Brief Description: An early developer of Unix and windowing system (GUI) technology
Further Details:
From 1980 until 2002 when he joined Google, Rob Pike was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
In 1980 too he won an Olympic silver medal in Archery.
In 1981 he wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix systems, and has since written ten more. With Bart Locanthi he designed the Blit terminal; with Brian Kernighan he wrote The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. A shuttle mission nearly launched a gamma-ray telescope he designed. He is a Canadian citizen and has never written a program that uses cursor addressing.
He is now a member of the Systems Lab at Google, Inc. "The Web is too large to fit on a single machine," he says, "so it's no surprise that searching the Web requires the coordination of many machines, too. A single Google query may touch over a thousand machines before the results are returned to the user, all in a fraction of a second."
"With all those machines, the opportunities for parallelism and distributed computation are offset by the likelihood of hardware failure. If one machine breaks on average every few years, a pool of a thousand machines will have machines break on a daily basis. A key part of the Google story is that by designing a system to cope with breakage, we can provide not only robustness, but also parallelizability, efficiency, and economies of scale."
About Jeremy Geelan Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo series, of the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo and founder of Web 2.0 Journal, AJAXWorld Magazine and other major SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.
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