people

This page highlights works about some people associated with development of the net.

Vinton Cerf's memoir for the Smithsonian oral history program is online. He also wrote a brief memoir in 1993. 

Snapshots of Licklider, Baran and other fathers of the Net are online as part of Hafner's disappointingly thin 'Wizards' site.

Licklider's Man-Computer Symbiosis and The Computer As Communication Device (PDF) are online. He's the subject of Mitchell Waldrop's The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider & the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking 2001).

Robert Kahn, former DARPA/ARPANET guru and knowbot inventor, has a staid bio on the Corporation for National Research Initiatives site. 

Jon Postel, another progenitor of the Internet, is commemorated on the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) site.

This site includes a profile of mathematician Claude Shannon.

For Yuri Rubinky, SGML pioneer, see his memorial page.

Ted [Theodor Holm] Nelson, hypermedia guru and proponent of global digital library Xanadu was memorably profiled in Wired and in Matt Kazmierski's more academic The World Wide Web: The Beginning & Now site.

Nelson's home page is worth a visit, particularly for the account of Xanadu. He notes that

Project Xanadu, the original hypertext project, is often misunderstood as an attempt to create the World Wide Web. It has always been much more ambitious, proposing an entire form of literature where links do not break as versions change; where documents may be closely compared side by side and closely annotated; where it is possible to see the origins of every quotation; and in which there is a valid copyright system - a literary, legal and business arrangement - for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation at any time and in any amount. The Web trivialized this original Xanadu model, vastly but incorrectly simplifying these problems to a world of fragile ever-breaking one-way links, with no recognition of change or copyright, and no support for multiple versions or principled re-use. Fonts and glitz, rather than content connective structure, prevail.

In 2005 he lamented that the Wired profile

is a sewer of lies, concealments and fabrications, steaming with malice, ...to dishonor and destroy our work, to annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and integrity of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure we had no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking behind the World Wide Web.  So far its dastardly purposes have been quite successful.

Nelson modestly claims that

I intend it will become known to posterity as a classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion.

For Douglas Engelbart a useful starting point is the Mousesite at Stanford Uni and Thierry Bardini's Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2000).

There's a wider view in Steve Lohr's Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts - the Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution (New York: Basic Books 2001), which is as over-written as its title.

   next page  (millennium)