A couple of buddies pointed me toward Sys-Con Media's Top 150 Information Technology Heroes, and I have to admit it was fun (once you click past the obstructing ad anyway). While my first reaction was to want to point out omissions (see below), what's not to like about a list that mixes Dennis Ritchie, Luca Cardelli, Edsger Dijkstra, and Charles Babbage?
However, you have to get a bit cranky with the fact that Jim Gray was left out. (His omission is even more surprising given recent events should have kept him on the authors' mind.) Jim's work on transactions was foundational for both relational databases and transaction processing (TP) monitors. Moreover, the whole web/Java application server category (WebLogic, WebSphere, .NET, ...) is really just a TP monitor rearchitected for web processing. (By the way, the reason it was not called a web/Java TP monitor in the first …
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