Archive for the ‘High Tech’ Category

FORTRAN developer John W. Backus, 82

Posted: Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 7:36 am

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82. … Read full obituary


Rex Farrance, PC World senior editor, 59, murdered

Posted: Thursday, January 11th, 2007 6:18 pm

PC World lost a treasured colleague and friend Tuesday, when Senior Technical Editor Rex Farrance was killed during a home-invasion robbery attempt. For 19 years, Rex served PC World with professionalism and a passion for accuracy. … Read full obituary


AltaVista creator Paul Flaherty, 42

Posted: Saturday, March 25th, 2006 1:29 pm

Paul A. Flaherty, a computer engineer who helped create the pioneering AltaVista online search engine, has died. He was 42.

Flaherty died March 16 of a heart attack at his home in Belmont, about 20 miles south of San Francisco, family members said Friday. … Read full obituary


PC guru Jim Seymour, 60

Posted: Friday, October 11th, 2002 1:20 pm

Jim Seymour, an early and influential technical writer who explained the benefits and headaches of personal computers for two decades in enthusiasts’ periodicals like PC Week and PC Magazine, died on Tuesday in Austin, Tex., where he lived. He was 60. … Read full obituary


Computer programming pioneer Kristen Nygaard, 75

Posted: Monday, August 12th, 2002 1:48 am

Kristen Nygaard, a pioneer in developing programming language for computers who helped lay the basis for the Internet, has died of a heart attack, aged 75.

Nygaard died yesterday in Norway’s capital, Oslo, according to media reports.

The University of Oslo professor was acclaimed internationally for his work in developing the programming language Simula that laid the basis for MS-DOS and the Internet.

He and his colleague Ole-Johan Dahl, who died in June, were presented the 2001 AM Turing Award and other prizes for their role in the invention of object-oriented programming at the Norwegian Computing Centre from 1961 to 1967. … Read full obituary


Gnutella developer Gene Kan, 25

Posted: Tuesday, July 9th, 2002 3:21 pm

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Gene Kan, one of the pioneers of the file-sharing technology called Gnutella that took music swapping beyond the realm of Napster, was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, a coroner’s spokeswoman said Tuesday. He was 25.

Sue Turner of the San Mateo County medical examiner’s office said Kan’s body was found July 2 at his Belmont home. …

A statement released Monday by his employer, Sun Microsystems Inc., said Kan died as the result of an accident and that no further details of his death were being released at the request of his family. …

Gnutella came along as Shawn Fanning’s Napster program became mired in lawsuits by the recording industry. Kan and a small clutch of developers honed the Gnutella protocol so that programmers around the world could make their own home-brewed computer applications — each speaking the same language and capable of pointing users to shared music, video and software files. … Read full obituary