This document profiles several important figures in the history and development of technology and the internet. It provides brief biographies and photos of pioneers such as Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web; Ray Tomlinson, who invented email; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, co-founders of Apple; Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft; and Vint Cerf, considered the "Father of the Internet." It also discusses companies such as Xerox PARC, Compuserve, and Prodigy, which were early leaders in networking and online services.

1. Steve Jobs
Chairman, CEO,
and co-founder of
Apple Inc.;
chairman and
majority
shareholder of
Pixar; and the
founder, chairman,
and CEO of NeXT.
And a
visionary/thief who
walked out of
Xerox PARC with
their brain trust.
Photo:
en.wikiquote.org

2. Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the
World Wide Web Web while at
CERN, the European Particle
Physics Laboratory, in 1989. He
wrote the first web client and
server in 1990. His specifications
of URIs, HTTP and HTML were
refined as Web technology spread.
Berners-Lee is also Director of
WC3 (World Wide Web
Consortium 'Magna Carta for the
web' to save internet from abuse
He is presently working on a new
decentralized platform. Let’s hope
that we learned something from
the first iteration and that it sticks
this time. Photo: ja.wikipedia.org

3. Ray Tomlinson
.
In 1971, a computer
scientist named Ray
Tomlinson was facing
a vexing problem:
how to connect
people who
programmed
computers with one
another. At that time,
computers weren’t
connected to one
another. The U.S.
government sought
to overcome when
the problem and
hired BBN
Technologies, where
Tomlinson worked, to
help develop a
network called
Arpanet, forerunner
of the Internet.
Tomlinson’s solution:
the @ sign. Photo
NPR.org

4. Plato
The philosopher
postulated long ago
that some day there
would be a
language based
purely on
mathematics.
Photo:
mumbrella.com.au

5. Steve Wozniak
Co-founder Steve
Wozniak almost didn't
join Apple. He had a
job offer at HP in
Oregon, and was
considering taking it
because he thought
Apple would crash and
burn. Whew! Photo:
afr.com

6. Bill Hewlett and
David Packard
What list could be complete
without mentioning this pair,
who founded their legendary
company in Packard’s garage
in Palo Alto. Fun fact: A young
Steve Jobs, then age 12,
called Hewlett (whose
number was listed) and
requested any available parts
for a frequency counter he
was building. Hewlett,
impressed with Jobs'
gumption, offered him a
summer job assembling
frequency counters.
Photo:Wikipedia

7. Paul Mockapetris
Actually, it’s Dr.
Paul Mockapetris,
and his claim to
fame and place in
history: he was the
creator of Domain
Name System
architecture

8. Jon Postel Considered the ‘god’
of the Internet,
Jonathan Bruce
Postel made many
significant
contributions to the
medium’s
development. He is
known principally for
being the Editor of
the Request for
Comment (RFC)
document series, and
for administering the
Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority
(IANA) until his
death. Photo:
Wikipedia

9. Hedy Lamarr
– Yes, that Hedy Lamarr. The
actress helped developed a
radio guidance system for
Allied torpedoes, which used
spread spectrum and
frequency hopping
technology. It’s now
incorporated into Wi-fi,
Bluetooth and CDMA. No
Oscar, but she did receive an
Electronic Frontier
Foundation Pioneer award.
Photo:
oldtimeradiodownloads.com

10. J. C. R. Licklider
Arguably the father of
the modern computer,
Licklider foresaw a
worldwide computer
network long before it
was built. He also
funded much of the
early research. Photo:
es.wikipedia.org

11. Douglas Engelbart
Engelbart is best known for his
work on founding the field of
human–computer interaction,
particularly while at his
Augmentation Research Center
Lab in SRI International, which
resulted in creation of the mouse,
and the development of
hypertext, networked computers,
and precursors to graphical user
interfaces. Photo:
blog.innovationjournalism.org

