Brief Biographies of Early ’90s People
The 200 Internet Figures Selected to Start the Study
Research for content for the “Early 1990s” section of the Imagining the Internet site got its start with the pre-selection of 200 people who were likely to have made predictive statements about the Internet in the early 1990s. After these key people were identified, their names were used as search terms in online databases and in a search of Internet bibliographies. In the process of seeking out predictions made by this initial list of predictors, approximately 800 additional predictors were found and their predictive statements were also logged in the database. The original 200 personalities selected for this predictions search were chosen after a content study of hundreds of sources including: various Internet sites; “Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet” (Hafner and Lyon, Touchstone, 1996); “Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web” (Berners-Lee, Harper Business, 1999); early 1990s editions of Computer-Mediated Communication; the Internet Society’s INET ’95 conference; WWW Conference ’95; and the research study “Forecasting the Internet: A Retrospective Technology Assessment” (Connie Ledoux Book, Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2002). The original “Internet personalities” selected as the basis for the search that built this database are listed here alphabetically, followed by a “Predictor’s Expertise” category in parentheses for which they best fit one or more of the descriptive words. Many of these people could be labeled with more than one of these classifications of “expertise”; in these cases, the label that seemed to best fit their role in the early 1990s was selected. A few of the people below are not included as predictors in the predictions database because forecasts credited to them were not found within the search parameters. This does not mean they did not make predictive statements in the time-span studied. It was not possible to cover every item spoken or written at the time in this database; it is merely a sampling of the remarks of the time. The following brief biographies describe what these people were recognized for doing in the early to mid 1990s, the period from which the predictions in the database were gathered. Click on the beginning letter of the predictor’s last name in order to take a short-cut to his or her biography:
A
Bernard Aboba wrote “The Online Users Encyclopedia” (Addison Wesley, 1993). (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Rick Adams founded UUNET in 1987 to provide commercial Usenet and UUCP access, based on an experiment by himself and Mike O’Dell. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Phillip E. Agre was an associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was the author of research studies on the Internet. He edited The Network Observer, an online newsletter on Internet issues. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Stewart Alsop was a contributing editor and editor-in-chief of InfoWorld magazine. He later became a partner in New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm, and was the executive producer of Agenda, a conference held annually for computer industry executives. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Robert H. Anderson, of RAND’s Information Sciences Group, was a co-author of the study “Universal Access to E-mail: Feasibility and Societal Implications,” a policy paper with projections about the future. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Marc Andreessen worked with Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in 1992, to develop a browser that would be usable on any computer, easy to use and graphically rich. In 1993, their browser, Mosaic, completely changed the face of the Internet – it allowed HTML “image” tags which make it so text and art can appear on the same page; it allowed easy text scrolling; and it introduced hyperlinks, allowing users to simply click on an area of the screen to go to another document on the Internet. In1994, Mosaic was developed and marketed; the product eventually was named Netscape. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Nick Arnett was president of Multimedia Computing Corp., the leading market research and consulting firm tracking multimedia technologies and markets, from 1988 through August of 1994. He later became the World-Wide Web product manager at Verity Inc. Earlier in the 1980s, he was a journalist with publications including InfoWorld and American City Business Journals. He was author of “The Internet and the Anti-net: Two Public Internetworks are Better than One.” (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Bill Atkinson was the man behind many of Apple Computer’s biggest innovations in the 1980s and early ’90s. He was honored with a 1994 EFF Pioneer Award for his work as the graphics-toolbox developer for Apple’s Lisa computers and his application HyperCard, the first truly mass-market hypertext product. In the mid-’90s he became chief scientist at General Magic, a company creating software for personal communicators and digital agents. (Pioneer/Originator.)
B
Stewart Baker was described by The Washington Post (Nov. 20, 1995) as “one of the most techno-literate lawyers around.” Baker’s Washington, D.C., practice covered issues relating to digital commerce, electronic surveillance, encryption, privacy, national security and export controls. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Paul Baran joined RAND in 1959 and investigated development of survivable communication networks capable of allowing the U.S. to reorganize and respond after a nuclear attack. By 1964, he developed the field of packet-switching networks, as outlined in 11 comprehensive papers titled “On Distributed Communications Networks.” This work eventually convinced U.S. officials that development of wide-area digital computer networks should be a priority. Others also say they were working on packet switching in this era, but Baran and Donald Davies were generally given the credit at this point in the 1990s. (Pioneer/Originator.)
John Perry Barlow helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 with WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) members Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore in direct response to a threat to free speech. Barlow’s was one of the loudest voices in the battle to keep the Internet unfettered while still encouraging that it become a tool available to everyone. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
John Barry was the author of the book “Technobabble” (MIT, 1991). He began working in the computer field in the late 1970s. While at InfoWorld magazine in the early 1980s, he started a column called “Computer Illiteracy,” in which he first explored the characteristics and consequences of technobabble, or techspeak. Later, at Sun Microsystems, he continued writing on the subject. (Author, Editor, Journalist.)
