Paul Brainerd (Aldus PageMaker)
The US company Aldus Corporation was founded on 1 February 1984 in Seattle, Washington, by Paul Brainerd (born 1947). Brainerd has a B.S. degree in business administration from the University of Oregon (1970), and an M.A. degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota (1975) and worked at the Minneapolis newspaper..Read More
Jarkko Oikarinen (Internet Relay Chat)
It was already mentioned on this site, that the first chat program in the world (EMISARI) was designed in 1971 by Murray Turoff. EMISARI however was used mainly for government and educational purposes and never became popular. The program, which gave birth to the modern extremely popular chat movement was the Internet..Read More
Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web)
Tim Berners-Lee used to say: “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web.” As simple as it may seem, how did this “simple” invention happen? n March 1989, a physicist and a computer nerd in CERN (European..Read More
Alan Emtage (Archie)
The Internet’s first search engine—the Archie system, was created in 1989 by a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, Alan Emtage. Emtage (born 27 November 1964, in Barbados) conceived the first version of Archie, which was actually a pre-Web internet search engine for locating material in public FTP archives. native..Read More
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
Metaverse of Neal Stephenson
The term Metaverse was coined in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, and refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space (Metaphysical Universe). eal Town Stephenson (born 31 October 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction and..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