Nice article but I suspect a lot of people who have worked on projects that advance an area of technology, or indeed civilisation, are quite happy with their anonymity.
He also coded the OS on the Apollo Guidance Computer that saved the day and mission, during the Apollo 11 moon landing, by rebooting into saved state and resuming real-time control of the vehicle without a hiccup, when operator errors repeatedly overloaded it. (Margaret Hamilton is often given credit for this, but she programmed other stuff.)
He never got the Turing Award he so richly deserved.
Tim Berners Lee is widely accredited as the inventor of the internet, but everyone ignores Robert Caillau, who arguably created the actual internet. Tim B Lee mainly created the hypertext paradigm of sending messages, and Robert worked out how to actually do it and created the concept of a browser.
Anyway they both agreed at the time they had an equal share in creating 'the internet', but the media seems to have long forgotten about the non-english guy.
so yeah, either TBL is too famous and in your list, or is R. Caillau not famous enough and belonging in the list from this post? Not upto me to decide, but anyway he should not be forgotten
ah well indeed, slip up of mine. I meant the World Wide Web, the WWW, as we know it. The idea of using the pre-existing internet (which did in fact exist as you say it) and how to shape messages on it to create something like the www, that was their actual invention.
Take something, and use it in a creative new way, is basically what they did
I remember a doctor describing this effect in his field in the last century. He said many conditions, particularly mental health related where all written down by French and German doctors at the turn of the century, so this friend Doctor of mine learned the original names.
But as American and British publishers started growing, they started doing a very sly thing which was, when an anglo researcher made a contribution to the understanding of that condition they would double barrel it at first. So it might have started as the Friedman psychosis, then it became the Friedman-Johns psychosis, and slowly the newer editions just had the Johns psychosis.
I wonder if Caillau is but a newer victim of this seemingly very anglophilic tradition.
The browser was a bit of an obvious invention at the time. We were cramming more and more functionality into BBS software, and rendering it into a WYSIWYG+WIMP client was a natural next step. If I'd managed to get off the couch that week, I'd be the father of "the internet". (My one was a lot more like a pdf document, though.)
The things that stands out about Tim's toy hypertext system (the "World Wide Web") was that Tim was focused on the actual system, rather than on the academic experiment. There were researchers in that area but they felt it was important to figure out problems like link decay before you would try to deploy this at scale, Tim didn't care, it worked fine.
What you've done is akin to if somebody argued that it's wrong to credit Bill Gates with inventing the computer when really that's what Steve Jobs did. It's not even the right generation. [ You can argue about whether what matters is the idea of the Analytical Engine, or one of the early realisations like the Z3, or Colossus or ENIAC or whatever. But those things were all built and (aside from the Analytical Engine) in use before Jobs or Gates were even born ]
Alan Kay was the idea man. He situated Smalltalk in a context of, this is programming as media, as a form of expression and a means to learn and teach, and not just an engineering activity; when it comes to Smalltalk, Dan Ingalls did much of the implementation work.
The "downvotes magnet" thing was tongue-in-cheek – any name is either not famous enough, making it a bad answer, or famous enough to have lots of fans that will disapprove of the nomination.
> why Kay?
I don't think his actual, lasting influences justify the near-mythical status bestowed on him by his disciples. Not saying he's completely unimportant, just that he's overrated. I'm not very confident on that assessment though, which is why I listed him last (and ESR first).
Weirdly negative tone towards Andy Warhol for seemingly no reason, otherwise interesting article. The guy (Warhol) was almost 60 years old when the Amiga came out and already a pretty famous name.
He was famous for ripping off other artists' work, yeah. I think thats why he's not considered in such flattering light. I know many well-trained artists who agree that he was a hack and plagiarist - but that was his thing, after all...
Someone who is quite well-known, but maybe doesn't get all the credit they really deserve, is Sophie Wilson. Not only did she design the ARM instruction set, but before that she spent fifteen years working on BBC BASIC, the language that so many of us in the UK first learnt to program in. Not sure I would have had a career in the tech sector without her.
>She subsequently joined Acorn Computers and was instrumental in designing the BBC Micro, including the BBC BASIC programming language whose development she led for the next 15 years.
Maybe, but not before she designed the Arm instruction set which is what the parent comment says (possibly I'm being pedantic but it does make a mess of the whole chronology).
