About People in ICT-points

ICT-points will attach data that concerns famous and perhaps not so famous people because I value immensly their influence on developing my ICT understanding, their own 'knowledge paths' being of paramount importance to ICT developements.

My interaction with them either directly or indirectly (by studying them), sometimes even subconsciously, has contributed to the evolving knowledge structure that I refer to by the name 'ICT-points' and I will try to document in this blog. These people are:

• Tony Brooker, talked about concepts such as gates, machine-cycle, buffers, produced the first Computer Science course in the UK. I received some early version of it at Essex University. Unfortunately missed the chance to know him better due to ideology obstacles, mea culpa. An Iranian student was taping his lecture and Prof.Brooker got really mad. Years later reading about Bletchley Park made me understand his "politics". Unfortunately mine did not resonate with his or Ian McCallum's either because the Essex student's scene was very different. A real pity to have the compiler-complier Autocode geek and to miss real contact. It was the times the great student occupation was taking place, Milliband was lecturing in Square 4 and Sex Pistols were on concert at Essex. The mix did not fussed.
  
• Willis Bandler, he tought us about Algebraic structures and Turing machines. This was my first exposition to the mother of all concepts in computing he introduced some kind of innovation air about machine concepts and mathematics. He pointed to Lofti Zadeh and Brian Gaines and Fuzzy Systems. He supervised my graduate thesis.
  
• J.T. Johnstone, made me think of the value of Maths, directed me to Ian Stewart and his approach to Maths, Peter was a graduate of St.Andrews the place I went to after Essex.
  
• A.J. Cole, equivalence of Markov algos, Turing machines and Lambda Calculus. Lefteris Papantoniou (lectured at AUEB) introduced me to Cole and his ideas. Relational Data Bases and Functional Programming were his offers. In fact I overherd Jack pushing Tony Davie to undertake my supervision on a Functional Programming project called SASL, as Tony was not very eager. Later Tony wrote a book on Haskell. Both SASL and S-Algol (programming language design) were established by David Turner in St. Andrews and pursued further by people like Ron Morrison.
  
• David Turner, got me into Functional Programming, a really powerful concept that stayed with me over the years. I gave him some results about the effects of parallelism on SASL programs after working on a parallel (simulated) implementation. I think his SKI-machine design and implementation is a piece of Art, whatever he programmed was amazing. He had the great C.Strachey as supervisor at Oxford. I learnt from the book on the Enigma that Strachey received his initiation to computing from god himself, Alan Turing. I read on the Web that Turner still pursues "mathematical programming" as a Prof. at Middlesex U.
  
• George Nelson, gave me his UNIX notes from Bell Labs while at St.Andrews U. I made good use of them while teaching about Unix in University of Patras in 1984. An article in the journal Software Practise & Experience, Dec 1982 titled "The Newcastle connection or UNIXes of the World unite" made me think of the form of unity.
  
• Paul Maritz, he talked to me essentially about what we call WINTEL before he joined Microsoft but I did not get it at the time. I asked him what was his goal at St.Andy's he said to learn about software as Hardware was his previous goal while at Intel. I did think of him as soon as my radar detected it 94/95 the emergence of Java/HotJava. I was very much impressed about his statement (as I looked on the Haloween docs) that the advent of brower (mosaic/netscape) constituted a paradigm shift in computing (on which the PC was riding).
  
• Christos Papadimitriou, I met him in 1982/83 and planned to work together at NTUA but did not collaborate eventually, his book on Turing re-established the connection in the form of his paper about Internet modeling.
  
• Nikos Malagardis, he got me into National Research Networking and OSI concepts. I found recently a paper of his about terminology translation in Greek. People like him remind me of Seferis' famous statement about Greece.
  
• Vint Cerf, the first Internet evangelism I received from him participating in the Networking Conference at Trieste (end of 80s), could not apprehend a word.
  
• Peter Kirstein, master of European Nets, UCL, tcpip code, provided the OK to link ARIADNE to JANET and over to NASA.
  
• Tony Bates, he got me into real Network admin things and thus ARIADNE got into Internet (NSFNET) in 1990 and later as AS-2546 in 1992 from Greece.
  
• Nathaniel Borenstein, designer of the MIME transformation, metamail and other tools. I believe he is the architect of the solution to introduce multimedia into Internet. This took place on the Email platform. An innovation also used by the Web platform. Some said 'WWW = FTP + Multimedia'
  
• Rob Blokzil, CERN, RIPE, ICANN opened my eyes on policy issues that helped remove the OSI blinders.
  
• Tim Berners-Lee, he had me thinking for months about his proposal that I heard at the CERN meeting of RARE. What the hell was networked information. I did a project with students "Info-hunt" soon to be overdriven by ARCHIE. Some years later I did explain to myself the meaning of "ed" in the concept "network".
  
