CRN Set To Honor High-Tech Risk Takers At Hall Of Fame Gala

Technological progress doesn't stem from the technology alone, but from an amalgam of inventiveness, vision and business savvy. Those traits will be celebrated Monday night at CRN's fifth annual Industry Hall of Fame awards ceremony, which lauds individuals who achieved technology breakthroughs and shaped today's IT market.

The event, to be held at 8 p.m. PST in the EFX Theatre of the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, will honor six IT pioneers: Douglas Engelbart, Judy Estrin, Grace Hopper, Robert Noyce, Mort Rosenthal and Philip Zimmermann.

Engelbart, who holds the patent for the mouse, is known as the father of interactivity. Through his ideas and work at the Stanford Research Institute and the Augmentation Research Center in the 1960s and 1970s, Engelbart set the stage for graphical editing and windowing, object addressing, hypermedia, version control, teleconferencing and distributed client/server architecture. He also is credited as one of the first people to demonstrate the graphical user interface and the concepts of linking and online collaboration.

During the past 20 years, Estrin and her husband, Bill Carrico, wrote the script for the high-tech entrepreneur by launching four Silicon Valley companies--two of which have been acquired by networking giants 3Com and Cisco Systems. The couple founded Bridge Communications, which marketed a router three years before Cisco; Network Computing Devices, a Unix terminal company; and Precept Software, an Internet video technology firm. When Cisco acquired Precept, Estrin became Cisco's CTO. But the entrepreneurial drive struck once again, and Estrin left Cisco and teamed with Carrico to form Packet Design, an Internet infrastructure company. Along the way, the couple made key advances in networking technology and multimedia.

Rosenthal, another seminal entrepreneur, helped spawn today's software channel. Before his 1982 launch of Corporate Software, the first software reseller catering to corporations, PC software was sold either through retail outlets or catalogs. But Corporate Software's product catalog became an industry bible, and as Rosenthal expanded the business he ended up laying the groundwork for the outsourced help desk and software asset management. This software activist also helped fuel the rise of industry players such as Lotus and Microsoft.

Similarly, Zimmermann championed online privacy. To protect personal privacy and civil liberties, he created Pretty Good Privacy e-mail encryption to shield information sent over the Internet, and PGP is now a global standard. But his creation came with a price. Zimmermann was the target of a three-year government investigation for allegedly violating federal encryption export laws. The case was dropped in 1996, and the Clinton administration later relaxed encryption laws. But Zimmermann remains a privacy proponent to this day. He sold PGP Inc. to Network Associates in 1997 and left the company earlier this year.

Two of this year's Hall of Fame inductees, Admiral Grace Hopper and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, are being honored posthumously.

Hopper, who died in 1992, invented the compiler and, in the process, spawned the universal programming language COBOL and modern programming. During the 1940s and 1950s, she also worked on some of the earliest computers, including the Mark I, II and III and the Univac. She spent more than 40 years in the U.S. Navy, retiring from duty in 1986 as the nation's oldest active officer.

An inventor and businessman, Noyce shunned government funding and nurtured the entrepreneurial spirit that put Silicon Valley on the map. In turn, he shaped the microprocessor and computer industries we know today. In 1957, he founded Fairchild Semiconductor, where he is credited as the co-inventor of the integrated circuit, and in 1968 Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove founded Intel, where the microprocessor was born.

This year's six inductees bring the membership in CRN's Industry Hall of Fame to 54. Past inductees include Bill Gates, William Hewlett, Steve Jobs, Chip Lacy, Andrew Grove, Larry Ellison, Bronson Ingram, Steve Raymund, Bill Joy, Ray Ozzie, David Packard and Gordon Moore.

For an in-depth look at the 2001 inductees, as well as past inductees, click here..

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