Quote from: dado7 on March 10, 2018, 05:37:31 PM

I think you should mention Charles Babbage, the man who originated the concept of a programmable computer. He is considered the "father of the computer".
Most of the people you mentioned are all about software, but I think that hardware is equally important, and it started way back before mobile phones, it all started with Abacus

If we are talking hardware, William Shockley and John Bardeen of bell labs too deserve a mention for the first transistor. The device that eventually enabled all logic devices.

Although as Hydrogen so ruefully pointed out earlier, It gets me every time to imagine how those early innovators would have worked.

Quote from: Hydrogen on March 10, 2018, 10:42:52 AM

Nothing against anyone on your list but do you ever get an impression our standards for innovation, progress and invention are steadily being lowered to produce an illusion that these things are not diminishing over time?

Today it is all about snazzy IDE's with tools and pre-built libraries ready to be exploited to make the next idea come to fruition. But like you pointed out, it does look like we no longer have that age of fundamental discoveries and inventions.. Sad

When ENIAC would have been built with its thousands of vacuum tubes occupying several hundred square feet. Those people really were giants.

How those people built on the capabilities of the first machines to gradually reach to the first microprocessors. How they would have programmed the instruction set for the first microprocessors in real bits and bytes, making them come to life. The ALU, I/O, 8 KB of EEPROM and a few LED's interacting to create the first illusion of a response from the machine!! Shocked

Such wonders they would have been. Gradually all of that complexity got abstracted away from bits to mnemonics to programming languages and now to function blocks based IDE's..

It is admirable that we are making programming more and more accessible but i frankly feel bad that the fundamentals are no longer as accessible as they would have been back in the days.. And that we never got to be a part of it..LOL..