"In creating wiki, I wanted to stroke that story-telling nature in all of us."
- Ward Cunningham
The internet has been around us for decades and still growing rapidly by the increase number of users that are connected on a daily basis to fulfill their needs. As knowledge exchange is becoming common on the World Wide Web, wikis has contributed more than enough for internet users to share and learn.
Wiki is a website whose users can add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor, powered by wiki software. "Wiki" is taken from a Hawaiian word meaning "fast" was first developed in Portland, Oregon, in 1994, and installed it on the internet domain c2.com.
Ward Cunningham is the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work.
Early Life
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham was born on May 26th, 1949. As an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki, he pioneered in both design patterns and Extreme Programming. He started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham (c2.com) as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository.
Cunningham received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science and his master's degree in computer science from Purdue University. He is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. He has also served as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principal Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory.
He is founder of the Hillside Group and has served as program chair of the Pattern Languages of Programming conference which it sponsors. Cunningham was part of the Smalltalk community. From December 2003 until October 2005, he worked for Microsoft Corporation in the "patterns & practices" group.
From October 2005 to May 2007, he held the position of Director of Committer Community Development at the Eclipse Foundation.
In May 2009, Cunningham joined AboutUs as its Chief Technology Officer. On March 24, 2011 The Oregonian reported that Cunningham had quietly departed AboutUs to join Venice-based CitizenGlobal, a startup working on crowd-sourced video content, as their Chief Technology Officer. Since then, he is an "adviser" with AboutUs.
Wiki
Wiki
Cunningham is well known for a few widely disseminated ideas which he originated and developed. The most famous among these are the wiki and many ideas in the field of software design patterns.
He owns the company Cunningham & Cunningham Inc., a small consultancy that has specialized in object-oriented programming. His reflection stands as a motivation for the software practice of Refactoring which itself enables the agile discipline of Extreme Programming.
Cunningham is also well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, in particular the use of pattern languages and a co-inventor of CRC (Class-Responsibility Collaboration) cards. He is also a significant contributor to the extreme programming software-development methodology. A great deal of this work was collaboratively carried out in the first wiki site itself.
As one of the people who changed the internet, Cunningham has chosen the Wikimedia Foundation in order to support Wikipedia and all its projects. The Wikimedia movement has long owed much of its success to the work set down in the original wiki and its community.
From inventing the software it depends on, to serving on its Advisory Board, Cunningham’s contributions since 2001 have been essential in creating a thriving community-based projects.
Early Life
Personal Life
Ward Cunningham lives in Beaverton, Oregon, with his wife Karen and children: Patrick and Christopher.