Richard Bartle of the University of Essex developed the first MUD, known as MUD1, with Roy Trubshaw in 1979. MUDs and MOOs grew in popularity and had participants from around the world. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Reva Basch became a professional independent “searcher” in the 1990s, seeking out specific information online for clients. She also wrote the book “Secrets of the Super Searchers.” (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Nick Beard was a British physician with a degree in software engineering – he installed an advanced hospital-information system at HCI in Scotland and was a Personal Computing World magazine columnist in the 1990s. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, was later the vice president and general manager of the Gigabit Systems Business Unit, Cisco Systems. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Brian Behlendorf was a key innovator in the development of Web commerce. At the outset of the 1990s, he was chief engineer at Wired magazine’s inception and later helped start up HotWired, one of the first large-scale publishing Web sites. He spent 1993-98 as co-founder and CTO at Organic Online, one of the first Web design and engineering consulting firms. While there, he co-founded and contributed heavily to the Apache Web Server Project, co-founded and supported the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling language) effort, and assisted several IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) working groups, particularly the HTTP standardization effort. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Gordon Bell proposed a plan for a U.S. research and education network in a 1987 report to the Office of Science and Technology in response to a congressional request by Al Gore. He was a technology leader at Digital Equipment Corporation (where he led the development of the VAX computer) and with Microsoft. (Technology Developer/Administrator)
Steven Bellovin was a researcher of cryptography and security at AT&T in the 1990s. He is co-author of “Firewalls and Internet Security” (Addison-Wesley, 1994). (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Michael L. Benedikt founded the International Conference on Cyberspace in 1991. He is author of “For an Architecture of Reality” (Lumen Books, 1987), and author/editor of “Cyberspace: First Steps” (MIT Press, 1991). He lectured widely in the U.S. and abroad. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Eric Benhamou chaired the American Electronics Association’s National Information Infrastructure Task Force from 1993-1995, representing 3,000 member companies in the fastest growing segments of the high-technology industry. He later became chairman of the 3Com Corporation, a world leader in networking technologies. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Tim Berners-Lee of CERN first released his revolutionary World-Wide Web for initial use in 1991 and with it shared his invention HTML (hypertext mark-up language). He later served as director of W3 Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations whose goal was to find ways to help the Web reach its full potential. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Jesse Berst was editor of Windows Watcher Newsletter. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Sven Birkerts was the author of “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.” Birkerts feared new technology was bringing us convenience in exchange for the loss of our souls. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Anita Borg, the founder and keeper of Systers, a 1990s electronic mailing list for women in computer science, won a 1995 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for her work. Her list was a major force for increasing the numbers and improving the position of women in the computer science field. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
Michael Botein was founding director of the Communications Media Center at New York University Law School. His expertise in international telecommunications law, the regulation of cable television and new technologies made him a valuable consultant to the FCC and the Administrative Conference of the United States. He wrote “International Telecommunications in the United States” (1987) and “Cases and Materials on Regulation of the Electronic Mass Media” (2002). (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Rick Boucher was a U.S. Congressman who backed the amendment that allowed the National Science Foundation to support computer networks and opened the floodgates of digital commerce in the early 1990s. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Stewart Brand founded Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) in 1985 with Larry Brilliant. This was one of the first and most intellectually active online “communities.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Anne Wells Branscomb, an expert in technology and the law, was the author of “Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access” (Basic Books, 1994), and the 1995 Yale Law Journal article “Anonymity, Autonomy, and Accountability as Challenges to the First Amendment in Cyberspaces.” (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Gareth Branwyn served as editor of Street Tech Labs and as the “Jargon Watch” editor of Wired. He wrote for Esquire, I.D., Yahoo! and other magazines. His books include “Jargon Watch: A Pocket Dictionary for the Jitterati” and “Jamming the Media: A Citizen’s Guide.” (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Dan Bricklin was the inventor of the first big spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, in 1979. In 1995, he founded and became chief technical officer of Trellix, a company making Web tools. Trellix later invested in Pyra Labs, the biggest supplier of Blogging software, in 2001. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Rick Broadhead was an author of more than 29 books, including “Selling Online,” “Lightbulbs to Yottabits” and “The Canadian Internet Handbook.” He was billed as one of North America’s leading speakers on the Internet and electronic commerce. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
John Brockman, founder of Brockman, Inc., a software and literary agency, served as the chairman and cofounder of Content.Com, Inc., a Web-based digital publishing company. He also wrote or edited many books, including “The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.” (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
John Browning served as executive editor of Wired UK, the English-language European edition of Wired, the magazine established to chronicle the digital revolution. Prior to Wired, Browning spent 12 years at The Economist, writing about business, technology and economics. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
David Bunnell served as the CEO of Upside Magazine. He was also the founder of PC Magazine, PC World, MacWorld, Personal Computing and New Media. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
C
James Cappio, a New York lawyer, wrote some articles for Wired in the mid-1990s. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Doug Carlston co-founded and became chairman and CEO of Broderbund Software. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Denise Caruso’s column,”Digital Commerce,” appeared in the New York Times in the 1990s. She also ran Spotlight and was the executive producer of Agenda, a conference held annually for interactive media industry executives. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Brian Carpenter developed process control systems at CERN in Geneva, the place at which Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and the World Wide Web. From 1985-98 Carpenter was Communications Systems group leader at CERN. He was instrumental in the beginning years of the Internet Society, including serving a term as chair. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Steve Case was founder and CEO of America Online, now merged with Time Warner. AOL developed into the country’s largest commercial Internet service provider, reaching a vast Internet community. The proliferation of AOL’s services helped define developing trends in Internet communication. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Edward Cavasos was a lawyer who specialized in Internet issues in the 1990s and he wrote the book “Cyberspace and the Law Your Rights and Duties in the On-Line World” (The MIT Press, 1994). (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Gerald Celente was a futurist and director of the Trends Research Institute. He began this career in 1980 and correctly predicted both the fall of the Soviet Union and the stock market crash of the late 1980s. (Futurist/Consultant.)
Vinton G. Cerf was one of the key figures in the Internet Society in the 1990s. He earlier worked with C.S. Carr and Steve Crocker to publish the first ARPANET host-host protocol in 1970. In 1972, he was appointed first chair of International Network Working Group that was initiated to establish common technical standards to enable any computer to connect to the ARPANET. In 1973, he doodled the basic architecture of an Internet on the back of an envelope in a hotel lobby in San Francisco; also in 1973, he presented basic Internet ideas with Robert Kahn at an International Network Working Group gathering. In 1974, he published (with Bob Kahn) a paper on Packet Network interconnection that details the design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP). Also in 1974, he published the first technical specification of TCP/IP with Stanford graduate students Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine. In 1999, he served as the first chair of the Internet Societal Task Force, formed by ISOC. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Dave Chalk established himself as a tech expert in the 1990s as the host of Dave Chalk’s Computer Show, a television program aimed at providing practical computer information with a human touch. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
David Chaum was the founder of DigiCash in the early 1990s. He was the inventor of cryptographic protocols that allowed him to create a company whose mission was to change the world through the introduction of anonymous digital money technology. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Steve Cisler was the chief library scientist at the Apple Corporate Library and was active in the early Internet community as a writer/activist. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
David D. Clark was a senior research scientist at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Robert Coover was one of the pioneers of online literature. He was a teacher of experimental courses in hypertext and multimedia narrative at Brown University. His 1992 essay on hypertext in the New York Times Book Review, “The End of Books,” described and publicized the idea of digital literature. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Douglas Coupland was the writer who coined the term “Generation X.” His first novel was “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture” (1991). A second novel, “Shampoo Planet” (1992), and a collection of stories, “Life after God” (1994), followed. In 1995, he published his best-known novel, “Microserfs,” a comic yet realistic look at the lives of techies in the 1990s. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Michael Crichton, an extremely successful novelist (“Jurassic Park,” “Prey”) based much of his popular fiction on his study of real-world science and technology trends. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Steve Crocker was probably best known in the 1990s as the founder of CyberCash Inc. a leading Internet payments company. Earlier, he was program manager on the team developing the protocols for ARPANET in 1966. In 1968, he organized the Network Working Group to develop host-level protocols for ARPANET communication. He began the Request for Comment (RFC) series of notes through which Internet protocol designs are documented and shared, and he wrote RFC 1 and many others. In 1970, he worked with Vinton Cerf and C.S. Carr to publish the first ARPANET host-host protocol. He later became known as an Internet and computer business and security specialist. (Pioneer/Originator.)
