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
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.”
The 45th Vice President of the United States (1993-2001), under President Bill Clinton, and the Democratic candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Gore is also an environmental activist who wrote An Inconvenient Truth. He has founded several nonprofits including the Alliance for Climate Protection, and received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in climate change activism. A well-known animatronic human, Gore was “born” tomorrow in 1948.
I’m pretty tired of creating 8-bit versions of famous white dudes in suits, so this character is based on a Futurama version of Al Gore (plus his South Park superhero cape). In the 31st century, Gore is First Emperor of the Moon. You guys, I’m serial. I’m super-serial. Lockbox.
Douglas Engelbart – No. 994
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.”