE is worth about a staggering $25 billion dollars.
———————————————————————————————
2. Jerry Yang and David Filo Yahoo! Inc.
David Filo and Jerry Yang
Yahoo! too is the creation of two Stanford University’s Electrical Engineer graduates, called Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yang started by listing web pages on the Internet and named it “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. Then, he decided to switch it to Yahoo! and the initial URL was at akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo
In December 1994, that particular website had already received over a million hits. Realizing its potential, David Filo and Jerry Yang got serious and diversified Yahoo! as a web portal.
David Filo’s net worth is $2.9 billion dollars and Jerry Yang’s is $2.3 billion dollars.
———————————————————————————————
3. Bill gates- Microsoft! inc.
bill-gates
William Henry “Bill” Gates III, is an American business magnate, philanthropist, the world’s third richest person (as of February 8, 2008), and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.
Gates also holds the record of being the Richest Person in the world for 15 consecutive years.
———————————————————————————————
4.Steven Paul Jobs – Apple Inc.
steven-paul-jobs
Steven Paul Jobs is the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. and former CEO of Pixar Animation Studios.
In the late 1970s, Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, created one of the first commercially successful personal computers. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven GUI (Graphical User Interface)
After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets.
Jobs is currently the Walt Disney Company’s largest individual shareholder and a member of its Board of Directors. He is considered a leading figure in both the computer and industries.
———————————————————————————————
5.Jack Dorsey – Twitter
Jack_Dorsey
Jack Dorsey is an American software architect and businessperson best known as the creator of Twitter. BusinessWeek called him one of technology’s “best and brightest”. MIT’s Technology Review named him to the TR35, an outstanding innovator under the age of 35.
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
———————————————————————————————
6.Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook
mark-zuckerberg
One of the most admired and successful youngster of the 21st century is a 24 years old Harvard graduate – the world’s youngest billionaire, with an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion
He founded Facebook, the online social networking website. Zuckerberg launched The Facebook (FaceMatch) from his Harvard dorm room in 2004 and started promoting it to all Ivy League schools and some Boston institutions.
Soon, he bought over Facebook.com domain name. Facebook is now a household name with people of all ages, groups and interests, interacting with each other. Its business and pleasure at the same time!
———————————————————————————————
7. Blake Aaron Ross – Mozilla Firefox
Blake_Ross
Blake Aaron Ross (born June 12, 1985) is an American software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla web browser; in particular, he started the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt, as well as the Spread Firefox project with Asa Dotzler while working as a contractor at the Mozilla Foundation. In 2005, he was nominated for Wired magazine’s top Rave Award, Renegade of the Year, opposite Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jon Stewart. He was also a part of Rolling Stone magazine’s 2005 hot list
———————————————————————————————
8 . Orkut Buyukkokten – Orkut
Orkut Buyukkokten
Orkut Buyukkokten (February 6, 1975 in Konya, Turkey) is a Turkish software engineer who developed the social networking service Orkut.
Originally from Turkey Konya, Buyukkoktenobtained a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Information Science from Bilkent University in Ankara, and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research at Stanford focused on Web search and efficient PDA.
Orkut started working at Google in 2002 and is one of its top employees.
He developed Orkut.com, the 3rd largest social network in the world, as a 20% independent project while working at Google. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Buyukkokten and Google based Orkut.com on code for InCircle, an application intended for university alumni groups. The allegation is based on the alleged presence of nine identical bugs in Orkut.com and in InCircle.
———————————————————————————————
9 . Kevin Rose – Digg
kevin-rose1
You all know Kevin, don’t you? Perhaps one of the most respected internet idealist and TV show host, Kevin Rose has definitely placed a huge impacts among all Digg users.
He became well known as an on-air talent and later as a co-host working on TechTV’s popular show The Screen Savers (which later became Attack of the Show! ) until his departure from the network on May 2005.
He also co-founded Pownce and Revision3 besides his popular Digg.com, social-bookmarking website. He created Digg in 2004 by hiring a freelance programmer who Kevin Rose paid $12 per hour through eLance.
Kevin Rose later bought Digg.com domain name for $1,200 and then went on to buy larger server space. Digg received an ultra boost of capitals when they received $2.8 million of venture capital from Omidyar Network, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Greylock Partners.
———————————————————————————————
10 . Bram Cohen – BitTorrent
bram-cohen
Best known as the developer, co-founder and author behind peer-to-peer sharing, Bram Cohen is the inventor of BitTorrent. The other day a cousin of mine said “Bit Torrent has made life easier!” That’s how easily we can sum up the achievements of this man.
Bram Cohen is also the co-founder of CodeCon and co-author of Codeville. In 2001, he quit his job at MojoNation to work in BitTorrent. He firstly revealed his ideas in a CodeCon conference and started luring beta testers by collecting free pornography.