D
Jim Dator was a futurist who is credited with founding the first Future Studies program in 1971. He was director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies at the University of Hawaii. (Futurist/Consultant.)
John December’s publications include articles and books about the World Wide Web, Internet and Java. From 1985 to 1989, he developed software and graphical user interfaces to analyze aircraft requirements for military missions at Boeing. He later became president of December Communications, an online Web-publishing, presentations, and consulting company based in Milwaukee, Wis. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Dorothy Denning was a professor and chair of Computer Science at Georgetown University in the 1990s, by which time she had been in the field of computer security and cryptography for two decades. Previous to her arrival at GU, she worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, SRI International and Purdue University. Her books include “Cryptography and Data Security” and “Information Warfare and Security.” She authored many Internet research studies. She was the first president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Michael Dertouzos was director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and the author of “The Unfinished Revolution.” He led a project intended to make computers adapt to people. He outlined a comprehensive proposal for a national information “infrastructure” in a 1991 article for Technology Review. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Mark Dery was the author of “Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture” (Duke University Press, 1995). His writings on fringe culture, technology, mass media, and the arts appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wired, 21.C, Mondo 2000, Elle, Interview, New York and The Village Voice. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
John Doerr was hired at Intel, then a small, chip-making company, in 1974. He stayed there through the remainder of the ’70s. In 1980, he joined the high-tech venture capital partnership Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, where he helped nurture the growth of such Silicon Valley superstars as Sun, Intuit, and Netscape. In the late 1990s, he joined forces with Jim Barksdale to create TechNet – a bipartisan group designed to promote the new economy and the political profile of high-tech ideas. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Esther Dyson was founding editor of Release 1.0 and a consultant and expert on computing and high-tech applications. She served as the president of EDventure Holdings. She founded the PC Forum, an annual conference and industry event. She had the highest profile of the women of technology in the 1990s. (Futurist/Consultant.)
E
Bill Eager, an Internet marketing pioneer, wrote many books about the field, including the best-sellers “The Information Payoff” and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Online Marketing.” He was also known for his presentations and workshops about technology at national conferences. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Larry Ellison was the founder of Oracle and a leading entrepreneur in the 1990s. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Phillip Elmer-DeWitt was the journalist known for the 1995 Time magazine cover story on “Cyberporn.” It relied heavily on a questionable study done by graduate student Martin Rimm. The stir caused by this story and other factors was a motivation behind Congress’ passage of the Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. As senior technology editor in the early to mid 1990s, Elmer-DeWitt wrote many Internet-issues stories. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse, spent 40 years predicting, designing and implementing the future of organizational computing. In 1962, while at the Stanford Research Institute, he produced the paper “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” from which came the concepts of augmenting human intellect, improvement infrastructure, co-evolution of artifacts with social-cultural language-practices and bootstrapping. His Augmentation Research Center developed an array of important human-computer interface solutions, including hypermedia. In 1989 he co-founded the Bootstrap Institute, a non-profit organization “in a quest to form strategic alliances aimed at improving organizations and society at large.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
James Evans was the author of “The Lawyers Guide to the Internet” (Nolo, 1995). (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
James Exon, a U.S. senator from Nebraska, was the author of the Communications Decency Act, passed by the U.S. Senate in 1995. The controversial legislation contained sweeping language barring “obscene,” “indecent” or “harassing” communications online or via phone or fax. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
F
David Farber was the recipient of the 1995 ACM Sigcomm Award for lifelong contributions to the computer communications field. He has worked at the University of Pennsylvania, managing research in high-speed networking. In 2000, he served as chief technologist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. He also directed the Center for Communications and Information Sciences and Policy. In 1997, Upside magazine named him one of its Elite 100 visionaries of high-tech. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Russell Feingold was a member of the U.S. Senate who was key in Internet discussions in the early 1990s. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Cliff Figallo, was managing director of the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, one of the best-known conferencing systems and virtual communities in the United States in the 1990s) and a director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cambridge office in the early 1990s. He later worked with Pandora Systems. Figallo and John Coate are regarded to be the chief architects of the WELL’s implementation of virtual community. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
Seth Finkelstein, an anti-censorship activist and programmer devoted hundreds of hours of personal time beginning in 1995 and over the span of several years to decrypt and expose to public scrutiny the contents of censorware blacklists, including those of CYBERsitter, SurfWatch and Cyber Patrol. The blocked sites of these products included some that advocated safer sex, feminism, gay rights and anti-censorship positions, in addition to the porn sites such products were built to block. He raised the level of public awareness about the freedom of speech issues raised by Internet content-blocking software. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
Bob Frankston helped Dan Bricklin create VisiCalc, the breakthrough computer spreadsheet program, in 1979. He worked with Lotus Development from 1986 to 1990 creating Lotus Express. From 1993 to 1998 he worked on the concept of “IP Everywhere” for Microsoft, with phone wire networking being one result. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
G
Oscar Gandy wrote a classic warning commentary, “The Panoptic Sort. A Political Economy of Personal Information” (Westview Press, 1993), and was a media scholar and an expert in the political economy of communication and information, public policy issues in privacy and new technologies and communication as a vehicle for political and social change. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Simson Garfinkel, a journalist, entrepreneur and international authority on computer security, served as chief technology officer at Sandstorm Enterprises, a Boston-based firm developing computer-security tools. He was a columnist for Technology Review Magazine and wrote tech articles for more than 50 publications, including Computerworld, Forbes and The New York Times. He is the author of “Database Nation,” “PGP: Pretty Good Privacy” and many other books. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Bill Gates, the most influential technology entrepreneur of the late 20th century, was the primary author of the prediction-packed 1995 book “The Road Ahead” and is the founder and CEO of Microsoft Corporation. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
David Gelernter, a Yale University scientist, was the author of “Mirror Worlds,” “1939: The Lost World of the Fair” and “The Muse in the Machine.” (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
William Gibson published the influential book “Neuromancer,” in which he coined the term “cyberspace,” in 1984. Through the early 1990s, he was asked to comment regularly on the coming age of the Internet despite the fact that he claimed to use it rarely, if ever. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
George Gilder was a pioneer the formulation of the theory of supply-side economics. In his major book “Microcosm” (1989), he explored the quantum roots of the new electronic technologies. His book “Life After Television,” published by W.W. Norton (1992), is a prophecy of computers and telecommunications displacing the broadcast-TV empire. He followed it with another classic, “Telecosm.” (Futurist/Consultant.)
