Linus Torvalds (born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish software engineer, American naturalized, who is the creator, and former principal developer, of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for operating systems (and many distributions of each) such as GNU and years later Android and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system Git. Torvalds believes “open source is the only right way to do software.” He currently resides in a suburb of Portland, Oregon.
Note: Despite his generous open-source software contributions, Torvalds is notorious for his gruff attitude that serves as a form of self-deprecation: “I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel—that’s what’s important to me.” – Linus Torvalds
John V. Blankenbaker, born in 1929 to a farming family in Oklahoma, is best known as the man who made the world’s first personal computer. His Kenbak-1 machine first went on sale in 1971—some five years before Steve Wozniak released Apple I. When Blankenbaker was a freshman at Oregon State College in 1949, he started the design of a computing device. By 1957, he had envisioned a simple computer, which he described in a paper, “Logically Micro-Programmed Computers,” published in Computer Transactions. In 1970, he began the design of Kenbak-1 as a private endeavor in his Los Angeles garage. The next year he founded Kenbak Corporation and built and sold about 40 Kenbak-1 digital computers, mainly to schools, before selling out to CTI Educational Products and shuttering his company entirely in 1973. Blankenbaker retired in 1985 and currently lives in Pennsylvania.
Steve Wozniak (born August 11, 1950), nicknamed “Woz,” is an American inventor, electronics engineer, programmer and technology entrepreneur who co-founded Apple Inc. He is known as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Wozniak single-handedly developed the 1976 Apple I, which was the computer that launched Apple. He primarily designed the 1977 Apple II, while Jobs oversaw the development of its unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique power supply. In 1990, Wozniak helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing some of the organization’s initial funding. Wozniak’s favorite video game is Tetris, and he has the condition prosopagnosia (or face-blindness).
I thought being character No. 1001 would be appropriate for a computing pioneer like Woz. Here are 14 other characters I chose to honor numerically: No. 88 (Doc Emmett Brown), No. 100 (Benjamin Franklin), No. 200 (Johnny Cash), No. 300 (Leonidas I), No. 400 (Charles Darwin), No. 500 (William Gibson), No. 600 (Jeff Mangum), No. 666 (Nero), No. 700 (J. D. Salinger), No. 800 (Niall Ó Glacáin), No. 888 (Bernie Sanders), No. 900 (Don Hertzfeldt), No. 999 (Edward Snowden), No. 1000 (Alan Turing). As I was compiling this short list, I realized all 14 were male. Sorry, ladies. The patriarchy’s role in gender inequality and my personal focus on political leaders, artists, popular athletes and technology innovators are certainly reflected in the characters I’ve selected. My 8-bit characters are almost exactly 80% male and 20% female, which isn’t very equitable, but I have been making efforts to discover and celebrate a greater proportion of female characters with ongoing series like women in STEM. Modern cultures and our history books are still pretty awful at acknowledging the contributions of women, especially women artists and scientists, but I’m trying to be better.
Alan Turing was a pioneering English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. During World War II, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking center. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic. After the war, he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts, when such behavior was still a criminal act in the UK. He accepted treatment with DES (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He was born on June 23, 1912 and died on June 7, 1954 from cyanide poisoning.
No. 1000. I finally hit four figures. Over the past five years, I have created an encyclopedia/journal of 1000 playable 8-bit characters for Mascot Mashup: Gorillas, my remake/mashup of the classic QBasic Gorillas artillery game. With this milestone reached—and with my second child due in less than three weeks—I will probably abandon my weekly schedule of primitive pixel art sometime this summer and reduce my commitment to whenever I feel like it. No matter what I do in the future, I am amazed that I stuck with this project for so long.
Edward Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American computer professional, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, and former contractor for the U.S. government who copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 without prior authorization. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments. On June 21, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property. Russian authorities granted him one-year asylum, which was later extended to three years.
Note: Edward Snowden’s principled whistleblowing has fueled important debates over mass surveillance and government secrecy. It’s been three years now. Snowden is still in Russia, but since September 2015 has been an essential voice on Twitter. Check out this Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) article: “3 Years Later, the Snowden Leaks Have Changed How the World Sees NSA Surveillance.”
Tim Berners-Lee (born June 8, 1955) is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid-November of that same year. Berners-Lee is the founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the founders chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Note: In today’s New York Times article, “The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It,” Tim Berners-Lee discussed how the modern web’s corporate control and government surveillance “completely undermines the spirit of helping people create.” On that note, Berners-Lee will give a live-streamed keynote address, “Re-decentralizing the web – some strategic questions,” today at the Decentralized Web Summit at 9:45 a.m. PT. The theme of the summit is “locking the web open.” Happy birthday to Tim.
Douglas Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human-computer interaction, which resulted in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers and precursors to graphical user interfaces (bitmapped screens). These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. The underlying technologies of the demonstration influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s. Engelbart’s Law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.
Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon, and graduated from Oregon State College in Corvallis in 1948. As someone who has worked at Oregon State University for over 11 years now, I can say that Engelbart is considered one of the luminaries of the institution; he’s up there with Linus Pauling. The OSU Alumni Association has a nice story on Engelbart: “Up Close and Personal: Inventor of the Computer Mouse.”
Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator. During World War II he headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project that produced the first nuclear weapons. Bush was the man behind the scenes of the atomic bomb project. He coordinated the activities of some 6,000 leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. Bush was a well-known policymaker and public intellectual during World War II, when he was in effect the first presidential science advisor. He is also known in engineering for his work on analog computers, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, a hypothetical adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of hypertext. Bush was also chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.
