
Giants of IT. The giants on whose shoulders we stand. One each day - antonpirker
http://www.giantsofit.org/1/charles-babbage
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jfaucett
Im kind of unsure as to how to interpret this, but there appears to be no
particular ordering just an influential cs person posted for each day of the
month.

Theres definitely pleanty of influencers missing from the current set,
McCarthy, Hoare, Dijkstra, to name few. If this were my list, I wouldnt have
Lovelace or Gates on it, but most of the others seem warrented enough (in my
opinion of course) :)

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antonpirker
hi. indeed it is just a list of persons in no particular ordering.

The persons you name are of course on the list. Lovelace already visible the
others will appear in the future. So every day one person is added.

If you have other persons you want to see on the list you can submit person
with a link in the footer of the page.

~~~
jfaucett
gotcha. nice job btw :)

~~~
antonpirker
thx!

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neals
To me, Bill Gates will always be what Steve Jobs is to so many.

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vezzy-fnord
That being?

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neals
_The_ being

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k__
Isn't he more like Zuckerberg?

I mean, he DID develop stuff, which Jobs didn't. He just didn't develop
groundbreaking stuff, he just sold it better than his competitors.

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anpk
Hate windows, but windows 3.1 was ground breaking for the tiime and was
primarily the reason why computers took off.

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a3n
Nice, bookmarked.

But please don't redirect giantsofit.org to your current feature, it makes it
tedious to correctly bookmark, and share, the site. Minor but unnecessary
annoyance.

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cactux
Here's another list, probably very similar:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pioneers_in_computer_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pioneers_in_computer_science)

~~~
masklinn
Oddly missing Haskell Curry and Robert Feys (type inference), Peter Landin
(more or less all modern functional programming[0]), Robin Milner (type
inference, ML, CCS), ...

[0] [http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/IO-monad-
history.html](http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/IO-monad-history.html)

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chrisBob
"classified"? Why not just use the wikipedia pictures for these people?

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antonpirker
The license of some of the Wikipedia pictures are preventing me to use them,
sorry.

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thebouv
Kudos to you for paying attention to the licensing instead of just ripping
them off.

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personjerry
This should probably be a Show HN.

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yitchelle
It would be interesting if degrees of separation could be shown between all of
these giants.

~~~
antonpirker
What do you mean with "degree of separation". Could you elaborate?

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yitchelle
For example, it would be interesting to see if or how Linus Torvalds connected
to Charles Babbage via the various relationships through the IT giants. If
there are 4(as an example) people between them, their degree of separation is
4.

It is similar to the Erdös number.

~~~
kedean
You need an activity to connect them, though. Erdos numbers are based on
collaborative math publications. The problem here is that some are researches
(you could do cs publications), some are software developers (torvalds,
gates), and some are just really influential.

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simula67
Good page! But Bill Gates did not develop BASIC or DOS.

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bluedino
Gates (along with Allen) did however _implement_ BASIC on quite a few
machines. BASIC is a very simple interpreted language, but it was technically
impressive to get it running on certain machines of the day as well as it
opening the doors to countless other people to begin their journey
programming.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Which is irrelevant because the claim being made is that he _created_ the
language.

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d_theorist
How many more times am I going to have to read that Ada Lovelace was the first
programmer? It is getting to be annoying.

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no1ne
I remembered reading an article regarding this over-hype -
[https://web.archive.org/web/20060813072159/http://archive.sa...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060813072159/http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/03/16feature.html)

Also this video -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K5p_tBcrd0&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K5p_tBcrd0&feature=youtu.be&t=36m29s)
jumping to minute 36 where Ada is discussed by the speaker.

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bjarne92
Tim Berners Lee should be on your list on the first place!

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antonpirker
Hi!

It's not a best of or top 100 list or something, it is in random order. But
Tim Berners Lee is of course on my list, so he will show up in the future.

~~~
fdemmer
i first thought it is by birth/or death date. _some_ relation to "now" might
make this more interesting, like the astronomy picture of the day. if there
are two on the same day they could simply be shifted.

~~~
antonpirker
on the start page ([http://www.giantsofit.org/](http://www.giantsofit.org/))
you will be redirected to the person of today. i just posted here the first
person because the person of today (jack kilby) has no image.

or do you mean more something like to have the person show on on her/his
birthday or day of death?

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laumars
I think he means the date is of special interest to that person. ie, birthday,
deathday, day they released the first version of programming language x, day
they founded company y, day product z sold it's first million copies, etc. Or
even keeping it topical such as with a new release of OS X you could have one
of the core designers / developers of the first version of MacOS.

It would make the list much more interesting, but would be significantly
harder to curate and would require you add some additional blurb to explain
why that individual was chosen for that day of the year. So I can't blame you
for going down the lower maintenance route of just compiling a random order
list of influential figures.

~~~
m-i-l
There's something about "random" order that doesn't sit comfortably with
someone like myself. I'd agree that some kind of connection to today's date,
e.g. birthday, release date, etc. would be good. Or even something simple like
making the entire list alphabetical or chronological (that would of course
entail preparing the entire list in advance, but if you still want to take
suggestions then those suggestions could be for next year's list).