John Gilmore founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) members John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor in 1990 in direct response to a threat to free speech. He was also a founder of Cypherpunks. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
Newt Gingrich was a U.S. Congressman and the Speaker of the House of Representatives who was known to be so tech-savvy that Wired magazine ran stories on his tech policy positions. He opposed Senator Exon’s controversial Communications Decency Act. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Mike Godwin was an attorney specializing in Internet issues and the outspoken chief counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the cyber-liberties organization in the 1990s. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Al Gore, a former U.S. senator and vice president, made the future of technology an important part of his political agenda and was a leader in technology policymaking in the years before and during the Clinton Administration. Internet pioneers said his support had significant impact in the building of the U.S. network. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
James Gosling was a lead engineer for Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s, just as the networked computing company was ready to make its leap to the Fortune 500. He created Java in the search for a universal programming language for the Internet, and it first struck a chord in 1995. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Lawrence Grossman wrote the book “The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in an Information Age” (Penguin, 1995). The former executive at NBC and PBS urged people to realize that digital communications had altered how things can and should be done. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Andy Grove was computer chipmaker Intel’s CEO from 1987 to 1998. He received much recognition for his tech achievements, including the 1987 Engineering Leadership Recognition Award from the IEEE and Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1997. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Connie Guglielmo, was a writer who worked for Interactive Week, covering the key companies in and around Silicon Valley. She worked as a reporter and editor at MacWeek in the late ’80s and early ’90s, rising to executive editor of news. She also worked as a freelance writer and editor for such publications as Fortune, Upside and Wired; and such projects as Against All Odds Productions’ “24 Hours in Cyberspace” and the “Macintosh Bible.” (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
H
Harley Hahn was a technology author, analyst and consultant and a prolific writer of books about computers and the Internet in the 1990s. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Justin Hall worked briefly at Wired in 1994, during a sabbatical from his college days at Swarthmore. He started his own irreverent e-zine, covering diverse topics and providing links all over the Web. He later worked for ZDTV and Games.com and as a freelance journalist. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
Fred Hapgood took on the role of moderator of the Nanosystems Interest Group at MIT and wrote a number of articles for Wired and other tech publications of the early 1990s. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Linda Harasim, a professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, was the Project Leader of Virtual-U, one of the first multimedia network systems customized for course delivery and enhancement. She spoke at conferences and wrote or co-wrote many articles and books on online education, including “Learning Networks: a Field Guide to Teaching and Learning Online” (MIT Press, 1995). (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Stevan Harnad was a professor and researcher in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. He made predictions about the future of electronic publishing, including his article “Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis” (1995). (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
David Hayes was an engineer who was quoted making early 1990s predictions in the San Diego Union-Tribune and the New York Times. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Dennis Hayes, served as chairman of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, the primary North American trade association for Internet commerce, content and connectivity. In 1977, he developed the core technology for the Hayes asynchronous modem, the device that enabled computers to communicate with one another across common telephone lines. This device for the first time put computer communications within the reach of ordinary families. It created the means for online services to develop – from the early services like CompuServe, to the bulletin board systems of the early ’90s. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Susan Herring, a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington edited collections on the impact of the Internet including “Internet for Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives,” and “Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis.” (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
David Herschman, the founder of Virtual Vegas, the online gambling service, also founded a CD publishing company in the 1990s. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
W. Daniel Hillis, vice president of research and development at the Walt Disney Company, an inventor of massively parallel computing, was also founder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines Corporation. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Starr Roxanne Hiltz, the co-author of a seminal book about the electronic frontier, “The Network Nation: Human Communication Via Computer” (MIT Press), was a professor of computer and information science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of many Internet research studies. In 1994, Hiltz received the “Pioneer Award” from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for her “significant and influential contributions to computer-based communications and to the empowerment of individuals using computers.” She was among the first to note that computer conferencing could form the basis of new kinds of communities. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Donna L. Hoffman, a professor of marketing at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, was a scholar in electronic commerce and Internet marketing in the 1990s. In 1994, she co-founded eLab with Professor Tom Novak. The New York Times called eLab one of the “premiere research centers in the world for the study of electronic commerce.” (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Lance Hoffman, a professor at George Washington University, was a security expert and the author of the 1994 National Science Foundation paper “Civilizing Cyberspace: Priority Policy Issues in a National Information Infrastructure” in addition to many other research pieces in the 1990s. He wrote the book “Rogue Programs: Viruses, Worms and Trojan Horses” (Van Nostrand Rheinhold, 1990). (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Peter Huber, a lawyer with degrees from MIT and Harvard, was a 1990s expert in telecommunications. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Dave Hughes created the first free, modem dial-up, electronic democracy bulletin-board system in the world. It soon challenged and altered the way local city-wide politics were conducted. It was colorfully named “Roger’s Bar.” Within five years the world’s press had beaten a path to Hughes’ home to report on, and encourage others to adopt an entirely new model of “electronic democracy” – a model that could be adopted in any small town in America. Wired magazine said he was the best-known personality on the Internet in 1993. Microtimes Magazine named Hughes one of the 100 most influential individuals in the Computer Age six times between 1990 and 1996. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Eric Hughes co-founded the Cypherpunks with John Gilmore and Tim May. This group included cryptographers, privacy advocates and digital anarchists. They were known for a densely written e-mail list generating megabytes of issue-oriented scientific discussion weekly. He was the author of the Cypherpunk Manifesto. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Christian Huitema was the developer of a number of research projects in Internet telephony and Internet conferencing in the 1990s at Inria and Telcordia. He went to work for Microsoft in 2000. He was a trustee of the Internet Society from 1995-2001. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Ellen Hume wrote “Tabloids, Talk Radio and the Future of News: Technology’s Impact on Journalism” as an Annenberg Senior Fellow at Northwestern University in 1995. She had previously served as executive director of the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her work analyzed how media, politics and government interact. She was a White House correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, served as national reporter for the Los Angeles Times and also worked at the Detroit Free Press. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
