14 tech luminaries we misplaced in 2021
We honor the IT pioneers who created the tech we use day by day.
Getty Images / IDG
Scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs usually work behind the scenes, garnering much less recognition than their creations and corporations. But these 14 heroes left lasting legacies that modified the course of historical past. They invented lights, computer systems, automobiles, and media; they based Adobe, Gartner, Sinclair, and Silicon Valley; they fought for accessibility, freedom of knowledge, and human rights.
As we replicate on the previous 12 months, we at Computerworld honor these distinctive innovators who handed away within the final 12 months.
[ See also: Tech luminaries we lost in 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 ]
Gideon Gartner: Analysis with Alacrity
March 13, 1935 – December 12, 2020
Esther Dyson
Gideon Gartner in 2010
Gideon Gartner was born in Palestine and grew up in Brooklyn, the place he confirmed promise as a musician. He handed up a musical scholarship to pursue undergraduate and graduate levels from MIT. He started his profession at Philco after which IBM earlier than discovering himself on Wall Street as a know-how analyst.
In 1979, Gartner acknowledged the function that non-public computer systems would have within the operation of tech organizations. He based Gartner Group, an IT advisory agency that focused the pc customers and CIOs who would quickly be making business-defining selections. Forty-odd years later, Gartner remains to be one of many world’s main know-how analysis and consulting corporations.
One of Gartner Group’s hallmark merchandise was the two-page analytical report, printed on a single sheet of paper. “When you have to do a 40- or 50- or 150-page document, it becomes so psychologically defeating to even think about completing it that it takes you forever,” mentioned Gartner. By comparability, a concise, sensible report may very well be produced, consumed, and utilized each day.
Gartner additionally based Soundview Technology (initially Gartner Securities), which was offered to Charles Schwab in 2003, and Giga Information Group (“Giga” being brief for “Gideon Gartner”), which was bought by Forrester Research, additionally in 2003. To all three of his corporations, Gartner introduced his distinctive insights and improvements.
“He had an unrivaled commitment to excellence within his work, products, management, and service to his clients,” wrote Jeffrey R. Yost, director of the Charles Babbage Institute, to which Gartner was a donor.
Gartner died at 85 from issues as a consequence of Alzheimer’s.
Paul Taylor: Communications Trailblazer
November 15, 1939 – January 11, 2021
Vermillion Films
Paul Taylor in 1968
Paul Taylor was born deaf in an period that had few lodging for such disabilities. But with the help of his mom, who turned a trainer for the deaf, Taylor refused to be held again. He earned a level in chemical engineering after which a grasp’s diploma earlier than taking over engineering positions at McDonnell Douglas and Monsanto in St. Louis.
It was there in St. Louis that he tailored present teletypewriters, or TTYs, into telecommunications units for the deaf. In the late Nineteen Sixties, Taylor paired TTYs with modems, enabling them to work over cellphone traces. Users on both finish may kind messages to one another, or ship written messages to an operator who would then verbally relay the message. After constructing TTY networks in St. Louis and New York, Taylor was employed by the FCC to include language supporting TTYs into the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Taylor spent thirty years as a professor on the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology. In 2002, he and his spouse moved to Portland, Oregon, to assist their daughter Irene elevate their grandson, Jonas, who had developed early listening to loss. Irene filmed the award-winning 2007 documentary Hear and Now about her dad and mom’ lives and their resolution to get cochlear implants of their 60s.
Taylor died at 81 from issues as a consequence of Alzheimer’s.
Alice Recoque: A Calculating Planner
1929 – January 28, 2021
In 1966, French president Charles de Gaulle authorised Plan Calcul, a authorities initiative to strengthen France’s laptop business. This led to the formation of laptop producer Compagnie internationale pour l’informatique (CII) in 1966.
One of CII’s founding engineers was Alice Recoque, who had beforehand designed the CAB500 mini-computer and co-directed the design of the CAB1500. At CII, she designed the Mitra laptop. The Mitra 15, launched in 1971, was utilized in nuclear energy crops, for guiding missiles, and as nodes in CYCLADES, the French community that impressed options of the ARPANET. Over 8,000 Mitra 15 models have been offered, many which remained in use by way of the Nineteen Nineties.
In 1978, Recoque participated within the institution of the group Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), whose ongoing mission is to make sure laptop know-how doesn’t infringe on particular person freedoms and human rights.