12. Xerox PARC
The Palo Alto Research Center was
responsible for such developments
as laser printing, Ethernet, the
modern personal computer,
graphical user interface (GUI) and
desktop paradigm, object-oriented
programming, ubiquitous
computing, electronic paper,
amorphous silicon (a-Si)
applications, and advancing very-
large-scale integration for
semiconductors. Their mistake:
allowing Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in
to look under the hood, both of
whom stole what they needed to
build their products – and empires.
Show of hands: Who has heard of
Apple and Microsoft? Xerox PARC?
Photo: jarcors.com

13. Scott McNealy
Founder, Sun
Microsystems, along with
now-investor and beach
privacy afficionado Vinod
Khosla, Bill Joy and Andy
Bechtolsheim. Photo:
Wikipedia

14. Bill Gross
Before there
was Y
Combinator,
there was
Idealab, the
first business
accelerator
(1996).
Howard
Morgan was
there, too.
Photo: Le Web

15. Bill Gates
In 1975, Gates launched Microsoft with co-founder Paul
Allen, and the company became the world’s largest PC
company. That’s ‘personal computer,’ btw. Gates was CEO
until he stepped down in 2000, remaining as chairman
full-time, before transitioning to a part-time spot to work
full-time at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
We won’t even get into Common Core.
As for the government’s anti-trust lawsuit against
Microsoft (United States v. Microsoft, 1998), as
BusinessWeek reported: “Early rounds of his deposition
show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I
don't recall,' so many times that even the presiding judge
had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's
denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by
prosecutors with snippets of e-mail that Gates both sent
and received.” Microsoft was found guilty of violating the
Sherman Antitrust Act, and just a head’s up to Gates’ pal
Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, MSFT was an early investor in
Facebook. Photo: flickr.com

16. Paul Allen
Co-founded
Microsoft with Bill
Gates in 1975.
According to
Wikipedia, in
March 2018, he
was estimated to
be the 44th-
wealthiest person
in the world, with
an estimated net
worth of $21.7
billion, revised at
the time of his
death to $20.3
billion. Photo:
Seattle Times

17. Vint Cerf
Considered the Father of the
Internet. Cerf was a manager
for the United States' Defense
Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) funding
various groups to develop
TCP/IP technology. When the
Internet began to transition
to a commercial opportunity
during the late 1980s, Cerf
moved to MCI where he was
instrumental in the
development of the first
commercial email system
(MCI Mail) connected to the
Internet. Photo: Wikipedia

18. Judy Estrin
Estrin worked with Vinton
Cerf on the Transmission
Control Protocol project at
Stanford University in the
1970s. Estrin is a serial
entrepreneur who co-
founded eight technology
companies. She was the chief
technology officer of Cisco
Systems from 1998 to 2000.
She is currently CEO of JLABS,
LLC, a privately held company
focused on furthering
innovation in business,
government, and nonprofit
organizations. Photo:
YouTube

19. Stewart Brand
Author of the Whole Earth
Catalog; founder of The
WELL ("Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link"), a
prototypical, wide-ranging
online community for
intelligent, informed
participants the world over.
According to The New
Yorker, “In a 2005
commencement address at
Stanford, Steve Jobs
described the “Whole Earth
Catalog” as “Google in
paperback form, thirty-five
years before Google came
along.” Photo:
en.wikipedia.org

20. Steve Crocker
Steve Crocker
(center) is the
man who
created
ARPANET
protocols that
are the
foundation of
today’s internet.
Photo: guimi.net

21. Glenda Shroeder
Implemented the first command-
line user interface shell and
publishing one of the earliest
research papers describing
electronic mail systems. Photo:
quazoo.com

22. Bob Taylor
ARPA director (1965-
1969) who convinced
ARPA to fund a
computer network aka
ARPA net, which gave
birth to the internet.
Photo:
internethalloffame.org

