Three Internet Companies, Three Stories

LA Weekly: Do You IMDB?. IMDB continues to be the number one site I go to for movie knowledge. They groked hypertext early on and the way they designed their site, tieing metadata between movies together with hyperlinks, was a major example for others to follow.

SFGate: CRAIGSLIST On the record: Craig Newmark. Most of you know that craigslist has recently been invested in by eBay, but for those that don’t, this is a good read.

Salon: Blogging grows up: The story of Mena and Ben Trott’s Movable Type, and Six Apart, the company they founded around it. A must read for content tool developers.

Unix’s Founding Fathers

Almost everything we do rests on the shoulders of others. Economist.com: profies Dennis Rictchie, who invented C and helped produce the earliest version of Unix:

Because computers were rare at the time, people did not have them on their desks, but rather went to the room, one side of which was covered with whiteboards, and sat down at a random computer to work. The technical hub of the system became the social hub.

It is that interplay between the technical and the social that gives both C and Unix their legendary status. Programmers love them because they are powerful, and they are powerful because programmers love them. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, perhaps put it best when he said, ?Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.? Dr Ritchie’s creations are indeed beautiful examples of that most modern of art forms.