Not as famous as they should be (2021)

>She subsequently joined Acorn Computers and was instrumental in designing the BBC Micro, including the BBC BASIC programming language whose development she led for the next 15 years.

Put another way, I think the whole narrative of ideas "coming from" an individual is often a self-indulgent fiction. I've seen too many R&D topics where the supposedly novel ideas seem to be inevitable memes. The self-styled sole inventors are often one of many seeing the same insights at the same time, because they are all hosting the same prerequisite background knowledge.

There are also often lots of these ideas floating around simultaneously. A significant meta (or negative?) thought process is to defer or suppress most of the ideas and focus on a few. Sometimes, we might think to credit the boss with the wisdom of deciding _when_ an idea deserves attention. That business decision is often more impactful than the juniors' many heartfelt flashes of insight.

But this meta-analysis can go further. Often there are different labs all in slightly different phases and some are "before their time" and some, perhaps, "too late". Was the boss at the goldilocks lab really more innovative? Or are all the players merely parts of a broader monte carlo search method...?

oh, I'm right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel

It's all about building up on other people's previous work.

But as American and British publishers started growing, they started doing a very sly thing which was, when an anglo researcher made a contribution to the understanding of that condition they would double barrel it at first. So it might have started as the Friedman psychosis, then it became the Friedman-Johns psychosis, and slowly the newer editions just had the Johns psychosis.

I wonder if Caillau is but a newer victim of this seemingly very anglophilic tradition.

Do you mean the web?

The Internet was already a thing before either of these people came along and built something on top of it.

What you've done is akin to if somebody argued that it's wrong to credit Bill Gates with inventing the computer when really that's what Steve Jobs did. It's not even the right generation. [ You can argue about whether what matters is the idea of the Analytical Engine, or one of the early realisations like the Z3, or Colossus or ENIAC or whatever. But those things were all built and (aside from the Analytical Engine) in use before Jobs or Gates were even born ]