Who was the first programmer
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), the daughter of renowned romantic poet George Gordon Byron, revealed her zest for maths and other exact sciences from childhood. She is known as the world's first computer programmer.
In the 1820-30s, she used to study machine models designed by mathematician Charles Babbage. First, she focused on the difference model to automatically calculate logarithms and trigonometric functions. Then, she worked with the analytical one.
The latter was described by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea in 1842. Ada gladly translated it into English and accompanied the work with her own comments. The software algorithm she provided in the notes to the article was the first program created directly for a computer.
Donald Knuth (born in 1938)
American Donald Erwin Knuth is known to the world as the creator of the popular TeX computer layout (typing) system, the Metafont programming language as well as the WEB and CWEB systems. For many years, he was an honorary professor at Stanford University.
His monograph The Art of Programming, which has been in progress since 1962, and other academic works cover almost all areas of programming, from data structures to the analysis of algorithms, the direction created by Knuth himself.
In 1974, the scientist obtained the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and in 1996, he gained the Kyoto Prize, both are analogues of the Nobel Prize. Other awards include the Grace Murray Hopper First Prize (1971), the National Medal of Science (1979) from US President George Carter, the John von Neumann Medal (1995) from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Faraday Medal (2011) from the Institute Engineering and Technology (IET). Also, the “father of algorithm analysis” gained recognition for the unique textbook highly appreciated by the developers of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
David Patterson (born in 1947)
American computer engineer David Patterson is also one of the pioneers of the computer industry. His academic career is closely linked to the University of California at Berkeley, where he held senior positions and was a professor from 1976 to 2016.
Patterson made a significant contribution to the development of a reduced instruction set RISC processor (he also coined the term), whose architecture is used by 99% of all modern chips. The scientist explored redundant arrays of independent RAID drives. Leading the NOW project, he anticipated computer clustering. He has co-authored several books on computer architecture that are widely used in teaching computer science.
For his innovative solutions, David Patterson received more than 30 awards. In 2008, he was presented with the Eckert-Moshley award. In 2018, he shared the prestigious ACM Turing Award with his close friend John Hennessy, the Chairman of the Google parent company Alphabet. He used to be the ACM President in 2004 –2006.
Bjarne Stroustrup (born in 1952)
The future outstanding computer scientist, Dane Bjarne Stroustrup, got to know the computer only being a student at Aarhus University. Soon, he began to develop software for the needs of the university and write programs for Unisys, a global manufacturer of integrated software and hardware solutions.
Proceeding with his studies at Cambridge, Bjarne was interested in microprogramming and distributed systems design and became a pioneer in the field of object-oriented programming. In 1979, the scientist received a PhD in computer science. By that time, Stroustrup had learned as many as 20 programming languages and decided to create a new one, while living in the US. He designed applied C ++, an improved version of the C language. As of today, his modified C version, based on his textbook of the same name, has been translated into 19 languages and is learned by students around the world. The professor himself lectures at several prestigious universities and also collaborates with Morgan Stanley.
Among the achievements of the talented programmer, the following awards are the most noteworthy: Grace Murray Hopper (1993), John von Neumann (2004), William Procter (2005), and Dr. Dobbs (2008) awards. Stroustrup is also a member of the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science (TAMEST) and the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
Tim Berners-Lee (born in 1955)
Another programmer who changed the IT world is Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee. The boy was born to a family of pioneers in the computer industry and could not imagine his life without electronics. As a physics student at Oxford King's College, he created his first PC and even tried to write his own programming languages.
In 1990, he developed HTML, the technique that became known as the hypertext, URL, the unique "address" of any resource on the network, and the HTTP protocol. These technologies laid down the basis of the World Wide Web. In 2001, the scientist received the prestigious Free Software Award in the field of computer science. In 2004, Queen Elizabeth II presented this full-blooded Briton with the title of a Knight Commander "for the service to the benefit of the global Internet development". In 2007, she awarded him the Order of Merit.
A year later, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web Foundation, promoting the open Internet as a public benefit and underscoring its advantages. And in 2013, he was put in charge of the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), a public organization advocating for a fast and accessible Internet and backed by such large corporations as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.
James Gosling (born in 1955)
James Gosling has made a tremendous contribution to the IT industry. The Green Project, which determined the fate of the outstanding Canadian programmer, was launched in 1991 when he was working at Sun Microsystems. Three years later, Gosling invented the object-oriented and cross-platform Java programming language. He implemented the original Java compiler and a virtual machine.
James Gosling participated in numerous projects as a scientist, both during his studies at the Universities of Calgary and Carnegie Mellon and later. He is credited as the inventor of NeWS (a windowed distribution system for computing on the Internet), GosMacs (a text editor of the Emacs family), Star7 (a universal prototype device for a smart home system), and a multiprocessor version of the Unix OS.