J
Tom Jennings developed FidoNet in 1983 and by 1988 it was connected to the Internet, enabling the exchange of news and e-mail. By 1992, it was a linked network of amateur electronic bulletin board systems with more than 13,000 nodes worldwide. He was given an EFF Pioneer Award in 1992. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Steve Jobs, co-founded Apple Computers in 1976 with Steve Wozniak. They began by building their computers in the Jobs family’s garage. Both men had earlier worked designing games for Atari. He left Apple in the mid-’80s and founded NeXT Corporation to build a new line of computers. He also helped fund and found Pixar in 1986. He returned to the position as Apple’s chief executive in the mid-’90s. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
David R. Johnson was the chairman of Counsel Connect and the co director of the Cyberspace Law Institute in the 1990s. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Deborah G. Johnson was a respected scholar in the field of computer ethics in the 1990s. She worked at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and wrote “Computer Ethics & Social Values” (Prentice Hall, 1995) and “Computer Ethics” (Prentice Hall, 1994). (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Eric Johnston was the manager and lead engineer of the Virtual Reality group at Spectrum HoloByte in the 1990s, and formerly worked in the NASA-Ames Virtual Environment laboratories. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Anita Jones was chair of the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Computing, Information and Communications and the Defense Director of Research and Engineering in the early 1990s, during the development of the Strategic Implementation Plan. She is the author of dozens of papers and many books. (Technology Administrator/Developer.)
Steve Jones, a social historian of communication technology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, was the author of many books, including “Doing Internet Research,” “CyberSociety” and “Virtual Culture.” (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Bill Joy served as chief of technical strategy at Sun Microsystems, a position he held in the 1990s, from the founding days of the company in 1982. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
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Brian Kahin was a coauthor of “Public Access to the Internet,” a 1995 collection of papers on Internet-access issues produced by the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project, for which he was founding director. He had helped found the Interactive Multimedia Association in 1988. In the early 1990s, he also was the author or editor of “Building Information Infrastructure” (McGraw-Hill, 1992), “The Information Infrastructure Sourcebook” (published by the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project 1993-1995) and “Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure” (with Janet Abbate; MIT Press, 1995). (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Brewster Kahle invented Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) for Thinking Machines Corporation in 1991. He is a co-founder of the Internet Archive. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Robert E. (Bob) Kahn was hired by Lawrence Roberts at IPTO in 1972 to work on networking technologies. He organized a demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines and a Terminal Interface Processor at International Conference on Computer Communications that year, sharing the idea of the network for the first time with a group of observers from around the world. In 1973, he posed the Internet problem and began a research program at ARPA to look into it, setting four goals for design: 1) any network should be able to connect with any other; 2) there will be no central distribution or control; error recovery – lost packets will be retransmitted; 4) no internal changes will have to be made to a computer to connect it to the network. In 1973 he presented his basic Internet ideas with Vinton Cerf at the International Network Working Group gathering. In 1974 he published (with Cerf) a paper on Packet Network interconnection that detailed the design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP). (Pioneer/Originator.)
Mitchell Kapor founded the Lotus Development Corporation and also founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) members John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore in 1990 in direct response to a threat to free speech. He was an outspoken supporter of open access to the Internet, and was asked to speak in many venues about the issue, including Congressional hearings. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Jon Katz was a 1990s technology columnist/journalist who wrote for Wired, Slashdot, HotWired and Rolling Stone. Part of his career was spent as a reporter and editor for the Boston Globe and Washington Post and as a producer for the CBS Morning News. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Randy Katz worked to promote the national information infrastructure in his role as a program manager and deputy director in the Advanced Research Projects Agency Computing Systems Technology Office from January 1993 to December 1994 He was awarded the 1995 Computer Research Association Distinguished Service Award for promoting the High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) program during his tenure. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Brendan Kehoe published his user-friendly guide “Zen and the Art of the Internet” in 1992. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Kevin Kelly was the author of the book “Out of Control” and the first executive editor of the highly influential Wired magazine. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Bob Kerrey was a U.S. senator who made technology issues part of his political agenda in the 1990s. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Leonard Kleinrock published the first paper on packet-switching theory in the RLE Quarterly Progress Report while at MIT in 1961. He established the Network Measurement Center at UCLA and worked in the area of digital networks. He also published a comprehensive look at digital networks in his book “Communication Nets.” He developed the ARPANET network with Lawrence Roberts. In 1969, Kleinrock’s NMC team connected an SDS Sigma 7 computer to an Interface Messenger Processor, creating the first node on the ARPANET, the first computer to connect to the Internet. Kleinrock’s team used the early system to iron out the initial design and performance issues on the world’s first packet-switched network. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Bruce Koball, a computer technologist and consultant, was chair of the conference Computers, Freedom, and Privacy ’93. He wrote “Security on the Net: A Cautionary Tale” in 1995, after being instrumental in the capture of notorious computer hacker Kevin D. Mitnick. (Research Scientist/Illluminator.)
