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
Pierre Omidyar (eBay)
On 4 September 1995, the 28-year-old software developer and entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar launched the famous eBay auction site as an experiment in how a level playing field would affect the efficiency of a marketplace. As of 2022, eBay is still one of the world’s leading marketplace and eCommerce platforms, with..Read More
Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google)
In January 1996, exactly two years from the moment, when two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University (Jerry Yang and David Filo) started their work on the project, which will become the now ubiquitous web portal Yahoo, two other graduates at Stanford—Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Stanford computer science graduate students,..Read More
Shawn Fanning (Napster)
Shawn Fanning was born on 22 November 1980, in Brockton, Massachusetts. He worked summers at his uncle’s (John Fanning) Internet company, called Chess.net. During this work, wanting to create a more straightforward method of finding music than by searching IRC or Lycos, he spent months writing the code for Napster,..Read More
Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)
The old dream of a world encyclopedia of Paul Otlet and Herbert Wells from the 1930s became possible in the 1990s, after the rapid progress of the Internet and the World Wide Web. he first known proposal for an online Internet encyclopedia was made by the Internet enthusiast Rick Gates in October 1993. Gates..Read More
Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)
In 2001 an American computer programmer, named Bram Cohen, began his work on a protocol and a program, which would change the entertainment industry and the interchange of information on the Web. This peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol was named BitTorrent, as well as the first file-sharing program to use the protocol,..Read More