Ray Tomlinson - Inventor of the Email.

   Google mail a.k.a gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, e.t.c all have one thing in common - they are used to send electronic mails - and you have probably used one or more of these email platforms before at one point in time or the other. You have also most likely heard of Larry Page, Jerry Yang and a host of others who created their own platforms for sending electronic mails but the person who sent the very first email was a man named Ray Tomlinson.
   Ray Tomlinson was an American Computer Programmer who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system which was the precursor to the internet.

• He grew up in Broadalbin, New York where he attended Broadalbin Central School.
• After graduating and receiving his Bachelor's degree from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York and receiving his Master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the company now known as BBN Technologies where he helped developed the TENEX operating system which included the ARPANET Network Control Program.
• It was during the course of his employment there, when he was asked to change a particular program which sent messages to other users of a time-sharing computer to run on TENEX, that he added additional code from a file transfer program called CPYNET to the program so that messages could be sent to users on other computers. This was in reality was the first email.
• This system was thus able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET as opposed to the previous method which allowed mails to be sent to others who used the same computer.
• He achieved this by using the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine. This scheme ever since then, has been used and is still used in email addresses.
• Since then, Ray Tomlinson has been and is still internationally known and credited as the inventor of the email.
• He has had so many awards and honors to his name; the most recent given in 2012, when he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame which is an honorary lifetime achievement award given to individuals who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the internet by the Internet Society.
• Sadly though, his life came to an end on the 5th of March 2016 at age 74.

Women in IT - Florence Seriki

Have you ever heard of Omatek Computers Limited? It is an indigenous Nigerian-based company, one of the first companies to locally assemble notebooks and laptops in Africa. It was founded by one of Africa's very own women, Engr. Mrs. Florence. O. Seriki in 1986 and she's our WCW in IT for today.

  Mrs. Seriki holds a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Obafemi Awolowo University and a Master's degree in Business Administration from Lagos Business School. Her foray into programming however began early in her career as a chemical engineer. As a result of obtaining poor results when running a set of simulations using old FORTRAN software, she was faced with the task of learning a new mathematical modelling language to complete the task which she did learn.

   During her NYSC service year, she created a demand for her computer training skills when she took up teaching some directors in the company where she worked how to use the computers that "just decorated their tables" and this lead her to set up a company to provide training on the use of computers to executives within the banking and oil sectors. That company branched out to supply of branded computers to banks and multinational companies and eventually it grew into a company that handled full assembly of computers and accessories.

   Today, 30 years later, Omatek is still a widely known indigenous brand holding an enviable market share in the production and assembly of computers as well as related accessories. In fact, Omatek is known to own the first completely knocked down computer factories in Nigeria and Ghana and has been recognized as the Best Systems Builder Partner by Microsoft for East, West and Central Africa.

   Mrs Seriki has received so many accolades for her innovation in the IT industry and her contributions towards the improvement of IT awareness in Nigeria. She is recognized today for seeing where a need was glaring and making moves to fill in that gap and for that reason we have made her a part of our list of women in IT and hope that the younger generations learn from her.

Steve Jobs - 5 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Him

   I-phone, I-pad, macbook, these are all devices we hear of and probably use. You are even likely to be accessing this web page on one of these devices. They are all produced under a company named Apple Incorporation founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Today though we are talking about Steve Jobs. Apart from being a co-founder of Apple Incorporation what else is there to know about this man who even in his death left a legacy behind?

• He was an adopted kid: His biological mother (Joanne Schieble Simpson) was pregnant with him for a man (Abdulfattah Jandali) who her parents refused to allow her have anything to do with him likely because of his Middle Eastern Heritage and thus she couldn't get married to him. So she had the baby(Steve) and put him up for adoption to a wealthy Catholic couple who later changed their mind. Eventually he got adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a blue collar couple who lived in the Bay Area.
• He dropped out of college: Unlike most other famous technopreneurs who dropped out of college as a result of not seeing the usefulness of spending more time there, Steve Jobs dropped out because he didn't want to waste his parents money and took an auditing and calligraphy classes which helped him later on in the development of the various typefaces that the Apple Macbook makes use of.
• He had other business ventures apart from Apple: After he resigned from Apple a first time because of internal political issues, he founded NeXt Incorporation which created the first interpersonal computer. They also released WebObjects, a framework for web application development. He was also a member on the board of Disney Pixar.
• He didn't ever code: When Apple is mentioned, Steve Jobs is usually thought of as an inventor but this was not the case as revealed by his co-founder Steve Wozniak who said, "Steve didn't ever code. He wasn't an engineer and didn't do any original design. In fact an employee noted that Wozniak was the innovator or inventor while Steve Jobs was the marketing person.
• He has been the subject of a number of films and books: The most popular of them all is the 2015 American biographical drama film, Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin.

Women in IT - Laura Gomez

Who is she?
Laura Gomez is a Latina woman who is listed in Glamour's 35 women under 35 changing the Tech Industry for her outstanding performance in the tech industry. She worked at Twitter where she managed Twitter en Espanol and was a founding member of their international team. The team was responsible for managing the social network to 28 languages. She also worked at Jawbone where she played a similar role.

