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To: Keith Hankin who wrote (14365)	11/23/1997 9:18:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

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.

To: Keith Hankin who wrote (14365)	11/24/1997 4:05:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 24154

Good additions for the list. I would except Mandelbrot though, and one other. It's pretty clear at this point that a colleague he robbed of any credit actually faxed him a printed out 'Mandelbrot Set' graphic and ideas on non-linear systems to get him started. Hoping he would follow up, not hoping to be forgotten, of course. A guy at the weather service, perhaps, where much else of the more modern work on non-linear systems occurred? USGS? I forget. Mandelbrot's excuse: 'He didn't know what he [the originator] had' or something approximately like that. All as documented in Scientific American from 1985 and other publications onward. Also hypertext: Seems to be the fathers (or mothers) of hypertext were elsewhere. I read an article on the origins once, and while I no longer can remember the key names, I don't remember Apple being involved at the time. Maybe some hypertext people moved there. Certainly hypercard helped to popularize it. Knuth, father of so much else? I would do a search on that one. However, whoever they were, they sure weren't at MSFT. Also, how about fuzzy logic systems? The main guy is at Berkeley, Lofti Zadeh if I have the spelling right. A prof, but I think you can credit Sony and Sanyo and other Japanese companies with a lot of work on that. Probably the reason why your new Japanese camcorder picture doesn't shake, if it doesn't. (Sadly, most American developers and researchers, if they stop to think about this area, are Baysian statistical and binary logic acolytes who think fuzzy logic is the work of the devil, so you don't get much of this here.) Hey, BTW, no Microsoft contributions yet in nanotech? What a surprise. Chaz