He then spent some time working with Valve, but quit his job later to work in BitTorrent Inc. with his brother and business partner Mike Morhaime – Blizzard Entertainment.
———————————————————————————————
11 . Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia
jimmy-walesJimmy Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia: a free and open content encyclopedia launched in 2001. He is also the co-founder of Wikia, a privately own web hosting company set up in 2004.
Jimmy Wales at first started a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia which is Nupedia. He then utilized the ideas of Nupedia with his “wiki” software to form today’s Wikipedia.
His work with Wikipedia, which has become the world’s largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world’s most influential people.
———————————————————————————————
12 . Chad Hurley and Steve Chen – YouTube
chad-hurley-and-steve-chen
Chad Hurley (aged 28) and Steve Chen (aged 27) became the founders of the popular San Bruno, California-based video sharing website YouTube, one of the biggest providers of videos on the Internet.
Chad Hurley used to work for eBay’s PayPal in the designing department where he designed their logo. Together with PayPal colleagues, Jared Karim and Steve Chen, Chad founded YouTube in 2005.
Google later acquired YouTube at $1.65 billion dollars.
———————————————————————————————
13 . Jeff Preston Bezos – Amazon
bezos
Jeff Bezos is the founder, chairman of board, president and the chief executive officer of Amazon.com, a major e-commerce company that sells goods through the Internet. His net worth is currently at $8.2 billion dollars.
He was named Time magazine Person of the Year in 1999.
———————————————————————————————
14 . Pierre Omidyar – eBay
pierre-omidyar1
Pierre Omidyar is the founder of eBay, an online auctioning marketplace that connects buyers and sellers. With a net worth of about $7.7 billion dollars, Omidyar and his wife Pam, are one of those entrepreneurs that go beyond doing profits, which is by contributing to non-profits organizations and aiding start-ups.
He wrote the source code of eBay when he was 28 years old in 1995. Initially, he decided to name his auction site after his consulting firm, Echo Bay but unfortunately, echobay.com was already taken. To save up his Internet service provider cost, he registered eBay.com.
———————————————————————————————
15 . Jack Ma – Alibaba
jack-ma
A similar site like ebay, was founded by Jack Ma, in 1999. It is basically a China-based business marketplace site that serves international businesses.
Alibaba Group then founded TaoBao.com, which is an online auction website that is pretty much similar to eBay and instead of paying through PayPal, TaoBao’s currency is AliPay. Yahoo Inc. then acquires 40% stocks worth over $1 billion dollars.
———————————————————————————————
16 . Matt Mullenweg – WordPress
matt-mullenweg
If it weren’t for Matt Mullenweg creating WordPress, I would not have been here writing at this blog and you all wouldn’t have been reading this article.
At the age of 19, he invented the core of WordPress, and later on when he turned 24, quit his job at CNET to fully focus on developing WordPress – a blogging platform.
He is also the founder of Automattic, the business behind WordPress as well as famous spam fighter, Akismet.
———————————————————————————————
17 . Sir Tim Berners-Lee – World Wide Web
sir-tim-berners-leeSir Tim Berners-Lee; the father of World Wide Web. On 25 December 1990 he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student staff at CERN.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is also the founder of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology which comprises of companies that are willing to create standards and improvements of the Web.
From my point of view, if it wasn’t for him, none of the above mentioned personalities existed.
———————————————————————————————
18 . Linus Torvalds – Linux
linus-torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project’s coordinator.
Initially Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed “Freax” – a combination of “free”, “freak”, and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system, but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server where the kernel was first hosted for downloading, named Torvalds’ directory linux.
Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.
———————————————————————————————
19 . Thomas Anderson – MySpace
thomas-anderson
Thomas “Tom” Anderson is the President of the social networking website, MySpace. He is one of the people identified as a founder of the site, along with CEO Chris DeWolfe.
Since newly created MySpace accounts include Tom as a default “friend,” he has become known as the face of MySpace. As of November 20, 2008, Tom has over 250 million “friends”, a number which is constantly increasing due to new MySpace accounts being created.
In 2003, working for eUniverse under the preview of Brad Greenspan he and a few other eUniverse employs set up the first pages of MySpace and the site grew from there. It is currently the most popular social networking website in the United States, and is the most popular website for teenagers as well.
Interesting Fact: According to several sources, in 1985 then 14-year-old San Pasqual High School (Escondido, California) student Tom Anderson was a computer hacker operating under the alias “Lord Flathead“.
He was known for leading a team that broke into Chase Manhattan Bank computers, altered records and left a message saying that unless he was given free use of the system he would destroy records. He was never charged.
———————————————————————————————
20 . Jon Postel – Internet Pioneer
He was their from the beginning from the creation of TCP/IP, SMTP, DNS and all the early protocols. He was the editor of the Request For Comment(RFC) document series, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death.
———————————————————————————————
This list is not over, INTERNET is the Building that is due to the great efforts of many people who have raised him from the child.
