PEOPLE WHO CHANGED THE INTERNET

PEOPLE WHO CHANGED THE INTERNET

From its birth in the labs of Tim Berners-Lee back in 1992, to its interaction with the Napster in 1999, and its 2004 induction of Wikipedia: the Internet as we know it, has evolved drastically, been around the world literally, and changed the way humans live permanently.

Nothing can replace it, nothing is like it, and it has no alternative. The internet is like a diamond mine for the people who wish to acquire wealth, a profound lake of information for those who have an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and an eternal form of entertainment for those wish to amuse themselves.

With the passage of time, people from amongst us have emerged with the craziest of ideas to test and enhance the potential of this God’s gift to mankind. And it is due to the efforts of these noble souls, that we have the entire world at the simple tap of our fingers.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee – World Wide Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee; the father of World Wide Web. On 25 December 1990 he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student staff at CERN.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is also the founder of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology which comprises of companies that are willing to create standards and improvements of the Web.

From my point of view, if it wasn’t for him, none of the below mentioned personalities existed.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin – Google Inc.

Two PhDs from Stanford University started work in the garage of a friend’s. And they were defiantly not building steam engines!

They were, however, creating the internet’s most powerful search engine. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are arguably the world’s most successful Internet entrepreneurs and developers in history. This enabled them to earn billions, while assisting everyone from high school students to particle physicists have an easy time searching for information over the internet.

Google was first launched on Stanford’s website (google.stanford.edu) and then finally on Google.com in 1997. It is estimated that GOOGLE is worth about a staggering $25 billion dollars.

David Filo and Jerry Yang – Yahoo! Inc.

Yahoo! too is the creation of two Stanford University’s Electrical Engineer graduates, called Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yang started by listing web pages on the Internet and named it “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. Then, he decided to switch it to Yahoo! and the initial URL was at akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo

In December 1994, that particular website had already received over a million hits. Realizing its potential, David Filo and Jerry Yang got serious and diversified Yahoo! as a web portal.

David Filo’s net worth is $2.9 billion dollars and Jerry Yang’s is $2.3 billion dollars.

Bill Gates – Microsoft

William Henry “Bill” Gates III, is an American business magnate, philanthropist, the world’s third richest person (as of February 8, 2008), and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

Gates also holds the record of being the Richest Person in the world for 15 consecutive years.

Steven Paul Jobs – Apple Inc.

Steven Paul Jobs is the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. and former CEO of Pixar Animation Studios.

In the late 1970s, Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, created one of the first commercially successful personal computers. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven GUI (Graphical User Interface)

After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets.

Jobs is currently the Walt Disney Company’s largest individual shareholder and a member of its Board of Directors. He is considered a leading figure in both the computer and industries.

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook

One of the most admired and successful youngster of the 21st century is a 24 years old Harvard graduate – the world’s youngest billionaire, with an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion

He founded Facebook, the online social networking website. Zuckerberg launched The Facebook (FaceMatch) from his Harvard dorm room in 2004 and started promoting it to all Ivy League schools and some Boston institutions.

Soon, he bought over Facebook.com domain name. Facebook is now a household name with people of all ages, groups and interests, interacting with each other. Its business and pleasure at the same time!

Kevin Rose – Digg

You all know Kevin, don’t you? Perhaps one of the most respected internet idealist and TV show host, Kevin Rose has definitely placed a huge impacts among all Digg users.

He became well known as an on-air talent and later as a co-host working on TechTV’s popular show The Screen Savers (which later became Attack of the Show! ) until his departure from the network on May 2005.

He also co-founded Pownce and Revision3 besides his popular Digg.com, social-bookmarking website. He created Digg in 2004 by hiring a freelance programmer who Kevin Rose paid $12 per hour through eLance.

Kevin Rose later bought Digg.com domain name for $1,200 and then went on to buy larger server space. Digg received an ultra boost of capitals when they received $2.8 million of venture capital from Omidyar Network, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Greylock Partners.

Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia: a free and open content encyclopedia launched in 2001. He is also the co-founder of Wikia, a privately own web hosting company set up in 2004.

Jimmy Wales at first started a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia which is Nupedia. He then utilized the ideas of Nupedia with his “wiki” software to form today’s Wikipedia.

His work with Wikipedia, which has become the world’s largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world’s most influential people.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen – YouTube

Chad Hurley (aged 28) and Steve Chen (aged 27) became the founders of the popular San Bruno, California-based video sharing website YouTube, one of the biggest providers of videos on the Internet.

Chad Hurley used to work for eBay’s PayPal in the designing department where he designed their logo. Together with PayPal colleagues, Jared Karim and Steve Chen, Chad founded YouTube in 2005.

Google later acquired YouTube at $1.65 billion dollars.

Jeff Preston Bezos – Amazon

Jeff Bezos is the founder, chairman of board, president and the chief executive officer of Amazon.com, a major e-commerce company that sells goods through the Internet. His net worth is currently at $8.2 billion dollars.

He was named Time magazine Person of the Year in 1999.

Thomas Anderson – MySpace

Thomas “Tom” Anderson is the President of the social networking website, MySpace. He is one of the people identified as a founder of the site, along with CEO Chris DeWolfe.

Since newly created MySpace accounts include Tom as a default “friend,” he has become known as the face of MySpace. As of November 20, 2008, Tom has over 250 million “friends”, a number which is constantly increasing due to new MySpace accounts being created.

In 2003, working for eUniverse under the preview of Brad Greenspan he and a few other eUniverse employs set up the first pages of MySpace and the site grew from there. It is currently the most popular social networking website in the United States, and is the most popular website for teenagers as well.

Interesting Fact: According to several sources, in 1985 then 14-year-old San Pasqual High School (Escondido, California) student Tom Anderson was a computer hacker operating under the alias “Lord Flathead“.

He was known for leading a team that broke into Chase Manhattan Bank computers, altered records and left a message saying that unless he was given free use of the system he would destroy records. He was never charged.

Linus Torvalds – Linux

Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project’s coordinator.

Initially Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed “Freax” – a combination of “free”, “freak”, and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system, but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server where the kernel was first hosted for downloading, named Torvalds’ directory linux.

Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

Jack Dorsey – Twitter

Jack Dorsey is an American software architect and businessperson best known as the creator of Twitter – a free social networking and micro-blogging service. BusinessWeekTechnology Review named him to the TR35, an outstanding innovator under the age of 35. called him one of technology’s best and brightest. MIT’s

Dorsey, Stone and Williams co-founded Obvious which then spun off Twitter Inc. As chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by the venture capitalists who back the company. In October 2008 Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board.

As the service grew in popularity, Dorsey had to choose improving uptime as top priority— even over creating revenue, which as of 2008, Twitter was not designed to earn.