17 People Who Changed the Internet Forever!
From its birth in the labs of Tim Berners-Lee back in 1992, to its interaction with the Napster in 1999, and its 2004 induction of Wikipedia: the Internet as we know it, has evolved drastically, been around the world literally, and changed the way humans live permanently.
Nothing can replace it, nothing is like it, and it has no alternative. The internet is like a diamond mine for the people who wish to acquire wealth, a profound lake of information for those who have an insatiable appetite for knowledge base, and an eternal form of entertainment for those wish to amuse themselves.
With the passage of time, people from amongst us have emerged with the craziest of ideas to test and enhance the potential of this God’s gift to mankind. And it is due to the efforts of these noble souls, that we have the entire world at the simple tap of our fingers.
In no particular order, Skidzopedia provides you with a list of those people who have influenced the Internet greatly.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin – Google Inc.
Two PhDs from Stanford University started work in the garage of a friend’s. And they were defiantly not building steam engines!
They were, however, creating the internet’s most powerful search engine. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are arguably the world’s most successful Internet entrepreneurs and developers in history. This enabled them to earn billions, while assisting everyone from high school students to particle physicists have an easy time searching for information over the internet.
Google was first launched on Stanford’s website (google.stanford.edu) and then finally on Google.com in 1997. It is estimated that GOOGLE is worth about a staggering $25 billion dollars.
David Filo and Jerry Yang – Yahoo! Inc.
Yahoo! too is the creation of two Stanford University’s Electrical Engineer graduates, called Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yang started by listing web pages on the Internet and named it “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. Then, he decided to switch it to Yahoo! and the initial URL was at akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo
In December 1994, that particular website had already received over a million hits. Realizing its potential, David Filo and Jerry Yang got serious and diversified Yahoo! as a web portal.
David Filo’s net worth is $2.9 billion dollars and Jerry Yang’s is $2.3 billion dollars.
Bill Gates – Microsoft
William Henry “Bill” Gates III, is an American business magnate, philanthropist, the world’s third richest person (as of February 8, 2008), and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.
Gates also holds the record of being the Richest Person in the world for 15 consecutive years.
Great List!
All of them are genius. Thanks for compiling this info.
You forgot Al Gore!
hey Al-Gore ?? What he did for Web !
umm.. you didn’t ranked them, can you!
I feel that Sabeer Bhatia, the guy who created the first web based Email (hotmail) should be listed.
I think you forgot my name here as the 18th person 😛
lol 😀 Sorry man it just slipped out of my mind. Btw in what field have you specialized in?!?!
How did Bill Gates change the Internet? At first he and Microsoft weren’t interested. When they saw the money making potential of it, they force bundled an inferior Mosaic based browser in every subsequent release of their OS and got busted for it. To this day the browser is inferior to most other offerings.
You used to have to get your own TCP/IP stack to add on to Windows 3.11 with either PPP or SLIP for modem access, and this usually came from your ISP, and was not included with the OS. When Windows 95 came out the networking stack was sub-par and full of bugs.
I’m still waiting for that “Internet changing thing” from Bill Gates or Microsoft, but haven’t as yet seen it.
The only thing close would be Xbox Live, but it wasn’t exactly the first Internet based gaming service. I believe Quakeworld started that, with Valve making it mainstream.
you forgot m00t
tanx
Not a single woman on the list.
It’s funny how Tom Anderson from Myspace didn’t make this list. I’m not saying he should be on it or not, but for a while there they were talking about him like he was a God. Myspace surpassed google for daily unique visitors at one point.
Now a few months later, people just don’t seem to care. Perhaps, we just now have perspective, or maybe we just have the attention span of a 2 year old.
Soooo Facebook “changed” the internet even though they just now (years later) have only reached where MySpace has been at for years. How did Zucker-douche make this list and MySpace didn’t? Facebook even now only has as many users as MySpace because they went international. They are still no where near MS in terms of users in places like UK, US, CA, MX, JP, IN. Your list is incomplete and bias.
I’m not sure the word “staggering” was included enough!
Interesting list, though.
Uh … Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were successful whether the internet existed or not.
By the way the Internet existed long before http existed – and without every goob and their kids on the net it was a far safer place.
Who-ray brokened Englinese!
Proofread!!
Why, oh why do people still try to connect Bill Gates with the success of the internet? This article is titled: “17 People Who Changed the Internet Forever!” yet Microsoft had LITTLE OR NOTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET!! In fact, when the internet was first gaining momentum, Gates was famously quoted as saying: “The internet? We’re not interested in it.” Just because the computer you are staring at right now is running their crappy software, doesn’t mean they got you connect to the internet. In fact, Internet Explorer was Microsoft’s way of BACKPEDDLING their ass into the internet, because they let it slip right by them. Do the history! Check the facts, and judge for yourself!
Al Gore was pro-active in passing the legislation that funded the transition from a defense / research network into the publicly accessible internet in the US today.
No, he didn’t invent the internet … but he was in on the process early enough (and in a big enough way) to take some of the credit.
Bill Gates does NOT belong on this list. He made his money selling software for stand-alone computers and, if anything, has hindered the internet through the zillions of security vulnerabilities coded into his products.
you forgot tom, who made myspace, which is way bigger than facebook.
Hey you seem to have forgotten the original pioneers of internet porn, they certainly changed the place, and made a truck load of cash
On this list is some of the best people on the web, specially kevin rose, shame I am not on the list though 😀
Yeah, Bill Gates does not belong on this list. He has done nothing for the Internet – always playing catch-up to the other great minds you’ve mentioned here.
