Honoring The High-Tech Industry's Finest

Inductees to the fifth annual CRN Industry Hall of Fame included visionaries, inventors and savvy entrepreneurs whose contributions drove computing and business innovations and helped change the world.

CRN honored its newest Hall of Fame members,Douglas Engelbart, Judy Estrin, Mort Rosenthal, Philip Zimmermann, the late Grace Hopper and the late Robert Noyce,last week in a gala event, co-sponsored by the Computer History Museum, in Las Vegas during Comdex.

Remaining true to the optimism and introspection that helped her launch four Silicon Valley companies over the past 20 years, Estrin said the current economic downturn marks a time to reflect on what it means to be part of the technology community. "The people who will be best-positioned when the economy turns up again will be those who are passionate about technology and what it can do," Estrin told the 450 attendees of the Hall of Fame ceremony.

Engelbart knows that lesson better than most. While working as a professor at Stanford University in the late 1950s, he faced constant skepticism from colleagues who argued that computing would never be taught as a full course. But Engelbart refused to listen. His work at the Stanford Research Institute and the Augmentation Research Center in the 1960s and '70s earned him recognition as the father of the mouse and contributed to the development of online collaboration, graphical editing, teleconferencing and distributed client/server architecture. "When people don't offer you support because they can't perceive the value of what you're doing, you have to keep plugging at whatever it is you believe in," Engelbart said after the ceremony.

Such perseverance defined the career of cryptography pioneer and privacy advocate Zimmermann. In the late 1980s, he developed the technology for Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption, which soon after its release as freeware in 1991 became a global encryption standard. Zimmermann continues to evangelize privacy rights as governments hike their use of security technology to combat global terrorism. "I'm worried that we can put technologies and policies in place that will try to address these urgent, short-term problems for the next few years, and then our children will be left with them in the next generation," he said.

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