Robert Kraut, a professor of social psychology and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, set out in the 1990s to do research on the impact of the Internet on the average U.S. family. He is known for a longitudinal field trial called HomeNet in which carefully assessed how families’ use of the Internet changed over time. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
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Lawrence Landweber, then at the University of Wisconsin, created THEORYNET, providing electronic mail to a group of more than 100 computer-science researchers using a locally developed e-mail system over TELENET in 1977. In 1979 he worked with the National Science Foundation to establish a U.S. research computer network that eventually became NSFNET. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Jaron Lanier was a pioneer of virtual reality and founder and former CEO of VPL. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Erik Larson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, wrote “The Naked Consumer” (Penguin Books, 1992) a book on databases, data collection, marketing and our shrinking privacy. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Patrick Leahy was a U.S. Senate member who played an important role in Congressional discussions of the Internet in the 1990s. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Jacques Leslie was a journalist who wrote about technology in the 1990s. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Steven Levy was a 1990s technology journalist. He wrote on the topic for decades for such publications as Newsweek and Wired. He is the author of the books “Hackers,” “Artificial Life” and “Crypto.” (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Geert Lovink was the editor of the media/art magazine Mediamatic from 1989 to 1994. He has lectured about media theory in Eastern Europe and participated there in conferences on independant media, the arts and new technologies since 1991. He helped organize Interface 3 (Hamburg, 1995) on the culture of computer networks. In 1995, together with Pit Schultz, he founded the International “nettime” circle, which promoted Internet criticism (www.desk.nl/nettime). (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Ed Lyell was an educator and education administrator who foresaw uses for the Internet in schools and became a popular public speaker on the topic. (Futurist/Consultant.)
Daniel C. Lynch was the founder of CyberCash Inc. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
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John McCrea was manager of Cosmo, a next-generation Web software product line from Silicon Graphics. In early ’95 McCrea thrust Silicon Graphics into the Internet market with the WebFORCE server product line. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Scott McNealy was the CEO and cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Inc., a leading global supplier of network computing solutions, including Java, in the 1990s. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Pattie Maes, a researcher at MIT’s Media Lab, was a founder and board member of Firefly Network, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. – one of the first companies to commercialize personalization and profiling technology (Firefly was acquired by Microsoft in 1998). She was also a founder and a board member of Open Ratings, Inc., a provider of performance data on businesses for B2B ecommerce. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Ed Markey was the U.S. congressman from Massachusetts’ 7th District who was a key supporter of the development of the Internet. In the 1980s and ’90s, he served on the House Telecommunications Committee and the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. He worked against proposed “per-minute” charges instead of “flat-rate” charges on nascent Internet companies. The preservation of a “flat-rate” pricing structure was vital in the development of the Internet. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
John Markoff wrote or co-wrote “The High Cost of High Tech,” “Cyber Punk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier” and “Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw.” He also covered the computer industry and technology for the New York Times. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Timothy C. May was a self-described “techno-anarchist” in the 1990s and author of “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” He is a co-founder of the Cypherpunks, with Eric Hughes and John Gilmore. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Alan M. Meckler was the chief executive officer of Mecklermedia in the early 1990s. His Mecklerweb was one of the first commercial web sites and his Internet World magazine was the first publication devoted exclusively to the Internet. His Internet World trade show and publishing business helped foster the growth and advancement of the Internet. In the mid-’90s, he sold Mecklermedia to Penton Media. He became CEO of Internet.com Corporation and later built it into Jupitermedia Corporation, which became a leading provider of global real-time news, information, research and media resources for information technology and Internet industry professionals. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Brock Meeks was a former Washington, D.C., bureau chief for MSNBC. Previously, he had been Washington Bureau Chief for Wired/HotWired and INTER@CTIVE WEEK, and prior to that, he spent two years as associate editor for Communications Daily, a Washington, D.C.-based newsletter. He won awards from the Computer Press Association for his writing on various topics. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Robert Metcalfe developed Ethernet technology at Xerox PARC in 1973 and later developed the networking company 3Comm. He is known for making the exaggerated 1995 prediction that due to an expected overload as people tried to connect, the Internet would “go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” He later jokingly ate his words, pureeing a paper copy of the article including this comment and swallowing it before a group of onlookers. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Jane Metcalfe was a 1990s member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She was a co-founder and first president of Wired Ventures, the parent company of Wired magazine, which she helped Louis Rossetto co-found. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Jerry Michalski took over the job of managing editor of Release 1.0 from Esther Dyson. (Futurist/Consultant.)
William J. Mitchell was a professor and dean of architecture at MIT and the author of the predictive book “City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn” (1994). He also taught at Harvard, Yale, Carnegie-Mellon and Cambridge Universities. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Hans Moravec was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute who caused a lot of consternation with the book “Mind Children: The Future of the Robot and Human Intelligence,” in which he predicted the rise of machines and extinction of humans. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Nathan Myhrvold worked at Microsoft Corporation as chief technology officer in the 1990s. Myhrvold was responsible for the Advanced Technology and Research Group, which had a budget of over $2 billion per year. Earlier, he was group vice president of Applications and Content, which included a number of Microsoft divisions, including Desktop Applications, Consumer, Research and Microsoft On Line Systems. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
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John Naisbitt, a futurist, was co-author of the best-selling book “Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990s” (Morrow, 1991). (Futurist/Consultant.)
Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Ted Nelson came up with the idea in 1967 to develop Xanadu, a worldwide electronic publishing system that could serve as a sort of universal library, accessible to everyone. (Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is a similar-but-smaller-scale system.) Because he was seen as a radical and he wasn’t a trained technology professional, Nelson’s ideas were sometimes ignored. Computer hackers continued working on building the code for Xanadu over the decades. In 1999, the Xanadu code was made open-source. Nelson was known for coining the term “hypertext.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Peter G. Neumann, the author of “Computer-Related Risks” (Addison-Wesley, 1995), was the creator/moderator of the ACM Risks Forum Digest for most of the 1980s and ’90s. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Jakob Nielsen labeled himself as an “Internet User Advocate” and built a reputation as a speaker and writer in that area. He co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group with Donald A. Norman (a former VP of research at Apple Computer). In the early 1990s, he was an engineer at Sun Microsystems. He invented and patented a number of Internet usability methods. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
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Tim O’Reilly was founder and first president of O’Reilly & Associates, a computer-book-publishing company that helped popularize the Internet in the decade of the 1990s. His Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and one of the initial commercial sites on the World Wide Web. He received InfoWorld’s Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for his advocacy on behalf of the Open Source community. He served on the board of trustees for the Internet Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Frank Odasz was an assistant professor of computing education at the University of Colorado and the director of Big Sky Telegraph, a popular community network of the time. He was widely known as a speaker on community networking and educational technologies. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
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Seymour Papert, a mathematician, was one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence. He is internationally recognized as the seminal thinker about ways in which computers can change learning. He wrote “The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer” (1992) and “The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap” (1996). (Pioneer/Originator.)
