Teema 9 - IT juhtimine ja riskihaldus

James Gosling 

 
James Gosling completed a PhD in computer science and contributed to software innovation.
Gosling was born in 1955 near Calgary in Canada. He invented the Java programming language, the first programming language which was able to adapt to highly distributed applications and is designed to work with the Internet. He is the father of the programming language which changed the world forever.
He is currently a chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems, which he joined in 1984. In the 90s Gosling founded the Green project, which eventually was renamed to Java. The aim of the software he created was to work on as many platforms and devices as possible without it requiring customization each time.
Despite the fact most of the technology developed by Gosling within project Green was never released, he saw some underlying principles would be very handy for the current Internet era.
Java was officially launched in 1995. The original design, compiler and virtual machine were made my Gosling. He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering for his big achievement and contribution to society. Not only did he create Java, Gosling also contributed to Gosling Emacs and Newa.
According to some critics Java never lived up to its initial claim ‘write-once-run-anywhere’, which is correct, but Java’s success was exactly because the code was robust and reusable on multiple major platforms such as desktops/laptops and smart phones. This means the claims of the critics can be neglected.

 

 

Bill Gates 

 
Bill Gates is the joint founder of Microsoft, world’s biggest software distribution company. His approach to business and technology was essential in making technology available for everyone.
In 1955 Gates was born to a wealthy family in Seattle, Washington as the child of a well-known lawyer and mother who served for the First Interstate Bank.
At the age of 13 Gates was deeply involved within software programming, after he excelled in science and mathematics.
Together with his schoolmates he began programming and fixing bugs for the Computer Center Corporation. In 1970 Gates and his friend Paul Allen (which whom he later co-founded Microsoft) formed a venture which they called Traf-O-Data. An Intel 8008 processor was assigned to count traffic.
Three years later Gates enrolled at Harvard University. He met Steve Ballmer there, his future business partner. They developed a version of the Basic programming language for one of the first microcomputers, called the Altair 8800.
Gates then decided to drop out of Harvard and founded Micro-Soft together with Allen, which was renamed to Microsoft Corporation later. Only just after founding the company, Gates began to license his MS-DOS OS (operating system) to IBM PC clone manufacturers. Gates strived for global dominance, which he wanted to achieve with the development of Windows, a graphical user interface (GUI) as an addition to its DOS command line. In the 90s Windows pretty much killed Gem and Geos, which were competitive DOS-based GUIs built by other developers.
Gates achieved to get Microsoft’s Windows OS pre-installed on the majority of PCs shipped worldwide, after which Microsoft became world’s biggest software production company. Gates became one the richest people on earth.
In 2000 Gates stepped down from his position as chief executive officer, after which in 2008 he became a part-time worker. Since his retirement from being CEO, Gates donated about 20 billion dollars to charity. He then appeared in famous cartoons such as South Park, Family Guy and the Simpsons.