[clug] Who's famous in the 80's and 2000's?

[Michael Cohen]

Of course my absolute favorite computer related personality Grace
Hopper - perhaps not that technical but important in her time (also
invented the pythonic philosophy that its better to say sorry than to
ask for permission).

But seriously its difficult to rate one person over another - you need
some kind of fair scaling system. In academia authors are ranked by an
"impact factor" which is the number of times their articles were cited
by other articles - the logic is that if their contribution was really
important to the field, many people would acknowledge it by citing
their papers.

Maybe a quick search of text book topics or software sales. Certainly
Microsoft will be most influential from a commercial perspective (its
influential because it impacts many peoples lives and use of computers
- the impact may not necessarily be a pleasant one). Similarly
Stallman's FSF's GPL is one of the most cited software licenses.

Also what exactly are you focusing on? technical contribution or
commercial management? Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are certainly
influential from a business perspective but made very little technical
contribution (in terms of code they actually developed themselves
rather than got their developers to write). Thats where it gets really
hairy.

Michael.


On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 4:28 PM, steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> wrote:
> Today I was trying to think of the 'leading lights' in computing for
> each of the decades its been around.
>
> I struck a blank for the 1980's and post 2000.
>
> Anyone got their favourites or suggestions?
>
> This was my quick hack list :-)
> Any other suggestions happily accepted, but if you mention your criteria
> or the persons' field, that'd be nice.
>
> 1930 - 1950 Turing, von Neuman, ...
> 1950 - 1960 Bob Glass, Jerry Weinberg, ...
> 1960 - 1970 Ritchie & Thompson, Codd & Date
> 1970 - 1980 BSD guys, Bill Joy, Gates, Steve Jobs
> 1980 - 1990 ???
> 1990 - 2000 Linus & Tridge
> 2000 - 2010 ???
>
> cheers
> steve
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