John Gage

John Burdette Gage (born 1942) was the 5th employee of Sun Microsystems,^[1] where he is credited with creating the phrase: "The network is the computer."^[1] He served as Chief Researcher and Vice President of the Science Office for Sun,^[2] until leaving on June 9, 2008 to join Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner to work on green technologies for global warming; he departed KPCB in 2010 to apply what he had learned "to broader issues in other parts of the world".^[3][4][5] He is also best known as one of the co-founders of NetDay in 1995. He joined the Human Needs Project in 2012 to bring water to the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya.

Background

Gage received his bachelor's degree in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley.^[6] He also attended the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard Business School. Gage worked at Berkeley with Bill Joy, the person largely responsible for the authorship of Berkeley UNIX, also known as BSD, from which springs many modern forms of UNIX, including Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.^[7] Gage joined Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Bill Joy and others.

Gage is one of the central figures in the film Berkeley in the Sixties by Mark Kitchell, recounting the University of California, Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He appears in "American Stories: the American Dream", a five-part Discovery Channel documentary.

In June, 2008, Gage retired from Sun Microsystems and joined Kleiner Perkins as a venture capitalist along with Al Gore.^[8] He left Kleiner Perkins in 2010.

Gage has served on scientific advisory panels for the US National Research Council, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the World Economic Forum. Most recently, he served on the US National Academy Committee on Scientific Communication and National Security and on the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security, whose reports aided in reorganizing US intelligence agencies. He has served on the boards of the US National Library of Medicine, of FermiLab, the Berkeley Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and other scientific and educational groups.

Currently he serves on the Malaysian International Advisory Panel, the Malaysian Global Science and Advisory Panel and on the boards of the University of California, Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy, the Oxford Martin School for the Twenty-first Century, the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation, and the Human Needs Project.

NetDay

President Bill Clinton installing computer cables with Vice President Al Gore on NetDay at Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord, CA. March 9, 1996.

Gage founded NetDay in 1995 with Michael Kaufman and several others. NetDay "called on high-tech companies to commit resources to schools, libraries, and clinics worldwide so that they could connect to the Internet."^[8] It was endorsed by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore who were active participants in NetDay'96.^[9] In 1998, Gage was awarded the ACM Presidential Award by Chuck House, the President of the ACM for his work on NetDay.^[10]

References

Publications

• Information Technology and Economic Development, in Economic Development, Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Workstations in Science, with Bill Joy in AAAS Science 26 April 1985, Vol 228.

^[1]

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to John Gage.

• Smithsonian Institution Leadership Award Oral History, 29 March 1999
• John Gage interviewed in documentary film Berkeley in the Sixties
• Video Interview with John Gage, Association for Computing Machinery
• Power to the People: Why is John Gage, a bearded old Berkeley troublemaker, carrying the corporate flag for the Pentagon's favorite computer maker?, Wired
• American Stories: The American Dream , 28 June 1998
• American Stories:

1. ↑ Science, Vol. 228 no. 4698 pp. 467-470 DOI: 10.1126/science.228.4698.467