You're correct, I got the chronology wrong. From a more careful reading of Wikipedia it looks like ~2 yrs writing most of BBC BASIC, then designing the ARM instruction set, whilst at the same time maintaining BASIC (for another 15 years).
Thanks. I feel really bad about my pedantry now! I didn’t know that she’d carried on maintaining BBC Basic for so long after the BBC Micro era.
Funnily enough I downloaded that ARM assembly language book last week in the course of writing up a couple of blog posts on RISC. (Shameless plug: first one on the IBM 801 should be our over the weekend - link in my bio if of interest.)
I can pretty much guarantee you that, for every person who is well-known for "inventing" something (especially in the 20th century onward), there are generally a whole lot of other people on the same project--or who were working in parallel on similar concepts elsewhere or who created something that was refined by the invention--who deserve at least a passing nod as well.
I generally assume credit is poorly assigned. In my former job as an applied researcher letting my boss get the credit for my ideas was practically part of the job description. My former boss has a bad memory so he’d tell me his great ideas forgetting they were mine. Instead of correcting him I’d be ‘great idea boss, we should totally build that’ - and that’s how I got to build a ton of cool shit.
I have the same perspective, and have had the exact same experience with supervisors "forgetting where they get ideas from" (not just me but also others working with them).
One related thing that's been on my mind a lot lately is people or projects who are/were ahead of their time, and as a result didn't really maybe get enough credit as they should have.
Sometimes being "ahead of one's time" suggests someone or something eventually getting a lot of attention for seeing things before everyone else. But sometimes I think people and projects ahead of their time just get forgotten and/or lost because they were never really supported enough to begin with.
I guess in general I often feel as if credit is as much about the audience as it is the creator. If someone has an innovation but no one else understands it, it's falling on deaf ears and often is lost.
I do think there is an insane amount of talent that is squandard due to inefficiencies in social organization. I don't know the solution and worry that it'll actually get worse instead of better.
I've been through enough cycles to develop an even more detached/depersonalized view of it... As you say, the credit is an observer's construct, but I think sometimes the innovators are also just the audience of an emergent concept.
Put another way, I think the whole narrative of ideas "coming from" an individual is often a self-indulgent fiction. I've seen too many R&D topics where the supposedly novel ideas seem to be inevitable memes. The self-styled sole inventors are often one of many seeing the same insights at the same time, because they are all hosting the same prerequisite background knowledge.
There are also often lots of these ideas floating around simultaneously. A significant meta (or negative?) thought process is to defer or suppress most of the ideas and focus on a few. Sometimes, we might think to credit the boss with the wisdom of deciding _when_ an idea deserves attention. That business decision is often more impactful than the juniors' many heartfelt flashes of insight.
But this meta-analysis can go further. Often there are different labs all in slightly different phases and some are "before their time" and some, perhaps, "too late". Was the boss at the goldilocks lab really more innovative? Or are all the players merely parts of a broader monte carlo search method...?
I go to a lot of effort to find others with the same ideas as me and I found that I am unusually unique. Having a unique idea makes me feel insane and my compulsion to test the idea comes from a need of validation. I would be much happier if someone else did it because there are more profitable things I could be working on. I don't think inventiveness is evenly distributed among the population. I think it can be both true that such talent is rare and that it needs the additionally rare appropriate time and place for it to flourish.
Among billions, we are not as unique as we might intuit from our much smaller social circles. Aside from most of us probably having physical doppelgangers out there somewhere by mere chance, I suspect there are also psychological doppelgangers with many of our same traits and disposition, and these thought doppelgangers who were also fed enough of the same material to be thinking similar things.
Sometimes we encounter one of these and have to decide whether they are fast friend, competitor, nemesis, or soul mate!
61 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadHe also coded the OS on the Apollo Guidance Computer that saved the day and mission, during the Apollo 11 moon landing, by rebooting into saved state and resuming real-time control of the vehicle without a hiccup, when operator errors repeatedly overloaded it. (Margaret Hamilton is often given credit for this, but she programmed other stuff.)
He never got the Turing Award he so richly deserved.