Kip Parent, the former electronic sales manager of Silicon Graphics, was the founder of Pantheon Interactive. He originated and launched Silicon Surf, SGI’s award-winning site. It was featured in dozens of books and magazine articles, and set Web-building standards for many people. It was named “best site” by Interactive Age in 1995. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Craig Partridge developed Mail Exchanger (MX) records in 1986 to allow non-IP network hosts to have domain addresses. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Paul Evan Peters was executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information in the 1990s. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Faith Popcorn, a futurist, is the author or co-author of many books including “The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life” (Harper Business, 1992). (Futurist/Consultant.)
Jon Postel worked with Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA’s Network Measurement Center from its beginning days in the 1960s, and thus was part of the team developing and testing the ARPANET. Regarded as an arbiter of standards for the Internet in its early days, he was involved in a number of Internet-governing activities. In 1988 he became the first director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority; he also was U.S. Domain registrar and RFC editor for many years. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Mark Poster wrote the book “The Second Media Age” in 1995 while teaching at the University of California, Irvine. He also wrote about technology for Wired magazine. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Neil Postman was a professor at NYU and prolific writer and speaker on the negative impacts of technology and the media on society. He wrote the book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.” (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
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John S. Quarterman was a founder of Matrix.Net, Inc., formerly known as Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS), established in 1990. Matrix.Net began monitoring the Internet in 1993, publishing the statistics on the Web beginning in 1995 in what was called the “Internet Weather Report.” Quarterman published the first maps of the whole Internet; many appeared in Matrix Maps Quarterly and elsewhere. He conducted the first demographic survey of the Internet. Matrix News, which he started in 1991, was the earliest continuing commercial newsletter published over the Internet. He wrote “The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide” (Digital Press, 1990). (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
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Howard Rheingold, one of the first writers to illuminate the ideals and foibles of virtual communities, published a webzine called Electric Minds and wrote the books “Virtual Reality,” “Smart Mobs” and “Virtual Community.” He also was the editor of Whole Earth Review and the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Jack Rickard, the editor/publisher of Boardwatch Magazine, the magazine of the 1990s home-grown BBS industry, was also co-founder of the Online Networking Exposition and BBS Convention (ONE BBSCON). (Pioneer/Originator.)
Lawrence G. (Larry) Roberts, met and was inspired by J.C.R. Licklider in 1964 to work on building a wide-area communications network. In 1965, the director of the IPTO contracted Roberts to develop a network. Thomas Marill programmed the network. In 1966, Roberts and Marill published what amounted to an ARPANET plan – it was titled “Toward a Cooperative Network of Shared Computers.” Roberts joined ARPA in 1966 as IPTO chief scientist. He led 1967 design discussions at an ARPA meeting in Michigan at which the standards for transmission of characters, and identification and authentication of users were first described. In 1967, he presented a paper that summarized the complete ARPANET plan at an ACM symposium in Tennessee. In 1968, he wrote and completed a program plan titled “Resource Sharing Computer Networks” which was approved June 21, and work on ARPANET began. In 1969, he became director of IPTO. He wrote the first e-mail management program to list, selectively read, file, forward and respond to messages in 1972. In 1973, he became CEO of Telenet, the first packet-switching network carrier. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Michael Roberts was the first president and CEO of ICANN (the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers), serving from October 1998 until March 2001. He worked as a policy consultant in the field of Internet technology, services and product development, with a specialization in research and education. Prior to taking on the start-up of ICANN, he was vice president at EDUCOM, a consortium of 600 universities and colleges with interests in information technology. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Paul Romer, a professor of economics at Stanford University, was named one of America’s 25 most influential people by Time magazine in 1997. His papers include “Science, Economic Growth and Public Policy” (in Technology, R&D, and the Economy, Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute, 1996), and he wrote a number of articles on technology and growth. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Lance Rose, a lawyer, earned a high profile for his expertise in Internet issues in the 1990s. He wrote “Netlaw: Your Rights in the Online World” (1995). (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Louis Rossetto was the CEO and co-founder of Wired Ventures Inc. in the 1990s. He was the founding publisher and editor of Wired magazine and its online spin-off, HotWired. Wired magazine incredibly influential from its beginning in 1993, illuminating for a large audience, the most important issues of the Internet age. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Marc Rotenberg, was founder and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), in the 1990s. He won an EFF Pioneer Award in 1997 for his work as a “champion of privacy, human rights and civil liberties on the electronic frontier.” He targeted the impact of computer and telecommunications technologies on freedom and privacy and was an active writer and speaker on associated topics. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
Douglas Rushkoff, an author, social theorist, journalist and software developer, wrote the book “Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace,” (Harper San Francisco, 1994) a best-selling portrait of the 1990s cyberculture. He edited “The Gen X Reader” (Ballantine, 1994), a collection of writings by the elusive, media-wary “slacker” generation. He also wrote “Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture” (Ballantine, 1994). In the 1990s, he regularly contributed features about pop-culture, media and technology to magazines. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Jim Rutt was the man who coined the phrase “snail mail” (1981). He co-founded First Call, an Internet financial information service in the early 1990s and was later an executive with Network Solutions. According to a September 2001 profile in Wired, he was once called the “bad boy of the Internet” and “a wired version of Jesse Ventura.” (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Anthony Michael (Tony) Rutkowski was a lawyer and engineer who was an executive director of the Internet Society during some key years of development in the 1990s. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
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Paul Saffo was the director of a decades-old research and forecasting foundation called the Institute for the Future, located in Menlo Park, Calif., in the 1990s. This Institute was a non-profit think tank that consulted for a large number of businesses and government entities, including telecommunications and consumer companies. (Futurist/Consultant.)
Adam Sah was a high-tech journalist for Wired magazine and other publications in the 1990s. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Kirkpatrick Sale, an author and journalist, wrote a book titled “Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution” that made him a leader of the neo-Luddites of the 1990s. “Luddites” generally believe that technological advances are an endangerment to society. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Robert Samuelson, a regular columnist for Newsweek, also wrote for the Washington Post in the 1990s. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Eric Schmidt was chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems from 1983-1997, where he earned international recognition as an Internet pioneer. He was also instrumental in the development and widespread acceptance of Java – Sun’s highly successful 1990s Internet programming language. He later worked as chief executive at Google. (Pioneer/Originator.)
