News Flash to my fellow Americans: Switzerland has made major contributions to the Internet
Everything important on the web does not start only in the U.S. Seriously.
Every now and then someone directly or indirectly opines on the net something to the effect of "if you aren't in the US, then you aren't really in the Internet game. You, your company, your city, whatever cannot be taken seriously." Usually this person is an American, and as one myself I finally feel obliged to call them out.
Besides the dramatic world shrinking effect of the Internet and modern communications, which allow people to work from just about anywhere, there are many bright people working for leading edge organizations creating new and revolutionary technologies all over the world. And they are doing it even in my adopted home of Switzerland, a nation of less than eight million people, which is a bit smaller than New York City.
What significant Internet-related contributions has Switzerland offered the world?
- MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) and RRD (Round Robin Database): Tobi Oetiker wrote RRDtool, and co-developed MRTG with Dave Rand. If you are looking at technical graphs on the Internet, it is very likely that you are looking at an MRTG/RRD graph. Kind of a big deal.
- Cyberduck: A very popular FTP/SCP/Amazon S3/WebDAV/etc client for Apple OS X. Cyberduck is open source.
- Google Zurich: The largest engineering center outside of the US is in Zurich. "Zooglers have played an important role in designing the maps and flight simulator for Google Earth – a virtual globe that allows users to zoom in on any place on the planet via their computer screens." I saw a demonstration of this stuff at a Google event a year or so back. Neat stuff.
- The Web: Tim Berners-Lee (then a British physicist) and others at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) created the World Wide Web, the first web server, and HTML in 1990. Kind of a big deal.