Anyway they both agreed at the time they had an equal share in creating 'the internet', but the media seems to have long forgotten about the non-english guy.
so yeah, either TBL is too famous and in your list, or is R. Caillau not famous enough and belonging in the list from this post? Not upto me to decide, but anyway he should not be forgotten
Take something, and use it in a creative new way, is basically what they did
I'd like to shout out Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine who made TCP for ARPANET: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675
But as American and British publishers started growing, they started doing a very sly thing which was, when an anglo researcher made a contribution to the understanding of that condition they would double barrel it at first. So it might have started as the Friedman psychosis, then it became the Friedman-Johns psychosis, and slowly the newer editions just had the Johns psychosis.
I wonder if Caillau is but a newer victim of this seemingly very anglophilic tradition.
Do you mean the web?
The Internet was already a thing before either of these people came along and built something on top of it.
What you've done is akin to if somebody argued that it's wrong to credit Bill Gates with inventing the computer when really that's what Steve Jobs did. It's not even the right generation. [ You can argue about whether what matters is the idea of the Analytical Engine, or one of the early realisations like the Z3, or Colossus or ENIAC or whatever. But those things were all built and (aside from the Analytical Engine) in use before Jobs or Gates were even born ]
Anyways, I nominate
* Eric S. Raymond
* Robert C. Martin ("Uncle Bob")
* Alan Kay
> why Kay?
I don't think his actual, lasting influences justify the near-mythical status bestowed on him by his disciples. Not saying he's completely unimportant, just that he's overrated. I'm not very confident on that assessment though, which is why I listed him last (and ESR first).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai#%22EMAIL%22_in...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/arts/design/warhol-copyri...
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/supreme-court-takes-and...
It's all about building up on other people's previous work.
Great presentation from Sophie here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOnpQgn-9s
>She subsequently joined Acorn Computers and was instrumental in designing the BBC Micro, including the BBC BASIC programming language whose development she led for the next 15 years.
Thinking about all this made me remember https://archive.org/details/arm-archimedes-assembly-language..., which as I recall was a pretty decent introduction to how microprocessors work (of the RISC variety, anyway).
Funnily enough I downloaded that ARM assembly language book last week in the course of writing up a couple of blog posts on RISC. (Shameless plug: first one on the IBM 801 should be our over the weekend - link in my bio if of interest.)
Really tho it was Jon Postel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel
> [Jon Postel] was referred to as the "god of the Internet"
I think that beats Cerf's "father of the Internet".
But really, IME (but maybe I'm just a nerd) Postel is at least as famous as Cerf.
oh, I'm right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel
Nobody knows his name. He is "Not as Famous as He Should Be."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_M._Atalla
One related thing that's been on my mind a lot lately is people or projects who are/were ahead of their time, and as a result didn't really maybe get enough credit as they should have.
Sometimes being "ahead of one's time" suggests someone or something eventually getting a lot of attention for seeing things before everyone else. But sometimes I think people and projects ahead of their time just get forgotten and/or lost because they were never really supported enough to begin with.
I guess in general I often feel as if credit is as much about the audience as it is the creator. If someone has an innovation but no one else understands it, it's falling on deaf ears and often is lost.
Put another way, I think the whole narrative of ideas "coming from" an individual is often a self-indulgent fiction. I've seen too many R&D topics where the supposedly novel ideas seem to be inevitable memes. The self-styled sole inventors are often one of many seeing the same insights at the same time, because they are all hosting the same prerequisite background knowledge.
There are also often lots of these ideas floating around simultaneously. A significant meta (or negative?) thought process is to defer or suppress most of the ideas and focus on a few. Sometimes, we might think to credit the boss with the wisdom of deciding _when_ an idea deserves attention. That business decision is often more impactful than the juniors' many heartfelt flashes of insight.
But this meta-analysis can go further. Often there are different labs all in slightly different phases and some are "before their time" and some, perhaps, "too late". Was the boss at the goldilocks lab really more innovative? Or are all the players merely parts of a broader monte carlo search method...?
Among billions, we are not as unique as we might intuit from our much smaller social circles. Aside from most of us probably having physical doppelgangers out there somewhere by mere chance, I suspect there are also psychological doppelgangers with many of our same traits and disposition, and these thought doppelgangers who were also fed enough of the same material to be thinking similar things.
Sometimes we encounter one of these and have to decide whether they are fast friend, competitor, nemesis, or soul mate!
So now I can put a name to the person whose art constantly made me feel bad about my Deluxe Paint skills :)