The world has become tightly connected since the internet.
The web itself has replaced the practice of reading newspaper.
Most of us now communicate through e-mails instead of paper
and pen. We now watch networks or movies online, it has even
become a wide business venture, so much so we can now make
purchase and pay our bills through the internet. The web has
also transformed friendships through various social media.
It also provides us the possibility to reconnect with people from
our childhood and it can be a life changing event.
Having a great idea is one thing. Turning that idea into a
booming company through innovation and execution is what
that matters most. Here, these are the people who have the
biggest impact on the direction of the web: past, present, and future.
They changed the internet and revolutionized the way we
lead our lives today. Just imagine the world without internet.
You can't because it has become our daily life.
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1. Vint Cerf And Bob Kahn - Father of the Internet.
The Father of Internet, Vint Cerf, together with Bob Kahn,
created the TCP/IP suite of communication protocols,
a language used by computers to talk to each other in a
network. Vint Cerf once said that the internet is just a mirror of
the population and spam is a side effect of a free service.
2. Tim Berners-Lee - Inventor of WWW
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He wrote
the first web client and server and designed a way to create
links, or hypertext, amid different pieces of online information.
He now maintains standards for the web and continues to refine its
design as a director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
3. Ray Tomlinson - Father of Email
Programmer Ray Tomlinson, the Father of Email, made it possible to
exchange messages between machines in diverse locations; between
universities, across continents, and oceans. He came up with
the "@" symbol format for e-mail addresses. Today, more than
a billion people around the world type @ sign every day.
4. Michael Hart - The birth of eBooks
Michael Hart started the birth of eBooks and breaks down the bars of
ignorance and illiteracy. He created the Project Gutenberg and
was considered world's first electronic library that changed the way
we read. The collection includes public domain works and
copyrighted works with express permission.
5. Gary Thuerk - The first Email spam
Spamming is an old marketing technique. Gary Thuerk, sent
his first mass e-mailing to customers over the Arpanet for
Digital's new T-series of VAX systems. What he didn't realize at
the time was that he had sent the worlds' first spam.
6. Scott Fahlman - The first emoticon
Scott Fahlman is credited with originating the first ASCII-based
smiley emoticon, which he thought would help to distinguish
between posts that should be taken humorously and those of a
more serious nature. Now, everybody uses them in messenger
programs, chat rooms, and e-mail.
7. Marc Andreessen - Netscape Navigator
Marc Andreessen revolutionized Internet navigation. He came up
with first widely used Web browser called Mosaic which was later
commercialised as the Netscape Navigator. Marc Andreessen is
also co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several
startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter.
8. Jarkko Oikarinen - Internet Relay Chat, IRC
Jarkko Oikarinen developed the first real-time online chat tool in
Finland known as Internet Relay Chat. IRC's fame took off in 1991.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait and radio and TV signals were shut down,
thanks to IRC, though, up-to-date information was able to distribute.
9. Robert Tappan Morris - First Worm Virus
The concept of a worm virus is unique compared to the conventional hacking.
Instead of getting into a network themselves, they send a small program
they have coded to do the job. From this concept, Robert Tappan Morris
created the Morris Worm. It's one of the very first worm viruses to be
sent out over the internet that inadvertently caused many thousands
of dollars worth of damage and "loss of productivity"
when it was released in the late 80s.
10. David Bohnett - Geocities
David Bohnett founded GeoCities in 1994, together with John Rezner.
It grew to become the largest community on the Internet.
He pioneered and championed the concept of providing free
home pages to everyone on the web. The company shut down
the service on October 27, 2009.
11. Ward Cunningham - The first Wiki.
American programmer, Ward Cunningham, developed the first wiki as a
way to let people collaborate, create and edit online pages together.
Cunningham named the wiki after the Hawaiian word for "quick."
12. Sabeer Bhatia - Hotmail.
Sabeer Bhatia founded Hotmail in which the uppercase letters spelling out HTM
- the language used to write the base of a webpage. He got in the news when
he sold the free e-mailing service, Hotmail to Microsoft, for $400 million. He was
awarded the "Entrepreneur of the Year" by Draper Fisher Jurvertson in 1998
and was noted by TIME as one of the "People to Watch" in international
business in 2002. His most exciting acquisition of 2009 was Jaxtyr which he
believes is set to overtake Skype in terms of free global calling.
13. Matt Drudge - The Drudge Report.
Matt Drudge started the news aggregation website The Drudge
Report. It gained popularity when he was the first outlet to break
the news that later became the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
14. Larry Page and Sergey Brin - Google (wikipedia)
Larry Page and Sergey Brin changed the way we search and use the Internet.
They worked as a seamless team at the top of the search giant. Their company
grew rapidly every year since it began. Page and Brin started with their own funds,
but, the site quickly outgrew their own existing resources. They later obtained
private investments through Stanford. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their
company Google, continue to favor engineering over business.
15. Bill Gates - Microsoft
Bill Gates founded the software company called "Micro-Soft,"
a combination of "microcomputer software." Later on, Bill Gates
developed a new GUI (Graphical User Interface) for a disk operating
system. He called this new style Windows. He has all but accomplished
his famous mission statement, to put "a computer on every desk and
in every home," at least, in developed countries.
16. Steve Jobs - Apple
Steve Jobs innovative idea of a personal computer led him into revolutionizing
the computer hardware and software industry. The Apple founder changed
the way we work, play and communicate. He made simple and uncluttered
web design stylish. The story of Apple and Steve Jobs is about determination,
creative genius, pursuit of innovation with passion and purpose.
18. Brad Fitzpatrick - LiveJournal
Brad Fitzpatrick created LiveJournal, one of the earliest blogging platforms.
He is seen on the Internet under the nickname bradfitz. He is also the author
of a variety of free software projects such as memcached, used on LiveJournal,
Facebook and YouTube. LiveJournal continues today as an online community
where people can share updates on their lives via diaries and blogs.Members
connect by creating a "friends list" that links to their pals' recent entries.
19. Shawn Fanning - Napster
Shawn Fanning developed Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program
designed to let music fans find and trade music. Users put whatever files they
were willing to share with others into special directories on their hard drives.
The service had more than 25 million users at its peak in 2001, and was shut down
after a series of high-profile lawsuits, not before helping to spark the
digital music revolution now dominated by Apple.
Napster has since been rebranded and acquired by Roxio.
20. Peter Thiel - Paypal.
Peter Thiel is one of many Web luminaries associated with PayPal.
PayPal had enabled people to transfer money to each other instantly.
PayPal began giving a small group of developers access to its code, allowing them
to work with its super-sophisticated transaction framework. Peter Thiel cofounded
PayPal at age 31 and sold it to eBay four years later for $1.5 billion.
