6 people to be thankful for

These are the 6 people I am thankful for because without them we wouldn’t have the modern IT world as we know it. There would be no Internet, no Linux, no Apple and no free software movement.

Dennis Ritchie is the creator of the C programming language, which is the mother of many other programming languages. He, along with Ken Thompson, also created the Unix operating system. Without him there would be no Mac OS X and no Linux.

Timothy John Berners-Lee (aka TimBL) invented the World Wide Web when he was working at CERN as a contractor. You wouldn’t be reading ITworld today without him. He is also one of the strongest voices in support of net neutrality.

Vint Cerf is known as one of the fathers of the Internet, along with Bob Kahn and Donald Davies. He is also the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol. He played a critical role in the founding and formation of ICANN, a body that ‘coordinates’ the domain name system as its primary role.

Richard Matthew Stallman (aka RMS) founded the GNU Project to create a free software replacement for the Unix operating system. Today’s Linux-based operating systems use a lot of GNU components. He also authored GNU GPL, one of the most popular free software licenses.

Linus Torvalds is the author of the Linux kernel, the world’s largest shared project. Linux today literally powers the modern IT infrastructure. Linux is also credited for making open source popular among enterprise customers. Torvalds also created Git, the most popular software version control system.

Brendan Eich co-founded the Mozilla project, which triggered the open source, standards-based web browsing revolution. But Eich’s biggest achievement is the JavaScript programming language, which is among the three core technologies (along with HTML and CSS) needed for modern web pages.