Recoque turned the director of synthetic intelligence in CII’s Groupe Bull in 1985. Her work there included the event of KOOL, or information illustration object-oriented language.
Her contributions to French {hardware} and software program growth earned her recognition from La Société informatique de France and from the French authorities with the Ordre nationwide du Mérite. Recoque was 91 when she handed.
Lou Ottens: Storage Star
June 21, 1926 – March 6, 2021
Jordi Huisman (CC BY 4.0)
Lou Ottens in 2007
Reel-to-reel tape recorders have been gradual, advanced, and cumbersome. As head of product growth at Philips, Lou Ottens was ready to do one thing about it. In the early Nineteen Sixties, he got down to create a smaller, less complicated, consumer-friendly audio storage medium.
The consequence was the cassette tape, an invention that revolutionized the music business. Not solely may followers carry total albums of their pockets, however anybody may report and distribute their very own authentic music and mixtapes. Cassette decks turned a regular function in vehicles, and the medium led to the popularization of audiobooks, or “books on tape.”
“We expected it would be a success — but not a revolution,” mentioned Ottens within the 2017 documentary Cassette.
Cassettes impacted greater than music and artists; earlier than the floppy disk, it was additionally a de facto information storage medium for early private computer systems. Some European radio stations would even broadcast laptop applications to be recorded onto cassettes.
Ottens additionally led the event of the compact disc at Philips, nevertheless it’s his authentic invention that’s now having fun with a resurgence in recognition: gross sales of cassettes grew constantly from 2015 to 2020, with the highest cassette album of 2020 coming from Lady Gaga.
Ottens retired in 1986. He was 94 when he handed.
Isamu Akasaki: LED the Way
January 30, 1929 – April 1, 2021
大臣官房人事課 (CC BY 4.0)
Isamu Akasaki
By the Nineteen Sixties, purple and inexperienced light-emitting diodes had been invented, however they couldn’t be mixed to kind white mild with out blue LEDs, which proved elusive. Many scientists, satisfied it was a futile effort, gave up their analysis.
Isamu Akasaki didn’t. After a profession on the firm that may grow to be Fujitsu, he earned a PhD from Nagoya University in 1964. From there, his persistence into his chosen discipline of analysis took a long time to repay — however by the early Nineteen Nineties, he and his colleagues had succeeded in creating blue LEDs.
Thanks to Akasaki’s discovery, LEDs, which eat much less vitality and last more than both incandescent or fluorescent lights, are actually ubiquitous, utilized in lightbulbs, smartphones, tv and laptop shows, and extra.
Akasaki’s groundbreaking work earned him the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics, which he shared together with his two co-inventors, in addition to the 2011 Japanese Order of Culture, and the 2009 Kyoto Prize.
Akasaki died at 92 from pneumonia.
Jack Minker: Human Advocate
July 4, 1927 – April 9, 2021
University of Maryland
Jack Minker
After working at such corporations as Bell Aircraft Corp. and RCA, Jack Minker returned to high school to earn his PhD. He later joined the University of Maryland in 1967 and have become the primary chair of its laptop science division in 1974. He co-founded the areas of disjunctive logic programming and deductive databases, reminiscent of these used within the language Datalog. He additionally researched synthetic intelligence and wrote or edited a number of books, together with Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence.
Just as notable was Minker’s work on behalf of laptop scientists’ human rights. Minker labored extensively with the Committee of Concerned Scientists (CSS), for whom he served as vice chairman from 1973 to 2021. In this function, he documented the violation of laptop scientists’ human rights in nations reminiscent of China, Iran, and the Soviet Union; petitioned for an International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Georgia, then a Soviet republic; fought for the discharge of Soviet scientists together with Anatoly Shcharansky, Aleksandr Lerner, and Andrei Sakharov; and served as editor and middleman for papers written by Russian scientists meant for English publication. He additionally served as an honorary board member of the Washington Committee for Soviet Jewry and volunteered with the Union Council for Soviet Jewry. He detailed these efforts in his memoir, Scientific Freedom and Human Rights: Scientists of Conscience During the Cold War.
Minker additionally served as nationwide program chair for the Association for Computing Machinery from 1968 to 1970 and chaired the Advisory Committee on Computing to the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1980 to 1982. He was honored for his work by the CSS, the ACM, the University of Maryland, and the New York Academy of Sciences. He was 93 when he died.
