Glossary of Historical IT Personalities
A Dictionary Compiled by Michael Grant
Abramson, Norman (born 1932)
Author of the concept of (data) packet radio transmission and leader of the University of Hawai team that put it into execution in the ALOHANET, with his multiple access ALOHA protocol (1970). This technology was adapted to cable transmission, in 1973, by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), to become known as Ethernet, the best known network connection and transmission technology.
Abu Ali Hasan Ibn Al-Haytham or “Alhazen” (965-1040)
Mathematician, astronomer and author of important works on astronomy, mathematics, physics and optics, he is usually seen as one of the authors of modern science.
Aiken, Howard (1900-1973)
Inventor, with his IBM-backed team, of the ASCC Mark I (Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator Mark I) at Harvard, in 1943. This was an enormous, fixed-point, electro-mechanical, programmable calculator capable of 1 multiplication a second and an addition in a third of a second, with input and output on paper tape.
Allen, Paul (born 1953)
Co-founder of the Microsoft software company with Bill Gates in 1975. He obtained the rights to QDOS (“Quick and Dirty Operating System”) for the sum of $50,000 and Microsoft offered it to IBM as the operating system for their new microcomputer, the PC. Nowadays a rich philanthropist, Allen resigned from the Microsoft board in 2000 but is still one of its strategy consultants.
Andreesen, Mark (born 1971)
One of the inventors of the first Web browser programme, Mosaic, and co-founder, with Jim Clark, of the Internet software company Netscape; he designed the Web browsers “Navigator” and “Communicator”.
Atanasoff, John Vincent (1903-1995)
Co-inventor, with Clifford Berry of the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) binary calculator, built in 1937-1942 at Iowa State University. It used a mechanical clock, but valves made up the logic circuits and the memory was an electrical charge, held in two rotating drums containing capacitors, able to store sixty fifty-bit words. It ran at 60 Hz and could carry out one addition per second. Punched cards were used for entering data. J. V. Atanasoff communicated his ideas to J. W. Mauchly, who used them in the design of the better-known ENIAC, built in 1945.
Lexical Aid
Browser : a software programme that enables Internet users to visit the Web and to go from site to site. It operates by interpreting HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), responding to a user clicking on one of the hyperlinks planted in a Webpage, and taking them to another page in the site, or to another site altogether.
Capacitor : a device consisting of at least two conductors, or semi-conductors, separated by a dielectric (an insulator) capable of storing a certain electric charge, its “capacitance”, measured in farads.
Data packet, or datagram : a small block of data circulating within a computer network and containing code for its destination address and route.
Fixed-point : a representation of numbers in which the position of the decimal point and the digits is fixed, thus limiting their manipulation.
Input : the transfer of data from outside the computer to its main memory or CPU.
Internet : the “Net”, the global network of computer networks and of individual computer users, in which all the users can communicate and use the Net’s services because they use common telecommunication protocols. The services available include: e-mail (electronic mail); the World Wide Web; IRC (Internet Relay Chat) chatrooms; FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for downloading large files and programs; Usenet newsgroups; multi-user games; peer-to-peer exchange of audio and video files, using the MP3 format; Internet telephony; real-time audio and video streaming.
Output : the transfer of data from the main memory or CPU of the computer to another device.
Protocol : agreed rules or codes for data exchange over a network.
Software : logical code, written by a programmer, that instructs a computer how to carry out a given task according to a programme of operations.
Valve : another word for vacuum tube, in electronics.
Web : contraction of the term “the World Wide Web”, or “W3”, this is the Internet service that allows its users to publish “pages” of information at a specific location on the Internet, called a “Website”. Other users, who have the right software, can visit the site and read the information published there. They can go directly to other pages held on the site, or to another site altogether, by activating, with one click of the mouse, special “dynamic” link points , called “hyperlinks”, in the page they are reading. There are now millions of sites located on servers, the big computers that deal with network traffic, all over the world and they make up the Web.
Babbage, Charles (1792-1871)
Inventor of the calculating machines, the Difference Engines No 1 (1832) and 2 (1847-9), and his Analytical Engine (1834), ancestors of today’s computers. In 1906, his son, Henry Babbage, with the help of the firm of R. W. Munro, completed the “mill”, the equivalent of today’s CPU, of his father’s Analytical Engine, showing that it would have worked.
Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)
Philosopher and inventor of the Biliteral Code (1623) which allowed its user to encode the alphabet using 5 characters.
Bardeen, John (1908-1991)
John Bardeen shared in the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956, with W. Schockley and W. Brattain, his colleagues at Bell Laboratories, for his contribution to the invention of the transistor. He shared in a second Nobel Prize in 1972, with L. N. Cooper and J. R. Schrieffer, for their work on superconductivity.
Berners-Lee, Timothy (born 1955)
Inventor of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), in 1989, and thus inventor of the World Wide Web, when working as a computer scientist at the CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. He wrote the first web client (browser) and server in 1990. A graduate of Oxford University, he now holds the 3Com Founders’ chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations whose mission is to make the Web work as efficiently and harmoniously as possible.
Berry, Clifford E. (1918-1963)
Co-inventor while still a student, with J. V. Atanasoff of the ABC binary calculator, built in 1937-1942 at Iowa State University.
Boole, George (1815-1864)
Mathematician and author of the work “An Investigation Into the Laws of Thought, on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities”, published in 1854, in which he claimed that logic is subject to mathematical laws that can be represented in algebraic terms, that all operations can be carried out by one of the three logical operators : AND, OR, NOT, and, finally, that “the respective interpretations of the symbols 0 and 1 in the system of Logic are Nothing and Universe”.
Brattain, Walter Houser (1902-1987)
John Bardeen shared in the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956, with W. Schockley and J. Bardeen, his colleagues at Bell Laboratories, for his contribution to the invention of the transistor.
Bricklin, Daniel (born 1951)
Co-inventor, with Bob Franston, in 1979, of the first spreadsheet programme, Visicalc, designed for the Apple II.
Brin, Sergey (born 1973)
Co-inventor, with Larry Page, of the world’s best-known browser, Google. The son of Russian mathematician and economist Mihail Brin, who left the Soviet Union for Palo Alto in the USA in 1979, he first met Larry Page at Stanford University in 1995. The two had gone there to study for their PhD’s in computer science, having already obtained their Master’s degrees there. Although they initially clashed, they became friends and co-inventors, devising firstly the BackRub experimental browser and then the Page Ranking system, which is Google’s particularity and which, by counting the links used to get to a web page, makes it possible to rank the sites according to their popularity, since the multiplicity of links constitutes a type of “voting” for the quality of the content of a site. Google became operational for the public in 1998 and caught on with spectacular rapidity.
Bush, Vannevar (1890-1974)
Science Advisor to President Roosevelt during World War II and author of a visionary article, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945, entitled “As We May Think”, in which he foresaw much of what is now Information Technology, including a kind of hyperlink system, in the form of a machine he called the Memex. He also led the team at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) that designed (1925) and built (1930) an analogical calculating machine on the Babbage model, known as the Differential Analyser.
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