father of O-O languages - ALGOL: ???
Nah, Algol (60) was the father of ALGOL-like languages, which is most of them besides FORTRAN and COBOL. Most people would say the father of OO languages was Simula, which was too cool in general, but unfortunately was invented by Norwegians, and hence had a NIH problem. It was big among CS types, anyway. C++ sort of grafted a lot of Simula into C, and Java removed a bunch of C from C++, so we're getting closer to the original these days.
Needless to say, Microsoft's involvement with the development of all of these was minimal, except in the embrace and demolish sense.
Hypertext - Apple???
Oh dear. This is usually credited to Vanevar Bush, some kind of technical guru in the Roosevelt administration. There's a famous Atlantic article from the late 40's call "How We May Think", which explained the ideas, although his mechanism was microfiche based. The modern term perhaps comes from Ted Nelson, mid '70's, "Computer Lib". He actually was hired by Autodesk at some point, but his implementation ideas were pretty half baked. Apple had Hypercard, of course, does anybody use that anymore?
Network-transparent Hyperlinking (URLs/HTML/etc) - Mosaic: U of IL
Mosaic was the graphical browser, but URL's/HTML/HTTP, e.g. the World Wide Web, is usually credited to Tim Berners-Lee(?), then at CERN and now at W3C. There were textual browsers before Mosaic. Personally, I wish things were still more textual in general.
Cheers, Dan. |
