In 1973, Thacker and a group of scientists at the famed Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) built the Alto, the world’s first desktop computer.  The Alto featured many innovations that we take for granted today in our personal computers: a television-like screen, graphical user interface, windows, icons, and a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor.

The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded Charles Thacker with the Turing Award, which is considered to be the “Nobel Prize in Computing.”  The award includes a $250,000 check, with financial support by Intel and Google.  Since 1966 the Turing Award has honored computer scientists and engineers who “created the systems and underlying theoretical foundations that have propelled the information technology industry.”

The award was named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, who described the mathematical foundation and limits of computing.  A programming language is considered to be “Turing Complete” when the “rules followed in sequence on arbitrary data can produce the result of any calculation.”  A device is considered to be a computer if it’s Turing Complete.

The Alto was never released as a commercial product, though Xerox built several thousand units.  The first prototype cost $12,000, which was surprisingly inexpensive compared to the mini and mainframe computers of the era.  Like many incredible PARC inventions, Xerox was slow to realize the commercial potential of the Alto.  It took Apple and the Macintosh to bring desktop computing to the masses a decade later.

Thacker was also the co-inventor of the Ethernet LAN, which is the ubiquitous computer network in homes and businesses today.  In 1983 Thacker co-founded the Systems Research Center (SRC) at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he designed the Firefly multiprocessor workstation.  This was yet another invention ahead of its time but pretty much standard today, even in general purpose PCs.  Thacker joined Microsoft Research in 1997 to help establish its Microsoft Research Cambridge laboratory, where he designed the hardware for the first Tablet PCs.  Over the years Thacker contributed to many other important projects including the first laser printer.  Thacker holds 29 patents in computer systems and networking.

Past winners of the Turing Award include Alan Kay in 2003 for pioneering object-oriented development and inventing the Smalltalk programming language, Douglas Engelbart in 1997 for his many important inventions including the computer mouse, and Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie in 1983 for their role in developing UNIX.

Top 10 Software Innovators of All Time
Top 10 Advances in Software Development

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So then why limit our ideas to just a 3×4-foot patch on the wall?  When we’re confined to the space of a typical whiteboard, our movements are constrained, and so our ideas may be limited as well.  If whiteboards are the snowy goodness of developer minds, then perhaps we should have whiteboards everywhere.

IdeaPaint turns virtually anything you can paint into a high-performance dry-erase surface, giving you the space you need to collaborate, interact and fully explore your creativity.  No matter where you use IdeaPaint, big ideas are sure to follow.

IdeaPaint is a flexible, durable and cost-effective dry-erase solution.  It can be applied to any smooth surface, outperforms and outlasts the leading dry-erase options, and works with all brands of dry-erase markers.

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To be a “most important” innovation, an innovation has to be an idea that is very widely used and is critically important where it applies. – David A. Wheeler

It’s not easy choosing the best innovators in an industry defined by innovation. The nature of software is such that the technologies, systems and products completely refresh every decade or so. The triumphant invention of just 10 years ago is now considered “legacy” or even obsolete. So making a lasting impression in the software business is a tough task indeed.

Following is my list of the top 10 software innovators of all time. Inclusion on this list doesn’t mean the person came up with every idea or wrote every byte of code. Rather, these are the people whose leadership, ideas, designs and products propelled the software industry forward by leaps and bounds. Their innovations affect us greatly even today.

10. Dan Bricklin – VisiCalc

Dan Bricklin was co-creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software available for personal computers. He received the Grace Hopper Award in 1981 for VisiCalc. He also founded Trellix, a website software company now owned by Web.com, and is founder and president of Software Garden.

VisiCalc was the first serious, mainstream business program for the IBM personal computer. It signaled the coming shift from large mainframes to small PCs, proving these personal computers could indeed be used for business. Many of the first IBM PCs were purchased just to run VisiCalc. Eventually Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel squashed VisiCalc, and unfortunately Bricklin never profited greatly from his invention.

9. Larry Ellison – Oracle

Larry Ellison founded Oracle in 1977 with $2000 of his own money. Oracle published the first commercially-available relational database and essentially launched the database market. Today, Oracle is the world’s leading supplier of database software and the second largest independent software company with nearly $10 billion in annual revenue. Oracle recently acquired PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and Hyperion.

Ellison is living proof that business sense is an innate gift, not something to be gleaned from academic textbooks. A college dropout, Ellison is now a multi-billionaire renowned for his business sense, drive and ambition.

8. Shawn Fanning – Napster

In 1998, Shawn Fanning created Napster, the first massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing system. Fanning appeared on the cover of Wired magazine and quickly rose to fame. Napster peaked in 2001 with 26 million users worldwide. However, Napster also became the target of several music industry lawsuits, which ultimately killed the service. Since 2002, Roxio has owned the Napster name, which it used to rebrand its PressPlay music service.