23. Sally Floyd
As the inventor of Random Early
Detection ("RED") active queue
management scheme, she
founded the field of Active
Queue Management (AQM)
with Van Jacobson. Almost all
Internet routers use RED or
something developed from it to
manage network congestion.
Floyd devised adding delay jitter
to message timers to avoid
synchronization. Winner, IEEE
Internet Award (2005) and the
ACM SIGCOMM Award (2007)
for her contributions to
congestion control. In 2007 was
named one of the top-ten most
cited researchers in computer
science. Phpto: topyaps.com

24. Andy Grove
The semiconductor
pioneer who transformed
Intel from a manufacturer
of memory chips into one
of the world's dominant
producers of
microprocessors. Photo:
Wikipedia

25. Nolan Bushnell
Creator of Pong and founder of both
Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese
chain, Bushnell has been inducted into
the Video Game Hall of Fame and the
Consumer Electronics Association Hall of
Fame, received the BAFTA Fellowship
and the Nations Restaurant News
"Innovator of the Year" award, and was
named one of Newsweek's "50 Men
Who Changed America." Bushnell has
started more than twenty companies
and is one of the founding fathers of the
video game industry. Photo: Wikipedia

26. Ann Winblad
An early Silicon Valley investor, she
and partner John Hummer co-
founded VC firm Hummer Winblad
in 1989, and certainly witnessed and
participated in some of the most
spectacular transformations in
technology from the most seminal
days. Named by BusinessWeek as
one of the Top 25 Power Brokers in
Silicon Valley. Photo: flickr.com

27. Jerry Yang
Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo!
in 1994, while he was a
Master’s candidate at Stanford.
In fact, "Jerry and David's
Guide to the World Wide Web"
was the master’s thesis he was
working on with co-founder
David Filo. Yang served as CEO
from 2007 to 2009. He wasn’t
the company’s first CEO (that
was Tim Koogle) and was far
from being the last one, either.
In all fairness, it was Yahoo’s
investment in Alibaba under
Yang’s leadership that
ultimately saved the company.
Such as it is. Photo: Wikipedia

28. John Chambers
In 1983, Chambers
joined a startup called
Cisco. In 1995, at 46, he
assumed the role of
CEO and grew the
company from $70
million in annual
revenues to a run-rate
of approximately $40
billion in 2007. Photo:
gogovtech.com

29. Larry Ellison
Long before there was Mark
Zuckerberg, there was Oracle co-
founder and CEO (and one of the
company’s largest shareholders)
Larry Ellison demonstrating to the
world what hubris was all about.
He did manage to wrest the
company from the verge of
bankruptcy to becoming a major
player and acquirer of such
companies as PeopleSoft, Siebel
Systems, Sun Microsystems and
Net Suites, founded by former
Oracle employee Zack Nelson. An
avid yacht enthusiast, he also
helped to bring America’s Cup back
to US shores in 2010, for the first
time in 15 years. Photo:
dazeinfo.com

30. Leland Stanford
Stanford University was appropriately named
after the one-time (one-term) California
governor and robber baron/president of the
Southern Pacific Railroad, the company that
built the western part of the first
transcontinental railroad. In fact, it was
Stanford himself who presided at the
ceremonial driving of "Last Spike" in
Promontory, Utah on May 10, 1869. And
founded the university that has been
producing a fair share of tech robber barons
ever since. Photo: Wikipedia

31. Michael Dell
Founder, Dell Technologies,
which he basically started out
of his dorm room at the
University of Texas. In 1992,
aged 27, he became the
youngest CEO of a company
ranked in Fortune magazine's
list of the top 500
corporations. Note to self: he
has got a wicked good
memory.
Photo: Wikipedia

32. David Filo
The Yahoo co-founder deserves his own
spot if for only one reason: As Google
co-founder Sergey Brin recalled during
an interview at Stanford’s
Global Entrepreneurship Summit, "In the
early days when we had the little
prototype and we were shopping it
around he [Filo] said, 'Why don't you
just go out and build this thing?' They
went to Excite CEO George Bell and
offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He
rejected the offer and later criticized
Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture
capitalists, after he negotiated Brin and
Page down to $750,000. Photo:
Wikipedia

