Technology Pioneers And Revolutionaries We Lost In 2011

2011 was a year in which we lost many visionaries, leaders and revolutionaries in the world of technology. All of them have had some impact on our daily lives, if not totally changed them. Below, I’ve tried to gather up some information on these technology greats. I know I’ve missed out on quite a few names who deserve to be mentioned and I hope to remedy that in a future post soon. Without further ado, here goes:

Norio Ohga (1930 ~ 2011)

Contribution: CEO of Sony, pursued the potential of Compact Discs, rise of Sony

In 1982, Sony became the first to release the compact disk or CD under the influence of Norio Ohga, it’s then CEO. Ohga pushed for the development of CDs because he saw great potential in their use for storing audio data.

Norio Ohga also turned Sony from an analog electronics manufacturer into a digital media giant. His acquisitions of Columbia Pictures Entertainment and CBS Records Group led to the formations of Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment respectively. Other than that he also established the Sony Computers Entertainment which supported Ken Kutaragi in developing the Playstation gaming console as a Sony product.

Wild Factlet: Standard CD capacity is 650/700 MB because Norio Ohga wanted to contain the complete Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on a single disc.

Robert Galvin (1922 ~ 2011)

Contribution: CEO of Motorola, first cell phone prototype under his leadership, rise of Motorola

Robert Galvin was the CEO of Motorola for almost three decades, ascending to the post after the death of his father Paul Galvin, the founder of Motorola, in 1959. Under Robert Galvin, Motorola saw it’s revenue increase by 3600%.

The firs prototype cellphone was revealed by Motorola in 1973 in his tenure. Developed by Dr. Martin Cooper, the analog mobile device successfully led to Motorola’s ventures into the development of wireless communication products.

John Opel (1925 ~ 2011)

Contribution: CEO of Intel, paradigm shift to personal computers, rise of Intel

The man who led IBM to super-dominance in the hardware industry in the early 1980s, John Opel, breathed his last at the age of 86.

John Opel started work as a salesman at IBM in 1949 and climbed the ladder to the top to become the company’s final chief executive in it’s era of dominance. The first IBM personal computer was produced under his tenure sparking the paradigm shift away from mainframe computers. IBM revenue nearly doubled during his time. Competitors publicly claimed that IBM was too powerful for them to compete with it.

IBM’s personal computer was built using Intel processors and Microsoft’s OS. Competitors realized that they could create copies using both, which ultimately led to both Intel and Microsoft becoming giants themselves.

Jean Bartik (1924 ~ 2011)

Contribution: Programmer for first electronic computer

The first electronic computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), was programmed by a small team of women co-led by Jean Jennings Bartik. In other words, they wrote the first software for an electronic computer.

According to Paul E. Ceruzzi, computer historian at the Smithsonian Institution:

These women, being the first to enter this new territory, were the first to encounter the whole question of programming, and they met the challenge.

The other programmers were Betty Snyder Holberton, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly (wife of ENIAC co-creator John Mauchly), Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence. Later, Bartik also worked on converting the ENIAC into a stored-program computer. These women were given little to no recognition for their work at that time. Betty’s worth was finally acknowledged in the 1990s and 2000s as she was awarded the Augusta Ada Lovelace award from the Association of Women in Computing in 1997, inducted into the Women In Technology International Hall Of Fame in the same year, named a fellow by the Computer History Museum along with Linus Torvalds and Bob Metcalfe in 2008, and received the Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2009.

Kenneth Olsen (1926 ~ 2011)

Contribution: CEO of Digital Equipment Corportation, reduced size of computer memory, helped paradigm shift to personal computers

Kenneth Olsen co-founded the Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957 with MIT colleague Harlan Anderson. During his years at MIT, he worked on the first transistorized research computer. Later, with the formation of DEC, he received patents for ‘saturable switch’, ‘diode tranformer gate circuit’ and ‘line printer buffer’ but it was the improvisation of MIT Professor Jay Forrester’s magnetic core memory that had the biggest impact on computers. Computer memories became smaller and lead to the creation of smaller and cheaper personal computers found in the homes of today.

Having had this huge impact on technology, one of his quotes is very often taken out of context:

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.

However, Olsen was not referring to the computers we have today, rather to a centralized computer automating all aspects of a home.

Olsen was named “America’s Most Successful Entrepreneur” by the Fortune magazine in 1986. In the same year, he was given the IEEE Engineering Leadership Recognition Award. His biography, by Glenn Rifkin and George Harrar, is titled ‘The Ultimate Entrepreneur: The Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation’. On the MIT150 list of top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT, Ken Olsen ranks at number 6.

Julius Blank (1925 ~ 2011)

Contribution: Co-founded first microchip maker, leading to smaller computers, helped paradigm shift to personal computers

A member of the “Traitorous Eight” who left Nobel-winning physicist Dr. William Shockley’s leadership at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of Beckman Instruments to form Fairchild Semiconductor, Julius Blank became part of the corporation that laid down the foundations of  the move to integrated circuits in the 1960s.

Disgruntled with the policies and methods of Shockley, and fed up with his authoritarian rule, eight employees at his laboratory decided to leave and form their own corporation which was named Fairchild Semiconductor. These eight were namely Julius Blank, Eugene Kleiner, Jean Hoerni, Gordon Moore, Jay Last, Sheldon Roberts, Victor Grinch and Robert Noyce.