Ralph H. Baer (March 8, 1922 – December 6, 2014) was a German-born American video game developer, inventor and engineer, and was known as “The Father of Video Games” due to his many contributions to games and the video game industry in the latter half of the 20th century. Born in Germany, he and his family fled to the United States before the outbreak of World War II. In 1951, while working at Loral, he proposed the idea of playing games on television screens, but his boss rejected it. Later in 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, his 1951 idea came back to his mind, and he would go on to develop eight hardware prototypes. The last two (the Brown Box and its de/dt extension) would become the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. Baer would contribute to the development of other consoles and consumer game units, including the electronic memory game Simon for Milton Bradley in 1978.
Ada, Countess of Lovelace was a British mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on the Analytical Engine, an early mechanical general-purpose computer invented by Charles Babbage. The engine was to be programmed using punched cards. Lovelace’s notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Specifically, she developed an algorithm to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer. Lovelace was born on December 10, 1815 and died on November 27, 1852 at the age of 36.
Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944. In the 1950s, Hopper invented the first compiler for a computer programming language and helped popularize the idea of machine-independent programming languages—which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches (in one instance, removing a moth from a computer). Owing to her accomplishments and her naval rank, Hopper is sometimes referred to as “Amazing Grace.” She was born on December 9, 1906 and died on January 1, 1992.
Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist, systems engineer and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1969, in a critical moment of the Apollo 11 mission, Hamilton’s team’s work prevented an abort of landing on the moon. She was 32 years old when the Apollo Lunar Module landed on the moon while running her code. She designed software robust enough to handle buffer overflows and cycle-stealing, which was instrumental in the success of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Hamilton is also credited with coining the term “software engineering.” In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language, based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design. Hamilton was born on August 17, 1936.
The Little Professor is a backwards calculator designed for children ages five to nine. Instead of providing the answer to a mathematical expression entered by the user, it generates unsolved expressions and prompts the user for the answer. The Little Professor was first released by Texas Instruments in 1976. As the first electronic educational toy, the Little Professor is a common item on calculator collectors’ lists. An emulator of the Little Professor for Android was published in 2012.
I still have my Little Professor calculator from the early 1980s in a box somewhere, as well as a couple of Tiger handheld games. I was quite fond of the robotic way the Little Professor spoke. If you play as the Little Professor in my retro artillery game, he throws money. In other money-throwing news, we officially closed on a new house today, and so the laborious process of moving across town begins. Keeping up with any of my hobbies is going to be difficult for a little while.
Russell A. Kirsch invented the square pixel. The history is that in the late 1940s, Kirsch led a research team that created America’s first internally programmable computer, the SEAC. By 1957 he and his team had invented a scanner which, using the computing power of SEAC, converted photographs to digital images. This breakthrough created the basis for satellite imaging, CAT scans, barcodes and desktop publishing. Kirsch is now retired and resides in Portland, Oregon. These days he claims that inventing square pixels was a bad idea and has a written a program that creates smoother, variably shaped pixels.
I think this story is really sweet. The first scanned digital image made on a computer in 1957 showed Kirsch’s baby son. Due to the importance of this first digital photograph, Life credited it as one of the 100 Photographs that Changed the World in 2003. Without Kirsch, this 8-bit-themed site wouldn’t be possible, in so many ways.
William Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist who has been called the “noir prophet” of the cyberpunk subgenre. Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in 1982 and later popularized the concept in his debut novel Neuromancer (1984). Gibson’s early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans. Gibson has written more than 20 short stories and 10 critically acclaimed novels. He posts frequent, interesting updates to Twitter as @GreatDismal.
Frankly, I’m a little surprised that I’ve now drawn 500 of these primitive pixel art characters. What a weird habit.
An American business magnate, investor and philanthropist. He is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. With a net worth of $56 billion, he ranks among the world’s wealthiest people. Born on this day in 1955, Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution.
An American entrepreneur and inventor. He was co-founder, chairman and former CEO of Apple. In the late 1970s, Jobs and company developed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the 2000s, he led Apple’s return to profitability with the iMac, iTunes Store, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Jobs also held leadership roles at Pixar and Disney.
In memoriam: Steve Jobs passed away yesterday, on October 5, 2011. Rest in peace.
Steve Wozniak – No. 1001
Steve Wozniak (born August 11, 1950), nicknamed “Woz,” is an American inventor, electronics engineer, programmer and technology entrepreneur who co-founded Apple Inc. He is known as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Wozniak single-handedly developed the 1976 Apple I, which was the computer that launched Apple. He primarily designed the 1977 Apple II, while Jobs oversaw the development of its unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique power supply. In 1990, Wozniak helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing some of the organization’s initial funding. Wozniak’s favorite video game is Tetris, and he has the condition prosopagnosia (or face-blindness).
I thought being character No. 1001 would be appropriate for a computing pioneer like Woz. Here are 14 other characters I chose to honor numerically: No. 88 (Doc Emmett Brown), No. 100 (Benjamin Franklin), No. 200 (Johnny Cash), No. 300 (Leonidas I), No. 400 (Charles Darwin), No. 500 (William Gibson), No. 600 (Jeff Mangum), No. 666 (Nero), No. 700 (J. D. Salinger), No. 800 (Niall Ó Glacáin), No. 888 (Bernie Sanders), No. 900 (Don Hertzfeldt), No. 999 (Edward Snowden), No. 1000 (Alan Turing). As I was compiling this short list, I realized all 14 were male. Sorry, ladies. The patriarchy’s role in gender inequality and my personal focus on political leaders, artists, popular athletes and technology innovators are certainly reflected in the characters I’ve selected. My 8-bit characters are almost exactly 80% male and 20% female, which isn’t very equitable, but I have been making efforts to discover and celebrate a greater proportion of female characters with ongoing series like women in STEM. Modern cultures and our history books are still pretty awful at acknowledging the contributions of women, especially women artists and scientists, but I’m trying to be better.