Well, as you lead a life in this fast, and developing world, you tend to meet, come across a lot of people, and by good or ill fortune, most have them impact your life, directly or indirectly. During my recent expriences, I have set out to find out more about people who indirectly impact us, our direct impacts can be traced out easily...!
Also, I have come across, recently, about many inventions, breakthroughs and feats in the field of information technology, a field that indirectly, but most effectively impacts me, my daily life and my interests...!
So here I am, presenting you this blog, which may end up being boring for some, where I shall shed some light on people who have, are, and I believe will, set out to change this world through their knowledge, astounding skills, and many dangerous, yet calculated risks...! Also I shall mentin a little about their early lives, and history, that may help us, and probably even inspire in learning from them, their lifestyle, perspective of mind and outlook.
So here we go:
These are some people whom many know, for their achievements, media coverages and stuff that spread information across the world..
1.Sir Tim Berners Lee
Introduction
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955) is an English computer scientist, who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web. On 25 December 1990 he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student staff at CERN. He was ranked Joint First in The Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses.
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development, the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and he is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Background
His parents, both mathematicians, were employed together on the team that built the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers. They taught Berners-Lee to use mathematics everywhere, even at the dinner table. Berners-Lee attended Sheen Mount Primary School, before moving on to study his O-Levels and A-Levels at Emanuel School in Battersea, where a computer centre is dedicated in his name.
As of now
In 2001, he became a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust having previously lived in Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset, UK.
In December 2004 he accepted a chair in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, to work on his new project — the Semantic Web.
Berners-Lee believes the future of Semantic Web holds immense potential for how machines will collaborate in the coming days. In an interview with an Indian publication, he shared his views as:
"It is evolving at the moment. The data Web is in small stages, but it is a reality, for instance there is a Web of data about all kinds of things, like there is a Web of data about proteins, it is in very early stages. When it comes to publicly accessible data, there is an explosion of data Web in the life sciences community. When you look about data for proteins and genes, and cell biology and biological pathways, lots of companies are very excited. We have a healthcare and life sciences interest group at the Consortium, which is coordinating lot of interest out there."
He has also become one of the pioneer voices in favour of Net Neutrality..
He feels that ISPs should not intercept customers' browsing activities, the way companies like Phorm do. He has such strong views about this that he would change ISPs to get away from such activities.
2.Larry Page
If you do not know of this guy...google 'google' to know...lol..!
Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the Google web search engine, now Google Inc., with Sergey Brin.
Background
Larry Page is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor Page, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University and one of the University of Michigan's first computer science Ph.D graduates, and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University. Despite his mother being Jewish, Page was raised similarly to his father: without a religion. He is also the brother of Carl Victor Page, Jr., a co-founder of eGroups, later sold to Yahoo! for approximately half a billion dollars.
Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, Michigan, and graduated from East Lansing High School. Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in Computer Science from. While at the University of Michigan, "Page created an inkjet printer, made of Lego bricks", was a member of the solar car team and served as the president of the HKN.
As of Now
In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. Page is still "on leave" from the Ph.D. program.Page ran Google as co-president with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt to become Chairman and CEO of Google.According to the 2007 edition of Forbes, Page had an estimated net worth of $16.6 Billion, placing him at rank 26 on Forbes's list of the richest persons in the world, together with Brin. Page and Brin recently purchased a pre-owned Qantas Boeing 767 airliner for their business and personal needs.In 2007, Page was cited by PC World as #1 on the list of the 50 most important people on the web, along with Brin and Schmidt.Page is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 220-mile (350 km) range battery electric vehicle.He is alumnus of The Queen's College, Oxford. While at Queen's, Berners-Lee built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. During his time at university, he was caught hacking with a friend and was subsequently banned from using the university computer. He graduated in 1976 with a degree in physics.
The World Economic Forum named Page as a Global Leader for Tomorrow. The X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board.
Well, you can find more about Page, and Google at the Google 'About Us' website...
