Of your choice of the most influential people in IT, James Gosling is the true geek. Unlike Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, neither of whom finished college, Gosling completed a PhD in computer science and contributed to software innovation at a technical level. Born in 1955 near Calgary, Canada, Gosling is best known as the father of the Java programming language, the first programme language designed with the internet in mind and which could adapt to highly distributed applications. Gosling received a BSc in computer science from the University of Calgary in 1977, and while working towards his doctorate he created the original version of the Emacs text editor for Unix (Gosmacs). He also built a multi-processor version of Unix, as well as several compilers and mail systems before starting work in the industry.
In 1984, Gosling joined Sun Microsystems, where he is currently chief technology officer in the developer product group. In the early 1990s, Gosling initiated and led a project code-named Green that eventually became Java. Green aimed to develop software that would run on a variety of computing devices without having to be customised for each one. Although much of the technology developed as part of Green never saw the light of day, Gosling realised that some of the underlying principles they had created would be very useful in the internet age.
Sun formally launched Java in 1995. Gosling did the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as Newa and Gosling Emacs. Although some critics say Java has not lived up to its initial "write-once-run-anywhere" claim, Gosling's success in the Computer Weekly polls is precisely because Java has allowed the creation of robust, reusable code which runs on devices as diverse at mobile phones, PCs and mainframes.
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