Sim Wong Hoo
On 1 July 1981, with a capital of only 6000 USD, the Singapore engineer Sim Wong Hoo, together with his childhood friend and polytechnic schoolmate Ng Kai Wa, opened a computer repair shop in Pearl’s Centre, in Chinatown, and founded Creative Technology. reative started by developing and selling an add-on..Read More
John Fairbanks (Poqet PC)
In 1987, the Texas Instruments’ engineer John P. Fairbanks (Electrical engineer from Missouri University of Science and Technology 1971) started Poqet Computer Co. with his former TI coworker Stavro Prodromou (who became president of Poqet, while Fairbanks was a vice-president), and Robert William Wilmot (electronics engineer, former head of Texas..Read More
Thomas Knoll (Photoshop)
Sometime in the fall of 1987, the 27 years old Ph.D. candidate in computer vision at the University of Michigan—Thomas Knoll, was trying to write a computer program to display grayscale images on a monochrome bitmap monitor. Because the program wasn’t directly related to his thesis on computer vision, Knoll..Read More
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina (NCSA Mosaic)
NCSA Mosaic of Marc Andreessen (born 9 July 1971) and Eric Bina (born 25 October 1964) was neither the first web browser (the first was the WorldWideWeb of Berners-Lee) nor the first graphical web browser (it was preceded by the lesser-known Erwise and ViolaWWW), but it was the web browser..Read More
IBM Simon (Frank J. Canova)
The first smartphone in the world—IBM Simon Personal Communicator—was announced at the COMDEX computer and technology trade show in Las Vegas, on 16 November 1992. The device was code-named “Sweetspot”, and after the very successful prototype demonstration at COMDEX, IBM began work on the commercial product, code-named “Angler”. Although the..Read More
David Filo and Jerry Yang (Yahoo )
At the beginning of 1994 two Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University—Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang (born 6 November 1968, in Taipei, Taiwan) and David Robert Filo (born 20 April 1966, in Wisconsin) were looking for a single place to find useful Web sites and for a way to keep..Read More
Ajay Bhatt (USB interface)
In 1990, while installing a new printer on his wife’s computer (she wanted to print school materials for their child), the 33 years old Indian-American techie Ajay Bhatt, who had just started as a senior staff architect on the chipset architecture team of Intel, was confronted with a huge frustration:..Read More
Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
Jeffrey Preston Bezos, the founder of the famous Amazon.com, was born on 12 January 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when his mother, Jackie, was still in her teens. Her marriage to his father lasted a little more than a year. She remarried when Bezos was five and Jeffrey took the name..Read More