The ones mentioned above were popular enough for everyone to know about...but here's one, who has done quite something useful, yet few know of him...
Heading toward the gaming world...
3.Steve Russel
Steve "Slug" Russell is a programmer and computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, one of the earliest videogames, in 1961 with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT working on a DEC Digital PDP-1. While there is some debate over priority regarding the concept of computer-based games in general, Spacewar! was unquestionably the first to gain widespread recognition, and is generally recognized as the first of the "shoot-'em' up" genre.
Steve Russell wrote the first two implementations of Lisp for the IBM 704. It was Russell who realized that the concept of universal functions could be applied to the language; by implementing the Lisp universal evaluator in a lower-level language, it became possible to create the Lisp interpreter (previous development work on the language had focused on compiling the language). He invented the continuation to solve a double recursion problem for one of the users of his Lisp implementation.
Now, about Spacewar!
Steve "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen of the fictitious "Hingham Institute" conceived of the game in 1961, with the intent of implementing it on a DEC PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After Alan Kotok obtained some sine and cosine routines from DEC, Russell began coding, and by February 1962 had produced his first version. It took approximately 200 hours of work to create the initial version. Additional features were developed by Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, and Graetz.
The basic gameplay of Spacewar! involves two armed spaceships called "the needle" and "the wedge" attempting to shoot one another while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. The ships' fired missiles were unaffected by gravity (due to a lack of processing time). Each ship had a limited number of missiles and a limited supply of fuel.The hyperspace feature could be used as a last-ditch means to evade enemy missiles, but the reentry from hyperspace would occur at a random location and there was an increasing probability of the ship exploding with each use.
Each player controls one of the ships, and must attempt to simultaneously shoot at the other ship and avoid colliding with the star. Player controls included clockwise and counterclockwise rotation, thrust, fire, and hyperspace. Initially these were controlled using the front-panel test switches, with four switches for each player, but these proved to wear out very quickly under normal gameplay. Most sites used custom control boxes wired into the same switches, although joysticks and other inputs were also used.
Moving on to the hardware segment...check out this one...
4.Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang
Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang is a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur and businessman. A native of Taiwan, he grew up in Oregon, graduating from Oregon State University before moving to California where he graduated from Stanford University. He co-founded Nvidia and serves as president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the graphics-processor company. As of 2008, Forbes listed him as the 61st highest paid CEO in a list of U.S. CEOs.
Background
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, he spent several years living in Thailand until he was accidentally sent to Oneida Baptist Institute, a Christian boarding school in Kentucky. His uncle and aunt, recent immigrants to Tacoma, Washington, who spoke little English, unwittingly thought it was a prep school but soon learned otherwise.
After leaving Oneida Baptist Institute and moving to Oregon with his parents, Huang began playing table tennis at a club in downtown Portland and at age 15, he placed third in junior doubles at the U.S. Open. He graduated from Aloha High School, located in the western suburbs of Portland.
Huang received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984, and his master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992.
Its weird to know this guy from NVidea went into the US Open...surprising...eh?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These people, or personalities, as you may call, are those who changed the world, and sometimes make places proud...it was a coincidence and i still remember it, a popular singer who went until the finals of popular reality show, Indian Idol had graduated from my school, which stood as a sole reason many voted him...and I felt really good to be a part of the institution that makes such great, or at least good people who are known all over the land for their deeds, however simple or complex they may be, and thus created inspiration and an ambition that I now strive to achieve.
This shows, that everyone has talent hidden inside us, wich under proper guidance, and attitude, shall shine forever like a diamond taken deep from the bowels of the earth, and then polished to shine and capture the hearts and eyes of numerous souls on earth...
Well, I am constrained to stop here, since I have reached the limit of this blog entry....but I shall surely keep you posted about more in due course of time....and thus spread the word of great people, and the numerous ways they can help us, intentionally, or may be even unintentionally.
Cya
Templar AKA Sumanth
Here are a few things the site offers links and downloads