What has she done?
She now has her own company, named Vyv, which according to their AngelList profile "is a content discovery platform powered by user-centric technologies which validate the accuracy of breaking news, surface diverse and relevant perspectives from around the web and create a radical way for content creators to monetize their work". Users will publish content and get paid for it according to its popularity using Bitcoin, a virtual currency.

She's proud of being active and trying to make sure that the gap between technology and public policy is bridged.

Laura I Gomez.
Photo Credit: Google Images.

Jerry Yang- The Chinese Technopreneur

   The name Jerry Yang might not ring a bell to the average person reading this but the name Yahoo is a household name. Yahoo provides various services from news to mailbox services to internet search, messaging service and a host of other things which at one point or the other all of us have made use of. What five interesting things are there to know about the co founder of this technology firm? Find out below:

1. His full name: Although known as Jerry. His full name is Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang.
2. His early life: He was born in Taipei, Taiwan and moved to California, San Jose to be precise when he was 10 with his mother. The only word he knew when he arrived California was shoe despite his mother being an English teacher.
3. His education: Unlike most technopreneurs who dropped out of college while developing their projects, Jerry Yang graduated from Stanford university with both his bachelor's degree and masters degree.
4. His other business ventures: He is the founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures which has provided funding to more than 50 startups.
5. He is a collector: He has a collection of Chinese Calligraphy which he began collecting in the 1990s that contains about 250 pieces. 

Larry Page- Five interesting things to know about the Google Founder

   We all at one time or the other made use of a search engine either to locate the definition of a word, to find out more about a person or an issue or even to purchase one item or the other. The most common of all the available search engines is the Google search engine.
   Although the Google search engine might be familiar to most people, some might not know anything about the name Larry Page. He co-founded Google with Sergin Brin. What else is there to know about this technology genius who created one of the fastest ways to locate something on the internet? Find out below:

1. He grew up in a home surrounded by computer scientists: His dad, Vincent Carl Page earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan and was said to be a pioneer in the field of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. His mum was a computer programming instructor. His elder brother was also said to "have taught him to take things apart". No wonder his interest in the Technology field from childhood.
2. He has a bit of a musical background: He played the saxophone and studied musical composition while growing up. This musical education according to Larry l inspired his impatience and obsessions with speed in computing hence the reason why he strived to make Google search engine very fast.
3. Google isn't his only invention: At the University of Michigan, Larry Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks. More recently though he created PageRank- Google's best known search ranking algorithm.
4. His other interests apart from Google: He is an investor in Tesla motors and he helped in the setting up of Singularity University, a transhumanist think tank.
5. His managerial and leadership skills: In 2015, he was voted by his employees as one of America's most popular Chief Executives and was named number one by Forbes. In other words, he's a really good boss.

Lastly, did you know?

   His full name is Lawrence Page although he is more widely known as "Larry" Page.

Bill Gates- 5 things you didn't know about the Technology Mogul/Philanthropist

   The company Microsoft is a household name to those in the information technology field. Even more popular is the name Bill Gates, a man who is well known as one of the richest men in the world. He founded Microsoft along with Paul Allen and has dominated the world richest people list for about 29 years. He is also well known as a generous philanthropist under the charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  But apart from being a very wealthy technopreneur, here are 5 things you probably never knew about the generous technology mogul and philanthropist:

1.   He was a rich kid: The earliest stories of bill gates we were told in our early schooldays was that of a poor kid who dropped out of school and ended up creating Microsoft. What most of those people who told us such stories failed to mention was that he dropped out of Harvard, one of the 8 Ivy League schools.  With a prominent lawyer for a dad, a mum who was a director on a couple of company boards and a grandfather who was a national bank president, Bill Gates was no poor kid. He was a rich kid who had access to the best educational institutions.

2.  He was also book smart, a brainy genius: With a SAT score of 1590 out of 1600 in high school or secondary school, he is what Nigerians call an “efiwe”, a bookworm. Who said bookworms and first-class students can’t be innovators?

3.  Microsoft is not his only business venture: Apart from Microsoft, he is involved in other ventures among which we have Cascade Investments LLC-a private investment and holding company, gCb3 - a think tank founded by him, Corbis-a digital image licensing and rights company, Research Gate- a social networking site for scientists where he is an investor and  TerraPower, a nuclear reactor design company.

4.  He is an author: Bill Gates has authored two books till date one of which he coauthored with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson titled “The Road Ahead” which was  published inn1995. The other book titled “Business @ the speed of thought” was published in 1999 and it discusses how business and technology are integrated. 

5. He has a flower fly named after him: Finally, the flower fly, Eristalis gatesi was named Bill Gate’s flower fly in his honor in 1997 by entomologists because of his contributions to the science of Dipterology. How cool is that?

    Lastly, here’s a tidbit you might find interesting: He is so generous that he and his wife plan on giving out about 96% of his wealth to charity with only $30 million dollars to be left as inheritance to his 3 children. I bet you didn't know that too.