

That year Apostolopoulos joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, aiming to improve the fidelity and security of streaming video- video sent through the Internet in continuous flows of data packets. Digital TV standard for high-definition television, for which he received a Technical Emmy in 1997. An MIT graduate student, he helped develop the video compression system that was integrated into the U.S. The only TR100 innovator who can also say he’s an Emmy Ward winner is John Apostolopoulos. In September 2002, he joined Yahoo! To assist it in migrating to PHP-based tools, a move expected to speed development and reduce training costs. Along the way, Lerdorf worked stints at IBM and Linuxcare.

Lerdorf offered his code free, and today companies worldwide, including Ericsson, CBS, and Yahoo!, use it as the backbone for more than 12 million sites, where it enables live financial data, news feeds, and stock tickers. Before PHP, Web pages were dominated by static text and pictures creating sites that could readily incorporate up-to-date information or interact with databases was difficult. Once embedded in the Web’s basic addressing protocol, PHP solved a fundamental problem. He named the language PHP, for PHP hypertext preprocessor- an acronym that contains itself. In 1995, without any formal programming training, Lerdorf developed a server language to help him set up Web sites he was designing for companies. But it’s the language he invented that has had global impact. Born near the North Pole on Greenland’s Disco Island, Rasmus Lerdorf has learned five languages while living around the world.
