17 People Who Changed the Internet Forever!

Garrett Camp – StumbleUpon

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Garrett Camp is the co-founder as well as the chief architect of Stumbleupon, a social bookmarking site that lets you discover and share new websites from all over the world. StumbleUpon took-off in November 2001, and continued, until late 2005 when it was moved to San Francisco.

To be more precise, StumbleUpon was founded by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance, and Eric Boyd during Garrett’s time in post-graduate school (in Calgary, Alberta, Canada).

The popularity of the software attracted Silicon Valley investor Brad O’Neill to take notice of the company and assist with a move to San Francisco. Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith now reside in San Francisco, where StumbleUpon is headquartered.

According to its About page, Stumble Upon has over 6,443,266 users.The majority of which are between the ages of 18 and 45 (in English-speaking countries). Half in the United States, half abroad, and the majority using Firefox.

Linus Torvalds – Linux

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Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project’s coordinator.

Initially Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed “Freax” – a combination of “free”, “freak”, and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system, but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server where the kernel was first hosted for downloading, named Torvalds’ directory linux.

Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

UPDATE (25/11/08)

Jon Postel – Internet Pioneer

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Jonathan Bruce Postel made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly in the area of standards. He is principally known for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death.

The Internet Society’s Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work.

In its infancy, Jon worked on its development, from its early protocols, to the creation of TCP/IP. Documenter and co-developer many of the key Internet standards, including TCP/IP (basic Internet protocols), SMTP (email transfer), and DNS (name servers).

Jon’s influence is felt throughout the Internet, in its protocols, in their documentation, in the DNS names we use and the ‘dot’ we use to separate them, and, in no small way, in the ‘good engineering’ that helped the Internet thrive from its inception in 1969 to today.

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