Tim O'Reilly
Founder and President of O'Reilly & Associates
O'Reilly has been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. Tim published the book that first brought the Internet into the public eye, Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, which was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. O'Reilly & Associates is thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. The large collection of O'Reilly's books, with the animals on the covers, is a standard feature of virtually every software startup.
O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web. O'Reilly continues to publish on the Web via sites such as oreilly.com, oreillynet.com, perl.com and xml.com. O'Reilly's conference arm hosts the popular Perl Conference, the Open Source Convention, and the Java Enterprise Conference.
Tim has also been an activist for Internet standards and for open source software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key Internet technologies, helping to block Microsoft's 1996 limits on TCP/IP in NT Workstation, organizing the "summit" of key free software leaders where the term "open source" was first widely agreed upon, and most recently organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents. Tim received InfoWorld's Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for his advocacy on behalf of the open source community.
Tim himself has written numerous books on computer topics, most notably UNIX Text Processing (with Dale Dougherty; Howard Sams, 1987), Managing UUCP and USENET (with Grace Todino), The X Window System Users' Guide (with Valerie Quercia), The X Toolkit Intrinsics Programming Manual (with Adrian Nye), UNIX Power Tools (with Jerry Peek and Mike Loukides) and Windows 98 in a Nutshell (with Troy Mott). As an O'Reilly & Associates editor he has also had a major hand in the development of many of the company's other titles, including UNIX in a Nutshell, Programming Perl, Sendmail, Essential System Administration, and The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Tim has served on the board of trustees for both the Internet Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, two organizations devoted to making sure that the Internet fulfills its promise. He is on the boards of CollabNet, ActiveState Tool Corp, Epit, Invisible Worlds, Webb, and IntellectMarket.
Tim graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a B.A. cum laude in Classics. His honors thesis explored the tension between mysticism and logic in Plato's dialogues.