Steve Jobs… hmmm Mac did create ITunes, which could be seen as an innovation in buying music online…
And where is Linus Torvalds, Eric Stallman and the Apache Devs ? If you look at the growth of the GNU/Linux and the internet they run pretty much together. In my opinion, without these guys the internet wouldn’t be close to what it is today.
It would have been a place where only big corporations would be able to afford putting up websites, and there would’ve been much tighter controls over the content you could see.
Also, many of the people on your list made use of Linux + Apache and much of the FOSS stuff to create these ground breaking Internet Innovations.
… oh no … kiddos. not only bill gates are wrong in this list … also steve “money money money” jobs.
As far as I’m concerned, Microsoft’s most significant contribution to the web was MSN Messenger, in Canada at least. MSN is practically synonymous with IM here.
Thanks! 😛
why would you cross out bill gates? he’s one of the most influential people in the world, and being that his field of origin is technology… wouldn’t he indeed be somebody who’s impacted and changed the internet as we know it?
You Microsoft hating fags go suck a mac dick.
Anyone else find it interesting they are all white or Asian men?
Hmmmm.I would add TPB owners.In fact i’m disturbed that they are not mentioned.They are many times out there in the front line fighting for what many of us belive it’s right.
Tim Berners-Lee did more than just invent the; he saved us money too! The heads of CERN (where he was working at the time of development), wanted to “RENT” each one of us the web, but he said: “No”
@ Styyl & lynstly
I do agree with both of you, and that is the sole reason I included him in this list. But it seems that authority rules in this case.
Most of the people here are of the view that Gates had little or no contribution to the web development. And that’s the reason I had to cross him from this list. No offense though! 😀
Inspiring for those who have innovation but are still afraid to show/do it.
Fear not just do it.
If it fails so what noone is gonna chop your head off!
Peace Peeps
I found this article through stumbleupon and I must say this is one of the rare few articles that actually catch my attention and are written well.
You described everyone that belonged on that list, it was a great read.
Thanks
Eric
I am not saying I like the guy, and as people have already said, Bill Gates wasn’t really interested in the Internet until all the other actors in the business had already proven his stance wrong, however, where do you think the Internet had been today if Microsoft had kept on ignoring it? With what? A 90% market share, that’s a lot of computers not being able to get online out of the box.
tl;dr: BillG played a role, just not in the active way that all the others on the list did.
Glad to see Sir Tim here at least.
And while guys like Kevin Rose and Mark Zuckerberg have done amazing work on web sites that were disruptive, may I suggest a few names from the first waves. For example, Vint Cerf was writing the TCP/IP spec in the early 1970s, which is before Mark Zuckerberg was born.
* Steve Case – morphed the closed Commodore network Quantum*Link into a series of platform specific sites before combining them all under AOL. And while we scoff at AOL now, there were enough members to enable the company to buy Time Warner. And then they did this little thing at Q-Link called OLMs – on-line messaging, which became, uh, AIM. Finally, he introduced flat-rate pricing and changed the game forever. Before that, we charged people by the minute.
* Vint Cerf – known as “father of the Internet”. Name it, and he’s done it. Once you look at Vint’s background, no one on the list belongs there more (except for maybe Sir Tim)
* Jim Clark & Mark Andressen – anyone here use a browser? Thank these two guys who brought Netscape to the market. And back in those days, IE was one no one used. It was all Netscape. Smart too. They gave the product away and sold the platform to AOL for $4 billion.
* John Postel — You know that email thing or DNS? Yeah, that’s him.
* Esther Dyson — besides the EFF (without which we would have no freedoms on today’s web), Dyson was the first chair of ICANN, the group that works with top level domains among other things.
I think there’s room for some more at the table. These Web 2.0 folks disrupted the underlying technology on the www interface, mostly for commercial purposes, but they didn’t change the Internet. It’s a worthy list. Maybe the title could be tweaked or the real people who fashioned DARPA into the Internet could join them.
Kickin’ it old school and new school! 😆
How about Caterina Fake & Stewart Butterfield, founders of Flickr? I think Flickr definitely belongs on the list- and will have the added merit of having a woman make it to the list
okay guys my god.
the internet was not changed by mr jobs, or mr gates; they shouldn’t be on this list.
AND if you’re looking to find people who changed the face of the internet, you may want to look at the inventor of Flash, the awesome develoeprs at netscape who invented JavaScript (the father of Web 2.0) – in fact, include netscape (wtf? gates but no netscape you obviously don’t know anything about the internet)
how about the developer of php? you know the server side crap that runns ALL of the above developers sites?
this list is a load of crap!
What about Janus Friis, the founder of Kazaa and Skype?
stumbleupon is how i found this website. haha…i love it =D
Fantastic List!! And I found you thanks to the creators of SU!! 😀 I’ve bookmarked it for reference later on – you know on those days when you think something is not possible!! These people are inspirations for us all.
Great compilation and the additions to your list make it pretty darn complete. I was wondering about Flickr but am happy to see it’s there now. Nice work!!
I thank you all on appreciating my work! I really feel proud of compiling such an excellent list (not praising myself) and the response that I am getting is beyond my expectations.
@ J
Well, I don’t think that they played a major role, although their ideas very unique and helped us in certain ways.
I’ll leave this to my readers to decide whether they think and want to add “Janus Friis” to this list.
Dude, where is Al Gore?