[Sussex] NOW: So, who are the all-time greats? WAS Hello all

[Geoff Teale]

I'm slightyl older (26 on the 20th Feb this year) - just to back up the
last post...

> - Alan Turing - Broke Enigma

Yes, he worked on ways of breaking Enigma encoding.. he has a
justifiable claim to be _one_ of the founders of computing.

> - Joseph Van Neumman - Sounds like an 80's electronic music star

:)

John Von Neumman created the first stored program computer and did a
_lot_ of the maths that took us on the first steps beyond had wiring a
programs towards where we are now

> - Dennis Ritchie - Hmm... rings a bell. Sommat related to Apple?
> - Ken Thompson - Mayor of London? or is that Livingston....

Ken and Dennis worked at Bell Labs from the 1960's onwards.  Between
them they created UNIX (mainly Ken) and C admist a miriad of other
wonderful things.

> - Don Knuth - Pass...

He's a retired UNi lecturer.  He is still writing his huge book(s) "The
Art of computer programming" amongst a number of other Computer Science
titles.  If you've read and understood these books then you pretty much
know all the fundementals of computer programming.  He is also the
creator of the TeX typesetting system. 

> - Tony Hoare - There was someone that worked at Gatwick called that...

Did a lot of work on translation software.  Invented the Quicksort
algorithm.. failed in just about everything he tried to achieve - but
that's mainly because he tried to achieve some very difficult things :)

> - Edsger Dijkstra - Bless you...

Good at maths, worked out the best ways of doing a lot of taks in
computing (most of which is documented in Knuth) - tried to get the GOTO
statement wiped out of 3GL's.

> - Mitch Kapor - Wasn't he on Baywatch?

Founded Lotus, wrote 1,2,3 ... sold to IBM, retired rich.  REally not a
great contribution.

> - John Perry Barlow - Someone in Corination Street.

Wrote songs for the Grateful Dead... started the EFF (I think???).

> - Richard Stallman - GNU bloke

Yup...

> - Linus Torvalds - Invented that linux thing...
> - Larry Lessig - grr.. know the name... what he did escapes me atm though :/

Larry's a lawyer and a law professor - he also writes books about
Copyright, Patents and Sotware.

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation