Editor's Letter
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In the pages that follow you will read about
incredible success stories. Men in the right places at the right times with the
right ideas. Men who not only had vision, but also the courage to persevere. Like America's founding fathers, these 10 industry luminaries--along with the original 15 CRNIndustry Hall of Fame members--laid the foundation for the modern computer age we all live in today. More than 20 years ago, Paul Allen had a brainstorm while in college and brought it to his friend Bill Gates, who was inducted into CRN's Industry Hall of Fame last year. Their partnership evolved into the world's most valuable company. Around the same time, Vint Cerf ran a test involving the successful communications between three different networks covering an 88,000-mile round-trip distance. The Internet was born. Building on this, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a program that was the conceptual start of the World Wide Web. While the Internet changed the way people communicate, the Web gave it mass appeal, and Berners-Lee is the man to thank for that. Dan Bricklin gave us the first electronic spreadsheet, paving the way for corporate megadeals and making the PC attractive to businesses. Oracle's Larry Ellison made relational databases a corporate reality. The straight-talking Charles Wang built Computer Associates into an industry powerhouse, while Ross Cooley pieced together Compaq's channel strategy and was charged with making sure the engine was always humming. Steve Wozniak is the other "Steve," the man who wrote the hardware and software behind Apple's first product. And it was Apple's hardware platform that allowed John Warnock and Adobe to radically change publishing. And finally, it was the late Bronson Ingram who raised the stakes in the distribution world and set the pace for all distributors to follow. Turn the page and introduce yourself.
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