Alan Cox
(1963- )
Born in Birmingham in the mid the 1960s, Alan Cox grew up in a family of model train tinkerers and chemical engineers, and made it to puberty just as the Commodore PET and Sinclair ZX81 were coming onto the market.
After secondary school, Cox enrolled in Aberystwyth university, but was hampered by a system that required him to take classes outside of, but complimentary to, computer science.
Doomed to fail Physics at Aberystwyth due to an overriding interest in dismantling and reassembling computers, Cox set out to land a Computer Science degree that required a minimum amount of science and maths study, and eventually enrolled in Swansea University.
Cox's initial involvement with Linux grew from a mixture of frustration and an interest in games development. Specifically he was looking for a platform on which to develop multi-user games, and wanted the University bulletin board to be available for more than three hours a day. Working with a friend he created a series of patches to create a more Linux-based network, and ended up in charge of the 2.0.29 networking code.
In late 1998 he penned his now-famous feature article Cathedrals, Bazaars and the Town Council for IT info site Slashdot, expanding on a motif created in Eric Raymond's seminal text "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
Out of Uni, Cox worked in systems administration for Internet service provider NTL, escaping later to what he described as the relative sanity of Cymru.net, until it was in turn bought by NTL, and he took refuge at Linux distributor Red Hat, where his passion became his job.
These days Cox hacks away at the Linux kernel from his home in the UK.
Linux-fanatics can follow his adventures and those of his wife Telsa on his online diary.
And while Cox has a tendency towards being media shy, he agreed to answer a few questions exclusively for ZDNet Australia.
Q: What advice would you give to young programmers, or what advice do you wish you were given when you were starting out?
Become a laywer. There is actually a more serious message there, people thinking about computing as a long term career "for the money" are probably making a mistake because the days of computing as a career with a license to print money are really over. For me the choice was easy because of the things I wanted to do computing was the only one I was good at.
If you do want to become a computer programmer then I would say read a lot of existing code as examples, and try and learn about all sorts of areas of computing from the hardware upwards. You can study computing as a very mathematical and theoretical thing. There is nothing wrong with this but if you want to be able to do useful things never forget the practical side.
The second thing is don't treat computing as the be all and end all. The most important thing to learn at university (after people skills and holding down beer) is probably how to learn new skills.
Until University, nobody really gave me any great advice, it was a new field to most of the school teachers too and I learned everything the hard way until University when I finally collided with people who knew a lot more than me. Robert Ash (the Aberystwyth University main sysadmin) taught me several important things by example then - notably the importance of tolerating new programmers and teaching them.
What have most important technological inventions?
That one is hard. Most of the key inventions this century are really building on the past
Cheap communications is one I'd have to pick. The telegraph may not be this century, but cheap and accessible communications in the form of the telephone and now the internet has been a product of modern technology and mass production
Computing is similar - the electronic computer and its move to a mass-market device has made many things possible both for individuals and for scientific research. Again building on theoretical work from long before, and practical systems in the mills and with Babbage (19th Century engineer who did a lot of preliminary work on logic machines).
Most of the technology that I and I suspect many other people value is probably overlooked - a standardised electric system delivered directly to the house, high quality piped drinking water and rubbish collection.
There is a lot of technology behind those, and the loss of them would cause a lot more chaos than having your television die.
Which programming languages have been the most important in the history of computing?
The real importance has not been the languages but the constructs they created. Algol 60 gave us good block structured programming that forms the basis of many modern ideas, LISP gave people a very elegant way to explore computation in a mathematical manner. It's more important IMHO to think questions like "Who invented the subroutine"
Who initially sparked your interest in computing, or inspired you in some way during your career?
Nobody specifically. Computers always sort of seemed interesting, and when I got involved in them proved to be so. The fact the school had staff running a computer club in the evenings made a big difference initially, since computers were expensive and the school had three computers in total.
Many thanks to Anthony Rumble of EverythingLinux without whose help this interview may not have been possible.
I think it is east to guess that the median age of your voters was below 30, and that those who wrote the salutory articles were slightly lacking in experience or balance. The extremely heavy leaning towards Unix and Linux does make the listing a little biased.
I suggest you read "Fire in the Valley" (both editions: Freiberger and Swaine, 1984 and 2000) for a different viewpoint on Bill Gates than he provides in his semi-fictional hagiography. If you read between the lines it becomes apparent the Microsoft achieved its eminence by inventing only one thing: the first software anti-piracy crusade, when Gates objected to people stealing the BASIC he stole from his time working as a hacker at DEC.
I am sorry, but my age must be showing. I can't see how any Web-based artcile doesn't put Douglas C. Engelbart at the head of the PC revolution. It is the obvious place for the man who invented the VDU, windowing, the mouse, and hypertext.
I feel despair that in the same week that I read two articles by prominent authors decrying the fact that because the young and inexperienced see something published on the Internet, they consider it true, that this piece of distortion is published on, guess what, the Internet.