Guru

Guru

Guru is a Hindi word that refers to a teacher or a religious and spiritual guide. Similarly, modern usage of the word in the West usually refers to a wise person—maybe a teacher—with knowledge and expertise about a particular subject, and its usage was made common first in computer circles. Gurus are typically people who are easy to get in touch with and are interested in sharing their knowledge with others.

One of the early gurus in computer science was Jackson Granholm, who in 1962 coined the term "kludge." This word initially referred to a poorly planned combination of parts put together while designing a computer. Therefore, a kludge is a machine that contains several features that are annoying to users and, in retrospect, are aspects that the designer wishes had been done differently. The term now encompasses programs, documentation, and even computing centers, so that the new definition describes systems that were hastily planned, patched together, and have proven themselves to be unreliable.

Another early computer guru was H. R. J. Grosch, who, while working for the IBM Corporation in the 1950s, introduced Grosch's Law, which states that organizations can reduce the overall cost of their hardware if they strengthen their computing power because this will reduce the cost of performing computing functions. This means that the more powerful a computer system is, the lower its costs will be per unit of performance. So, if one spends twice as much on a new computer, one would anticipate its performance to be four times greater.

A third early guru was Gordon Moore, former chairman of the board of Intel, and the person who formulated Moore's Law in 1965 shortly after patenting the integrated circuit. His hypothesis, which states that transistor densities on a single chip will double every eighteen months, has proven to be very accurate over the years. Moore's Law has had an impact on costs and overall system performance, as well as in increased microprocessor speeds.

Some current computer gurus include:

• Peter J. Denning. His work on virtual memory systems helped make virtual memory a permanent part of modern operating systems.
• James Gosling, creator of Java and developer of Sun's NeWS windowing system. He was also the principal investigator on the Andrew project while earning his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
• Tim Berners-Lee, originator of the World Wide Web. Together with colleagues, he developed Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language used for web documents; Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP); and the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) used to find anything on the web.
• Linus Torvalds. He developed Linux, an operating system originally designed to maximize the capabilities of the Intel 80386 microprocessor. Later, Linux became widely adopted in industry and educational markets around the world because of its power and flexibility.

More recently, the word "guru" has appeared in numerous web sites covering a wide range of topics, from computer-related sites to supermarket shopping. A recent search for the word brought out 190 different web sites, and the numbers are growing daily. Can all these sites be populated with knowledgeable people who are interested in sharing their knowledge? Are they manned by people who claim to be experts but are not? How is one to know for sure? While doing online research, one has to be wise and take the time to validate the sources of information.