William Schrader was president and chief executive for Performance Systems in the 1990s. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Evan Schwartz was a 1990s journalist with a computer science degree who covered information technology. He was a former editor at Business Week, where he covered software and digital media and was part of teams that won a National Magazine Award and a Computer Press Award. He also wrote for the New York Times, Wired, and MIT’s Technology Review. His books include “Webonomics” and “Digital Darwinism.” (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Peter Schwartz, a futurist and co-founder of the Global Business Network, was a 1990s adviser to the Pentagon and large corporations on how to adapt to the new realities of an information-based world. He also wrote for Wired magazine. (Futurist/Consultant.)
Richard Sclove was founder and an advisory board member of The Loka Institute, a nonprofit organization in Amherst, Mass., dedicated to making research, science and technology responsive to social and environmental concerns. He is also the author of the book “Democracy and Technology” (1995). (Futurist/Consultant.)
Andrew Shapiro was a journalist, lawyer and entrepreneur who specialized in the impact of new technologies in the 1990s. He served as a host of “Digital Age,” a show broadcast on public television, and in 1999 MIT’s Technology Review named him one of 23 innovators who will shape the future of the Web. (Research Scientist/Illuminator)
Aliza Sherman established herself as an author, speaker and e-business expert in the 1990s. In the early days of the Web, Sherman founded Cybergrrl, Inc. the first woman-owned, full-service Internet company. She also founded Webgrrls International, a networking group for woman interested in the Internet. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Barbara Simons was a 1990s leader in technology-policy issues. She founded and chaired the Association for Computing Machinery’s U.S. Technology Policy Committee (USACM) and was ACM secretary from 1990 to 1992, prior to which she chaired the ACM Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Mark Stahlman was the president of the New York-based research and financial services firm New Media Associates in the 1990s. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Barry Steinhardt was director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s technology and liberty program, and he was an active speaker who was quoted often about the Internet in the 1990s. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
Bruce Sterling, a writer, consultant and science fiction enthusiast, wrote or co-wrote “Schismatrix,” “The Hacker Crackdown” and “The Difference Engine” and edited “Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology.” In the 1990s, he wrote tech articles for Fortune, Harper’s, Details, Whole Earth Review and Wired, where he was a contributing writer from its founding. He published the nonfiction book “Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years” in 2002. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Clifford Stoll was an astrophysicist who also wrote the influential books “Silicon Snake Oil” (1995) and “The Cuckoo’s Egg.” A long-time network user, Stoll made “Silicon Snake Oil” his platform for finding fault with the Internet hype of the early 1990s. He pointed out the pitfalls of a completely networked society and offered arguments in opposition to the hype. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Paul A. Strassman worked as a chief information systems executive throughout the 1990s. He wrote for Computerworld magazine, and holds registered U.S. trademarks for the phrases Return-on-Management®, Information Productivity® and Knowledge Capital®. He was appointed in 1991 to the newly created position of Director of Defense Information. He is the author of many books, including “The Politics of Information Management” (Information Economics Press,1993) and “The Irreverent Dictionary of Information Politics” (Information Economics Press, 1995). He became a NASA executive in 2002. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
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Jay “Marty” Tenenbaum was founder and CEO of Enterprise Integration Technologies, the company that pioneered security and payment for the Web. VeriFone acquired EIT in 1995. He was also the founder and first chairman of CommerceNet, the premier industry association for Internet commerce, with nearly 600 corporate members worldwide. Earlier in his career, he was a prominent AI researcher. (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Alvin Toffler was a futurist and best-selling author in the 1990s. He teamed up with his wife, Heidi, to write the bestsellers “Future Shock,” “The Third Wave” and “War and Anti-War.” (Futurist/Consultant.)
Sherry Turkle was the author of “Life on the Screen: Computers and the Human Spirit.” and a professor of the psychology of science at MIT. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Murray Turoff, the co-author of a seminal book about the electronic frontier, “The Network Nation: Human Communication Via Computer” (MIT Press), was a professor of computer and information science and the author of many communications research studies. In 1994, Turoff received the “Pioneer Award” from the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a “key innovator and premier theorist of computer-mediated communications” and for his “significant and influential contributions to computer-based communications and to the empowerment of individuals using computers.” (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
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Vernor Vinge was known for his prophetic 1983 science fiction book “True Names,” in which he presciently addressed many of the future burning issues of identity and privacy on the Internet. Because of this background, he was interviewed about the Internet in the early 1990s. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Paul Virilio was a French technology theorist and author of “Pure War, Speed and Politics” and “War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception.” (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
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Roy Want, a scientist at Xerox PARC, was an inventor of “active badge” technology that allows a person or things movements to be followed and monitored. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
John Warnock was the founder of Adobe, a major software maker of the 1990s. He introduced the concept of PDF in 1991. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
Jim Warren was the founding editor of Dr. Dobbs’ Journal, a publication about high-tech, and was the founder/organizer of the West Coast Computer Faire. He was active in networking in the 1980s and by 1992 had organized the first Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference and set up the first online public dialogue link with the California legislature. When he won an EFF Pioneer Award in 1992, he was noted as being “instrumental in assuring that rights common to older mediums and technologies are extended to computer networking.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
David Wetherell was running College Marketing Group in the 1990s when he started Booklink Technologies to sell textbooks to college professors. He set up the @Ventures fund to bankroll Internet startups, including a big infusion of cash for Lycos in 1995. He launched a host of subsidiaries to provide key infrastructure for emerging e-commerce. CMG became Internet holding company CMGI Inc. Business Week called him the “Internet Evangelist,” and he was named one of Time magazine’s “Digital 50.” (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Gary Wolf was the executive editor of Wired Digital, which produced the online news service HotWired and the associated businesses HotBot and Pointcast in the 1990s. He was a co-author of the book “Aether Madness: An Off-Beat Guide to the Online World” (Peachpit Press, 1995). (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Stephen Wolff was director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Networking and Communication. (Technology Developer/Administrator.)
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Michael Zisman was a vice president with Lotus Development Corp. (Technology Administrator/Developer.)