In 2011, the programmer participated in the development of Google algorithms. Having left the IT giant, he started developing software for underwater research as part of the Liquid Robotics startup. Today, as an engineer, he works on the cloud web services platform infrastructure at Amazon Web Services.
Among the main awards of the scientist are the Order of Canada (2007), the highest national civilian award, and the John von Neumann Medal (2015).
Anders Hejlsberg (born in 1960)
Danish engineer Anders Hejlsberg has had a passion for programming since childhood. At the Technical University of Lyngby, he developed programs for Nascom machines.
His Turbo Pascal is the first language to help university students take the first steps in programming. In the early 80s, his compiler was a real breakthrough in software development because of its aggressive pricing strategy, one of the first full-screen IDEs, and high efficiency ensured by a very short execution time.
Later on, as the chief architect of Delphi, Hejlsberg focused on fast performance. Delphi, in turn, had a huge impact on the development of the concept of the C # language for the Microsoft.NET platform. Interestingly, Bill Gates himself convinced Anders to move to Microsoft in 1996. The talented programmer currently works for the company as a leading C# architect and main typewriter developer.
Anders Hejlsberg obtained the Dr. Dobb’s Excellence in Programming Award in 2001.
Brendan Eich (born in 1961)
Another living legend of the IT industry is American programmer Brendan Eich, known for his natural-born modesty and persistent views on human nature.
After starting his career at Silicon Graphics with operating systems and compilers, Brendan mastered programming in 7 years. The fruit of his work at Netscape Communications was the invention of JavaScript in 1995. This language is the bedrock of the entire modern Web and one of the main standards in the field of web programming.
A few years later, when Explorer came on the scene, Brendan Eich took over the Mozilla project. So, the Firefox browser came into being under his supervision. After the scandalous departure from the post of CEO of Mozilla Corp. in 2014, Brendan Eich has been working on his own IT project for several years. He is developing the Brave browser, the main tasks of which are effective ad blocking and user privacy protection.
Linus Torvalds (born in 1969)
Finnish-American software engineer Linus Torvalds is the creator and the lead developer of the famous Linux kernel. Invented in 1991, the operating system quickly gained in popularity because it was distributed free of charge, ran on any computer, and was open source. Later on, many other popular operating systems were developed on its concept, including Ubuntu, Fedora, and Android.
In his book Just for Fun, Torvalds explained that he wrote the program specifically for the new PC he was using and regardless of the OS because he wanted to use its features with the 80386 processor. This program later became the Linux kernel. To manage the development of the kernel, the scientist created a distributed version control system Git. Currently, thousands of different programmers are involved in Linux updates. Linus Torvalds himself owns this trademark and monitors its use.
In 1998, the engineer was awarded the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He gained the Ada Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society (the highest award in computing in the UK) two years later. In 2012, the national award "Technology of the Millennium" was personally presented to him by President of Finland Sauli Niinisto. In 2014, the IEEE Computer Pioneer Medal was added to his trophies.
John Carmack (born in 1970)
American IT engineer John Carmack earned the nickname John Engine as a student. From 1990 to 2012, he designed 41 (!) games, including Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Rage, Commander Keen, and the legendary Doom, released by John's company ID Software. It was Doom that brought him worldwide fame as a super-efficient developer. The games developed further cemented the success of the programmer, who opened a new era in the world of computer games.
Innovations that Carmack has applied to 3D graphics include the Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes, adaptive tessellation, binary space tiling, beamcasting, surface caching and MegaTexture technology, pointer conversion, objects beyond borders, and more. Original 3D techniques have become an integral attribute of subsequent computer games, especially shooters.
The developer of revolutionary programming methods was awarded two Emmy awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), as well as the GDC Awards at the Lifetime Achievement Game Developers Conference (2009).
In the period from 2013 to 2019, Carmack was actively engaged in virtual reality technology in Oculus VR. At the moment, the scientist is riveted to creating powerful artificial intelligence in his new company Keen Technologies.
Bram Cohen (born in 1975)
American freelance programmer Bram Cohen is known for creating the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, which is used to download files quickly from the World Wide Web.
Back in 2001, a PR campaign to support the launch of a new product and the design of the official website with black text on a white background came unnoticed. Cohen made up for the lack of marketing efficiency with the technical advantages of his brainchild: high file download speed and network decentralization. Thanks to BitTorrent, several users could distribute one file at a time. Besides, the files were not downloaded sequentially, but in parallel and in parts, which made it very convenient to organize their distribution.
Now the P2P protocol is over 20 years old, but it still proves its utility. The number of its users has exceeded 250 million people. The technologies invented by Bram have been adopted by such IT giants as Facebook, Twitter, World of Tanks, etc.