Andy Hertzfeld (Mac OS)
On 24 January 1984, Apple Computer Inc.’s chairman Steve Jobs took to the stage of Apple’s annual shareholders meeting in Cupertino, to show off the very first Macintosh personal computer in a live demonstration. Macintosh 128 came bundled with what was later called the Mac OS, but then known simply as the System Software (or System). he..Read More
Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris)
One of the most genius and popular computer games of all time, Tetris, was conceived by the Russian Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. Алексей Леонидович Пажитнов (Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov) was born in 1955, in Moscow, Russia. After graduating from the Moscow Institute of Aviation, he was hired as a programmer at..Read More
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