Napster forever changed the entertainment business. By providing an enormous selection of free music to download, it enabled people to obtain just the music hits, effectively demoting the album. Napster also made it easy for music enthusiasts to download songs that were otherwise difficult to obtain, such as older music, unreleased recordings, and concert bootlegs. The music industry is still struggling to recover from the impact of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing.

7. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen – YouTube

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen founded YouTube, a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google stock. In January 2008, nearly 79 million users watched over 3 billion videos on YouTube. Currently YouTube hosts about 83.4 million unique videos and 3.75 million user channels. YouTube consumes more Internet bandwidth today than was used by the entire Internet in 2000.

YouTube has become a global hub of self-expression. It was one of the main factors for Time magazine’s declaration of “you” as the “Person of the Year” in 2006. It allows you to “wrest power from the few and help one another for nothing.” This will “not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.” You are no longer just receiving the news produced by media, but you are creating your own news and becoming the hero in your own movies.

6. Linus Torvalds – Linux

Linus Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer who initiated development of the Linux kernel. At the time, the GNU Project had created many of the components necessary for a free software operating system but lacked a solid kernel. The result is Linux, the world’s most popular operating system that’s not Windows.

Torvalds wrote about 2% of the Linux kernel himself, which is significant, given there are thousands of contributors to the open source operating system. Today Torvalds is the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel. Torvalds owns the “Linux” trademark and manages the non-profit organization Linux International.

5. Marc Andreessen – Netscape

Marc Andreessen was the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications. AOL acquired Netscape in 1999 for $4.2 billion and made Andreessen its Chief Technology Officer. Andreessen was also the co-founder and chairman of software company Opsware (originally Loudcloud) when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. Currently he is co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social-networking websites.

Andreessen was 23 years old when he built the browser that launched the World Wide Web. The Netscape $2 billion IPO in 1995 propelled Andreessen into the spotlight and on the cover of Time magazine. Andreessen became the “poster-boy wunderkind of the Internet bubble generation: young, twenty-something, high-tech, ambitious, and worth millions (or billions) of dollars practically overnight.” (wiki)

4. Larry Page and Sergey Brin – Google

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford, invented Google in 1996 as a research project. The Google website launched in 1997, and by the end of 1998 it had indexed about 60 million web pages. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords and launched the pay-per-click model, until then a rarity in advertising. Google launched its IPO in 2004, raising $1.67 billion and giving it a market capitalization of $23 billion, making Page and Brin instant billionaires.

Today Google has a market cap of $180 billion and owns 70% of web searches. Google performs nearly 6 billion web searches each month. Google has also become a verb in popular lexicon. If there’s anything you need to know, you “Google it.”

3. Steve Jobs – Apple, Pixar

Steve Jobs is the CEO, chairman and co-founder of Apple Inc., and is the founder and former CEO of Pixar Animation Studios. In fiscal 2007, Apple had worldwide sales of $24 billion. Apple’s iPod and iTunes dominate the portable and online music markets with nearly 80% market share. The Apple Macintosh owns 8% of the personal computer market and provides an effective counter-weight to the dominance of Microsoft Windows. Pixar led the surge of software-animated feature films, including Toy Story and Finding Nemo, resulting in eight academy awards. The Walt Disney Company purchased Pixar from Jobs in 2006 for $7.4 billion.

Jobs “contributed greatly to the myths of the quirky, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of design while understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following.” (wiki)

2. Tim Berners-Lee – World Wide Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an English developer who invented the World Wide Web in March 1989. Berners-Lee published the first website on August 6, 1991. The site provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how to use a web browser, and how to set up a web server. Berners-Lee made his idea freely available, with no patent or royalties due. In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The W3C declared their standards must be based on royalty-free technology so they can be easily adopted by anyone.

Berners-Lee once said: “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web.” The World Wide Web is one of the most important communication inventions in history, providing a standard platform for global communications and commerce. Today there are over 100 million websites and 45 billion web pages.

1. Bill Gates – Microsoft

Bill Gates is co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest software company with 79,000 employees in 102 countries and $51 billion in annual sales. More than 90% of personal computers use the Microsoft Windows operating system, and nearly 50% of web servers run Microsoft software. Microsoft also dabbles in cable TV, Internet portals, computer hardware, and gaming with the XBox. Microsoft is currently in process to acquire Yahoo.

Gates, the world’s third richest man, is leaving Microsoft in July to become a full-time philanthropist. His Gates Foundation is the largest in the world with an endowment of $38 billion.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but kudos to the man whose company delivered a world-dominant computing platform, offering software entrepreneurs a market 600 million strong and expected to hit a billion by 2010. When there is that much attention and opportunity focused in one place, we will continue to see incredible advances in software and hardware that fuel Moore’s Law and drive our information society.

So who would appear on your list of Top 10 Software Innovators? Please comment below.

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