33. Terry Semel
The former Yahoo CEO
offered Stanford grads
Sergei Brin and Larry Page
$1B for then startup
Google. Looking for
investors. Brin and Page
wanted $3B but didn’t
want to sell. Semel refused
to propose any further
acquisition offers. In
retrospect, maybe not such
a good decision. Photo:
quotationof.com

34. Steven Levy Editor at Large, Wired, Founder and Editor
in Chief, Backchannel (launched on
Medium, acquired by Conde Nast), tech
historian and writer extraordinaire who
has penned such must-reads as Insanely
Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh,
the Computer that changed Everything,
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer
Revolution, Artificial Life : A Report from
the Frontier Where Computers Meet
Biology, In The Plex: How Google Thinks,
Works, and Shapes Our Lives and Crypto:
How the Code Rebels Beat the Government
Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. Fun fact,
according to Wikipedia: In 1978, Steven
Levy rediscovered Albert Einstein's brain in
the office of the pathologist who removed
and preserved it.Photo: LinkedIn

35. Mitch Kapor
Founder of Lotus
(acquired by IBM), co-
founder Electronic
Freedom Foundation and
founder, Kapor Capital
(@Twilio, @Uber,
@ClassDojo ,@Clever,
@Optimizely,@Formlabs)
Photo:
computerhistory.org

36. Compuserv
According to Wikipedia, CompuServe
(CompuServe Information Service,
also known as CIS) was the first major
commercial online service provider in
the U.S. It dominated during the
1980s and remained a major
influence through the mid-1990s. CIS
was known for its online chat system,
message forums covering a variety of
topics, extensive software libraries for
most computer platforms, and a
series of popular online games,
notably MegaWars III and Island of
Kesmai. It also was known for its
introduction of the GIF format for
pictures. In 1997, parent company
H&R Block decided to sell the
company. AOL had come along and,
well, video killed the radio star.

37. Steve Wilhite
Compuserv employee Wilhite was
the primary creator of the GIF file
format, which went on to become
the de facto standard for 8-bit color
images on the Internet until PNG
became a viable alternative. He
developed the GIF (Graphic
Interchange Format) in 1987. By
2016, the format had found
mainstream use in website design,
social media posts, workflow
documents and how-to guides.In
2013, he was the recipient of a
Lifetime Achievement Webby Award
in recognition of having invented the
GIF file format. His speech (which
was limited to 140 characters): It's
prounounced "jif" not "gif."

38. Prodigy
Prodigy – another early
major online service
provider, offering subscribers
access to a broad range of
networked services, including
news, weather, shopping,
bulletin boards, games, polls,
expert columns, banking,
stocks, travel, and a variety of
other features. Prodigy built
some of the web’s very first
store fronts/ecommerce
portals. Bonus points: what
was the company’s name,
before it was changed to
Prodigy? Answer is on next
slide

39. Trintex
Prodigy was founded on
February 13, 1984, as Trintex, a
joint venture between CBS,
computer manufacturer IBM,
and Sears, Roebuck and
Company. CBS left the venture
in 1986 when CBS CEO Tom
Wyman was divesting
properties outside of CBS's core
broadcasting business. The
service was launched regionally
in 1988 in Atlanta, Hartford,
and San Francisco under the
name Prodigy, which was
headquartered in White Plains,
NY. And that concludes our
Web 1.0 trivia moment.

40. Robert Metcalfe
Co-inventor of Ethernet, co-founder of
3Com. Of course, Metcalfe also famously
missed the mark with some of his
predictions:
The Open Source Movement's ideology is
utopian balderdash
After the wireless mobile bubble bursts
this year (mid 90s), we will get back to
stringing fibers ... bathrooms are still
predominantly plumbed. For more or less
the same reason, computers will stay
wired.
(Windows and Linux) are outdated
clunkers that wont be able to adequately
handle the coming of "video internet”
Then again, even a broken clock is right
twice a day, and some tech founders only
have to hit it once.
Photo: Wikipedia