After scientists at Fairchild had developed an inexpensive way to create silicon computer chips, the responsibility of mass manufacture fell on the shoulders of Blank and Kleiner, the only two experienced in manufacturing within their group. Together, they developed the machine shop, assembly line and manufacturing facilities for the production of the silicon wafers, the first of their kind.

David C. Brock, who authored the book on the history of Fairchild Semiconductor called “Makers of the Microchip” along with Christophe Lécuyer, wrote:

In those days you couldn’t go out and buy these things off the shelf. They had to build everything, starting with the equipment for growing silicon crystals.

Two of Julius Blank’s partners at Fairchild, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, went on to found the Intel Corporation. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was also formed by executives from Fairchild, former colleagues of Blank. Blank left Fairchild in 1969 became a consultant and an investor.

In 2011, Blank was awarded the “Legends of California” award by the California Historical Society.

Steve Jobs (1955 ~ 2011)

Contribution: Co-founder and CEO of Apple, first GUI enabled computer, led Apple to dominance

The most well-known of deaths in 2011 is none other than Apple’s late co-founder, CEO and Chairman, Steven Paul Jobs, perhaps the only one widely acknowledged by the media.

Starting as a small firm in his parents’ garage, Jobs founded Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Jobs revealed Apple’s infamous Macintosh in 1984, the first computer to implement a fully graphical user interface (GUI) and meet great commercial success. He left Apple in 1985, only to return in 1996 when his company NeXT Computer was acquired by Apple.

Jobs took the reigns of Apple in 1997 and steered the company to heights of greatness within a decade. Considered as an arrogant, temperamental and demanding leader by his employees, Jobs heightened sense of perfection found it’s way into Apple’s products. The company entered the music distribution scene but it wasn’t until Apple set its eyes on cellular phones that the world really did change. When the iPhone was revealed in 2007, it was met with much acclaim and success and raised the bar for most of the giants already in the cellular business. With Google also entering the market with it’s Android mobile OS, the competition between the two companies, along with RIM and Microsoft tagging behind, took the cellular phone user experience to a whole new level. And somewhere along the way, Tablet computers were introduced in the game.

Steve resigned as CEO of Apple in August 2011 due to prolonged ailment from pancreatic cancer. He remained as Chairman until his death on October 5, 2011. He was hailed as a revolutionary who changed the way people thought about technology, by putting the focus more and more on end-user experience.

John McCarthy (1927 ~ 2011)

Contribution: Father of Artificial Intelligence, inventor of Lisp, garbage collection, time sharing, helped make internet and faster computers possible

Known as the Father of Artificial Intelligence, John McCarthy was exceptionally bright, finishing off mathematics books taught in universities during his high school days. He was the first to coin the term Artificial Intelligence and arrange an international conference on it. He invented the List Processing Language, or Lisp, in order to help with his work on AI. To solve memory problems in Lisp, he invented “Garbage Collection”, a technique that frees computer memory off data and commands that are not needed any more. This went on to become a very useful feature of all computer languages today.

Apart from this, John McCarthy presented the concept of “Time Sharing”, a technique that enabled many people to use computers simultaneously at that time. This too, went on to become an integral part of all computer operating systems. According to his colleague Lester Earnest:

The Internet would not have happened nearly as soon as it did except for the fact that John initiated the development of time-sharing systems. We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. It came to be called servers…now we call it cloud computing. That is still just time-sharing. John started it.

John McCarthy was the first to talk about the concept of “buying and selling by computer” or “electronic commerce” in a paper he presented in France in the 1970s.

In 1971, Dr. McCarthy received the Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery for his work on AI. He earned the Kyoto Prize in 1988, the National Medal of Science in 1991 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2003. He was inducted as a fellow at the Computer History Museum in 1999. In 2011, he was inducted into the IEEE Intelligent Systems’ AI Hall Of Fame for “significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems.”

Apart from innovations in the silicon industry, Fairchild Semiconductor also pioneered the business model for entrepreneurs of the 20th century: stock options, open working relationships, no job titles, etc.

Dennis Ritchie (1941 ~ 2011)

Contribution: Inventor of C Language, co-creator of UNIX, paved way for the software world of today and the world wide web

Inventor of perhaps the most well-known language in the world, the C language, and a central figure in the development of the Unix operating system, the effect Dennis had on the world can be judged from the fact that almost all languages today have been influenced by C in some way, if not totally based on it. The principles and concepts laid out by Unix are used by many operating systems of today, with OSes being built around the Unix kernel.

Rob Pike, the programming legend who spent 20 years working at the Bell Labs, comments on Ritchie’s inventions:

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and Unix. The browsers are written in C. The Unix kernel – that pretty much the entire Internet runs on – is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs, I can almost guarantee were written in C. It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.

Dennis Ritchie started work at Bell Labs’ Computing Sciences Research Center in 1967. Ritchie and Ken Thompson were assigned by MIT to design Multics, a complex multi-user operating system. Along the way, they decided to write their own operating system to help with their programming and the result: Unix. And to build Unix in a better way, Ritchie wrote C based on the language ‘B’ which Ken Thompson wrote for Multics, with input from Ritchie.

Perhaps the effect of Ritchie’s work is still not acknowledged but the following two quotes should help put some perspective on it. Computer historian Paul E. Ceruzzi on Ritchie:

Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household name at all, but… if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, you’d see his work everywhere inside.

Brian Kernighan, his former colleague and co-author of the ‘C Programming Language’, stated:

There’s that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants; and we’re all standing on Dennis’s shoulders.

 

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