Important People: Principal Figures in the Development of the Internet and the World Wide Web

Steve Crocker, a talented computer scientist, wrote eight of the first twenty-five Request for Comment, popularly called RFC--the Internet's way of establishing standards about host software. Along with Vinton Cerf and Jon Postel, Crocker was among the University of California at Los Angeles graduate students enlisted to build hardware and software that would hook up to Interface Message Processors (IMPs).

Doug Engelbart is a legend in the computer world. The inventor of many common devices and ideas used in computing today, including "word processing," "outline processing," "screen windows," the "mouse," and the "text link." On November 21, 1969, a computer at Boelter Hall, home of the computer science department at University of California at Los Angeles, hooked up with another hundreds of miles away at Engelbart's lab at the Stanford Research Institute.

Bill Gates is chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft Corporation. Perhaps Harvard's most famous drop-out, Gates was a computer hobbiest before he and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975. The widespread popularity of MS-DOS and Windows was largely responsible for the "PC revolution" of the 1980s. Although Gates was not an Internet pioneer in the sense of seeing the Internet revolution coming and being one of the first to set the pace, he and Microsoft have made major strides and the company's Internet Explorer Web browser is now a strong contender to the marketplace dominance of Netscape. For several years Gates has been listed as the most or one of the most wealthy individuals in the world. Gates is married to a Duke business school graduate, Melinda Gates, and they have a daughter, Jennifer, who was born in 1996. They live in a fabulous "smart house" mansion outside Seattle. Gates authored The Road Ahead, now in its second edition.

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