Comments on: Visionaries: The states has Vint Cerf, the UK Tim Berners-Lee and we have Gerry McGovern? WTF

By: John Grogan

John Grogan — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:07:51 +0000

Tim O’Reilly is Irish, born in Cork in 1954.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_O%27Reilly

By: Elana

Elana — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:51:45 +0000

Well, to go with the whole “number of pages” thing, one Irish guy both has physical pages and also made sure that the original draft stayed free on the net:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_toc.html

By: Conor O'Neill

Conor O'Neill — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:45:20 +0000

How about Colm Grealy and Barry Flanagan? I think it’s fair to say that they are the ones who brought the internet to most of the rest of us in Ireland with IOL. Sure it was just an ISP but it took balls and vision to do it when and where they did.

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:32:32 +0000

I know next to nothing about McGovern and am not going to suggest anyone else or defend/attack him.

That said, being part of the first wave (and not surviving it) is nothing to be proud of…

I also disagree that paper-pages written can capture the extent of someones contribution to the internet… their legacy, surely, would define their contribution?

By: Bernie Goldbach

Bernie Goldbach — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 17:29:54 +0000

Who besides Gerry McGovern has written a book about the Irish internet while also running a company that rode the first wave? I think that one measure of a person’s contribution is the amount of paper pages written. In Ireland, the same respect does not attend those who serve tens of thousands of pages electronically every month, probably because that metric is harder to capture for the print world.

By: Branedy

Branedy — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:40:41 +0000

In another vein, getting old makes you senior

By: Branedy

Branedy — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:39:26 +0000

Does that mean all my gopher work, makes me famous?

By: James Corbett

James Corbett — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:16:29 +0000

Gerry McGovern…. crikey… now there’s a blast from the past. Wasn’t he some kind of a ‘thought leader’ or something like that?

Seriously though, what has he done lately… I’ve totally lost track of him since the Nua days.

By: John

John — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 15:46:54 +0000

Totally agree about Nua – they perfectly symbolised the Internet Hype in Ireland in the late Nineties/early 2000s.

As for who is…very few of us would have broadband if it wasn’t for Ireland Offline, so….