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Who-is-who in the UNIX community



Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie
born: 1941 in Bronxville, New York
description: Develloper of the Unix Operating System and writer of the C programming language.
Homelink
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email: dmr@NOSPAM.bell-labs.com


Kenneth Thompson
born: 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana
description: Co-develloper of the Unix Operating System, writer of the B programming language and Pascal language.
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Brian W. Kernighan
description: Co-develloper of the Unix Operating System, Co-develloper of the C programming language and the K in the AWK programming language (the other AWK guys where: Alfred V. [A]ho, Peter J. [W]einberger).
Homelink, Homelink at Bell Labs
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Donald E. Knuth
born: 1938
imaginary presentation: Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on the computerized world was the greatest.
Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"
Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!"
Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that..."
Homelink
lookup on Wikipedia


Andrew S. Tanenbaum
born: 1944
description: Professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in The Netherlands on computer architecture, operating systems and networks. Creator of minix and amoeba OS. Best Know for the early and heavy discussion with Linus following the quote "Linux is obsolete!".
Homelink
lookup on Wikipedia
email: ast@NOSPAM.cs.vu.nl


Bill Joy
born: 1955
description: Started out at Berkeley (worked on the paging system of BSD), creator of the sadistic vi editor [which we all love], creator of the c-shell and co-founder / Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems.
lookup on Sunsite
lookup on Wikipedia


M. Douglas McIlroy
alias: Doug
description: Engineer, mathematician, and programmer, responsible for stuff like: Unix pipes, software component concept and several Unix programs. Retired in 1997 from Bell Laboratories.
Bio
Homelink
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email: mcilroy@NOSPAM.dartmouth.edu

Free / Open Source related


Miguel de Icaza
born: 1973 in Mexico City
description: De Icaza's co-founded the company Helix Code (=Ximian) and sells Gnome service and support.
Companylink
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email: miguel@NOSPAM.ximian.com


Larry Wall
born: 1954 in Los Angeles
description: Perl creator and Guru extra-ordinaire.
Homelink
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email: larry@NOSPAM.wall.org


Linus Benedict Torvalds
born: 1969 in Helsinki
description: Ever heard of the Linux Operating System?
Homelink
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email: torvalds@NOSPAM.transmeta.com


Eric S. Raymond
alias: ESR
born: 1957 in Boston, Massachusetts
description: "Open Source" poster boy, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, writer of the book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and keeper of "The Jargon File".
Homelink
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email: esr@NOSPAM.thyrsus.com


Bruce Perens
description: Co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, former Debian Project Leader, primary author of the Open Source Definition and Hewlett-Packard senior OSS strategist.
Homelink
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email: bruce@NOSPAM.perens.com


Richard Matthew Stallman
alias: RMS
born: 1953 in Manhattan
description: Founder of the Free Software Foundation and last standing MIT AI-labs hacker. This guy gave up is life for its pricipples - well known as "not an easy person", but he deserves the respect to the fullest!
Homelink, Sitelink
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email: rms@NOSPAM.gnu.org


Alan Cox
description: Linux kernel developer No.2 (or "the *other* No.1"), extremely gifted debugger and RedHat employee.
Sitelink
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email: alan.cox@NOSPAM.linux.org


Jon "Maddog" Hall
description: Software Engineer, President/Executive Director of Linux International and godfather of Linus daughter.
Biolink
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email: maddog@NOSPAM.li.org or maddog@NOSPAM.usenix.org


Dave S. Miller
description: Currently working at RedHat. Does a large amount of work on the Sparc port, set-up and maintaines the VGER CVS tree (unofficial playground for patch feeding to Linus, stuff like the Sparc port and the original Linux kernel mailing list).


Theodore Y. Ts'o
cname: Ted
description: Currently working at IBM. Ted is one of the Senior Trusted Lieutenants of Linus who has a lot going on, even outside the Linux world.
see also lkml
old homelink, current homelink (i guess...)
email: tytso@NOSPAM.mit.edu


Larry McVoy
description: Larry came from SUN Microsystems, is author of the sourceware document and founder of a startup called BitMover Inc. Bitmover's main product "BitKeeper Source Management software" is mainly written for Linus Thorvalds after the "Linus doesn't scale" and VGER issue back in 1998.
Homelink, Personal Homelink
Bitkeeper description in lkml.


Brian Behlendorf
description: Brian founded CollabNet, with O'Reilly & Associates, in July 1999. He is also co-founder and member on The Board of Directors of The Apache Software Foundation.
Homelink
email: brian@NOSPAM.behlendorf.com


Stephen C. Tweedie
description: Currently working at RedHat. Owner of ext3 filesystem. Graduated Ph.D. December 1999.


Jamie Zawinski
aias: jwz
description: Founder of XEmacs (out of Lucid Emacs which is a split from GNU Emacs), co-creator / develloper of Mozilla Dot Org during the first year. Became disillusioned with the Mozilla project, resigned from Netscape Communications Corporation in 1999 and started running the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco.
Finaly: this is why Jamie thinks "why cooperation with RMS is impossible".
Homelink
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email: jwz@NOSPAM.jwz.org


Furthermore we have: Kurt Garloff, Cort Dougan, Martin Mares, Geert Uyterhoeven, Paul Vixie .., Eric allman .., Larry Augustin (CEO VA_Research), Tim O'Reilly (duh), Tridgel andrew (original Samba author), Guido van Rossum (Python), Michael Tiemann (Cygnus Solutions founder), John Ousterhout (creator of TCL) ..

Special Notice


Rob Pike: 1st bitmap, Plan9
Ron Rivest: The "R" in RSA
Gene Spafford: security, COAST supervisor
Robert (Bob) Young: RedHat CEO
Seymour Cray: Set the next level for Supercomputing, programmed its OS in octal
Steve Jobs: Next, Apple mac, OSX
William & Lynn Jolits: first porters of BSD to x386, later spiniffs became Net/Free/Open BSD.
Dave Stutz: implementor of Microsoft's shared source version of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI)

Networking
(not really Unix but still wanted to add these...)


Sir Arthur C. Clarke
born: 1917 in Minehead, Somerset, Great Britain
description: Inventor of the geostationary satellite and sience fiction author most famous for his book "2001: A Space Odyssey".
Website
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Timothy J. Berners-Lee
cname: Tim
born: 1955 in London, England
description: Inventor of the World Wide Web (based on a paper from Arthur C. Clarke) while working at CERN, using hypertext (see: Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson), now the overall Director of the W3C.
W3C Biolink
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email: timbl@NOSPAM.w3.org

Other websites:
PEOPLE and PIONEERS
Computer History Museum "Hall of Fellows"

Copyright © 2002-2005 W. Van Hooste.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.