Charles Geschke: A License to Print
September 11, 1939 – April 16, 2021
Adobe
Charles Geschke
After leaving seminary, Chuck Geschke earned a PhD in laptop science in 1972. That identical 12 months, he joined Xerox PARC, the legendary Palo Alto analysis middle that birthed so many technological improvements. One of them was a printing know-how Geschke developed with co-worker John Warnock. When Xerox selected to not transfer ahead with the undertaking, Geschke and Warnock took it with them to discovered Adobe in 1982.
Steve Jobs, whose work on the Macintosh was additionally impressed by PARC, provided to buy Adobe in 1983 for $5 million. Geschke and Warnock opted as a substitute to license their PostScript know-how for Apple’s LaserWriter printer. Released in 1985, the printer heralded a revolution in desktop publishing and printing. Adobe adopted in 1987 with the discharge of Adobe Illustrator and in 1993 with the PDF format, cementing the corporate’s function in graphic design and data change.
This success introduced with it some undesirable consideration: in 1992, Geschke was kidnapped and held for $650,000 ransom. He was recovered unhurt 4 days later, and he and his spouse resumed their each day lives, refusing to recruit bodyguards or in any other case seal themselves away.
Geschke, who at occasions served as president, COO, and co-chairman of the board of Adobe, was acknowledged a number of occasions for his contributions, receiving the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2008 and the Marconi Prize in 2010. His firm, which has 20,000 workers and a market worth of $245 billion, has constantly been ranked among the best locations to work.
“I could never have imagined having a better, more likable, or more capable business partner,” mentioned Warnock in a press release.
Geschke died at 81 from melanoma.
Daniel Kaminsky: Internet Savior
February 7, 1979 – April 23, 2021
Dave Bullock (CC BY 2.0)
Dan Kaminsky in 2009
When Dan Kaminsky was 11 years outdated, his mom grounded him from the web after he was caught hacking into navy computer systems. He didn’t study his lesson, occurring to ascertain a profession as a pc safety researcher.
Most notably, in 2008, whereas working because the director of penetration testing at safety agency IOActive, Kaminsky found a basic flaw in DNS, the strategy by which the web interprets domains into IP addresses. After collaborating with main IT companies and the US Department of Homeland Security on a repair, he detailed the vulnerability in a presentation at Black Hat Briefings.
DNS wasn’t Kaminsky’s first contribution to web safety. In 2006, Sony’s copy-protection scheme contaminated computer systems with rootkits, which Kaminsky decided to have affected over a half-million networks.
Kaminsky was simply as concerned about utilizing know-how to unravel issues of biology and accessibility: he developed DanKam, an app to help with colorblindness, and helped enhance listening to aids and telehealth instruments. He assisted with COVID-19 analysis nicely earlier than vaccines turned accessible. His work was usually motivated by what he discovered morally proper, not what was financially profitable.
Kaminsky was the co-founder and chief scientist of WhiteOps, a frequent speaker at DEF CON, and a Computerworld visitor columnist. He died at 42 from diabetic ketoacidosis.
Makoto Nagao: Broke the Language Barrier
October 4, 1936 – May 23, 2021
ITU
Makoto Nagao
After incomes a PhD in engineering in 1966 from Kyoto University, Makoto Nagao stayed there till 2003, beginning as an assistant professor and culminating in a time period as the college’s twenty third president. During this time, he developed among the first machine-translation methods.
His contributions to machine translation included directing the Mu undertaking, which made the primary profitable machine translations between Japanese and English, utilizing abstracts of science papers. Nagao proposed a mannequin for example-based machine translation, a system of translation by analogy that’s now broadly used; and he developed JUMAN (Japanese User-extensible Morphological Analyzer), a parser for languages reminiscent of Chinese and Japanese that wouldn’t have express phrase delimiters. Nagao was additionally a pioneer in clever picture processing and pure language processing for the Japanese language.
Just as he linked languages, Nagao additionally linked fellow scientists, co-founding the Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation. The group now grants an annual Nagao Award to these “who have contributed to research and development leading to or facilitating commercialization of machine translation systems.”
After retiring from Kyoto University, Nagao served because the 14th director of the National Diet Library, a Japanese analog to the United States Library of Congress. There, he helped develop Ariadne, an academic content material mangement system utilized by digital libraries.
For his work in making info accessible throughout languages and methods, Nagao was the recipient of the International Association for Machine Translation’s Award of Honour (1997) and the Japan Prize (2005), amongst many different recognitions. He was 84 when he handed.