It is rather unfortunate that in the ever changing and rapidly improving world of technology, we hardly remember the geniuses who through their inventions laid the foundation for many of the conveniences and features we now enjoy in our favorite communication devices.

This article is a tribute to the ten people who made these discoveries and an attempt to bring their achievements into the limelight.

Teaching You Tools to Become Empowered

To build a successful business and career, you must always keep up with changes in the IT Marketplace. AWS, Office 365, LinkedIn, Sales Force, SEO, Social Media are just a few examples of where knowledge is a huge factor for success.

Training with HSG addresses your knowledge gaps and provides you with the requisite tools to outpace the competition.

1.      Marty Cooper

Did you know that Cooper was the first to file the patent in 1973, when he was already working for Motorola for the “radio telephone system”. The Cooper’s Law is his brainchild and to think that he himself was inspired to come out with the patent was Star Trek and its Captain Kirk is indeed revealing.

2. Mike Lazardidis
 

Lazardis was a child prodigy who was reading all the science books by the age of 12. He was even awarded a prize for this. However, despite his interest in academics, he dropped out of college to satisfy the entrepreneurial streak in him and thus Research in Motion was born in 1984. The BlackBerry as we know it today, owes its conception and further development to the magnificent research institute he set up in 2000 at a cost of $100 million.

3. Tony Fadell
 

Fadell bounced off an idea he had with Apple and that was how the iPod was created in 2001. He is now the Senior Vice President at Apple handling the iPod product and its further development.

4. John Backus
 

Though FORTRAN is not much in use today, it was a programming language that was developed in the 1950s by Backus and used extensively in the years to come. Backus passed away last year due to brain tumor.

5. Jack Nilles
 

He is the one who coined this term way back in 1970 and is also credited with the design of space vehicles that are used by the US Air Force as well as NASA.

6. Doug Engelbart

Each time you click your mouse, you should thank Engelbart as he was the one who patented this discovery in 1970. However, he did not get any royalties for this useful invention and at 83, remains active at the Bootstrap Institute, which he heads.

7. Gary Thuerk
 

Thuerk has a rather unenviable legacy of having been the first to send out mailers to people he did not know through ARPANET, a network. Though he was castigated for sending out such spam, he deserves credit for being the first to introduce this possibility of spam mail to all of us.

8. John Cioffi

DSL technology was introduced by this Stanford professor when he used copper wires to transmit data in order to make broadband possible to computer users. He was awarded the 2006 Marconi Prize for his contribution to technology.

9. James Gosling

This computer science doctorate was the genius who wrote the first Java script in 1991 and this was not surprising considering he had already conceived and implemented a multiprocessor Unix system by then.

10. Vic Hayes
 

Hayes used his electrical engineering skills for developing the Wi-Fi and he has also been credited with the successful working of the 802.11 LAN wireless communication system. He is now at Netherlands where he was born, working with the Delft University of Technology.