• Jill Foster, she got me into RFCs and international collaboration.
  
• Joyce Raynolds, offered the idea of User Support and Information services, amazing an IETF working group for the users (not about developers !).
  
• Randy Bush, I learnt from Ignacio Martinez he was Mr. NIC but was afraid to ask for in-addr.arpa hosting for 143.233.0.0. I asked JANET and IRIS instead. My source of hesitance was that perhaps I would have rtfm before asking. Could not have since the bible, the SUN Microsystems admins manual completely lacked a reference and had to learn it the hard way.
  
• Larry Landweber, met him in 1993 and learnt that he did CSNET and INET connectivity maps. Missed the chance to talk proper as I did something different at the RIPE/RARE conference. He worked with Dave Farber whose list I steadily follow for years now. I recently met him in Athens he asked me about hotels and things, gave a lecture for the students of AIT.
  
• Steve Goldstein, I was introduced to NSFNET guru by Maria Demou of Cern about 1989. I noticed the statement he made on the RIPE list about Tony Bates' work for European Internet when Tony said good-bye to Janet admins.
  
• Carl Malamud, met him at RIPE, he did really interesting Internet projects like TPC.INT that provided energy to my holistic view deliberations.
  
• Peter Lothberg, he talked about fat-pipes and their unique experience in route handling where two IP continents linked together by the fat-pipe. Curious to learn CISCO used his consulting to design the GSR rooters.
  
• Brian Carpenter, he got me into CHEOPS, recently found a paper of his on Turing and Von Neumann, he made the historic correction "Turing/Von Neumann architecture". British were really "closed source" on their achievements and missed a lot by that imho. Brian agreed to give me a line for Ariadne from Demokritos to Cern, a site of reference of tcp/ip in Europe.
  
• Richard Stallman, I talked to him about talking to Greece had a debate on production model versus ideology. Met him again about patents event in Athens.
  
• Lance Spitzner, he got us into learning about internet attacks, met him via C.Karafasoulis of my lab. Project's approach to learning security seemed quite similar to lab's cource and to the idea of "reflected learning" so the decision to join his group made sense. Sharing knowledge is really our really common ground. My lab concept was a miniature case compared to his Honeynet global lab project.
  
• Jeff Stuzmann, he gave us an example of Security pro, an important event since did not have contact with the field.
  
• Brian Kuhle, interacted while reviewing and correcting the text for the KYE book that I contributed to research the case 'Know Your Enemy'.
  

The list above offered passage to several others like:

• Alan Turing, still reading the book on Enigma, an immense resource on many aspects. Been to Hastings and St.Leonards and Guilford, what a coincidence.
  
• Christopher Strachey, the ultimate guru, he was re-booting with remote-login, prog.language design, he supervised Dave Turner who partly supervised me. He with Dana Scott established the mathematical truth of lambda calculus, a topic that proved useful for so many years.
  
• Saunders MacLain, he thought the structure of Maths is a Network.
  
• Alvin Toffler, he wrote about recurring waves of technology, gave me an evolutionary concept.
  
• Valentin Turchin, the master of Metasystem Transition Theory and Metacomputing
  
• Seymour Papert, the bug helps learning , LOGO, learn-by-doing, OLPC philosopher
  
• Bob Khan, the 'inter-network' concept with Vint Cerf, followed his comments on ICANN.
  
• Dave Clark, End-to-End Architecture, How to think abou the new Internet, famous statement "we do not believe in voting but in rough consesus and running code"
  
• Marshall T. Rose, great educational books about Internet like "closing the book with email", the BEEP toolset,
  
• Les Kleinrock, first book on large communication nets, saw it in 1987.
  
• Larry Roberts, ARPANET chief, his timeline vindicated my evolutionary thinking concerning internet development (model).
  
• Van Jacobsen, journal Connections, first Internet reference for me then it was the first books. Funny enough though I was a contributor did not digest fully "Internet: Getting started".
  
• Jon Postel, the protocal Tzar, he proposed to Rohit Khare a study about getting an Internet picture
  
• Paul Mockapetris, the designer of DNS, the most facinating Automation step of Internet (imho)
  
• Guy Steele, started from his paper about parallel garbage collection, wrote about evolving a language.
  
• David Isenberg, the Stupid Network conceptology, first paradigm about 'what-is-the-net'
  
• Niels Provos, a simple tool that helps understanding attacks, member of the Honeynet Project.
  

Now, if the names above mean something to you then that is a good enough reason to ping me to ask to comment to correct me and generally be part of testing the model that wants to say something about the process of Internet understanding as a function of following ICT developments.

I find my posting very much like Andy Oram's from O'Reilly but I think my authoring is based on a more direct affinity with the sources. I guess it is not a mere coincidence they state that knowledge communication is their niche.

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