Comment by pessimist
14 years ago
In defense of Google, I think their machine translation is highly underrated, its simply incredible how good it is, at least for European languages. As is their contribution to building large data centers and manipulating large amounts of data (mapreduce, Bigtable was the first major nosql).
Facebook is too young to tell.
Still, IBM is the gold standard for CS research - Microsoft appears to have many productive researchers but I'm not sure they have made fundamental advances like virtual memory, hard disks, relational databases (all of which came from IBM).
I thought virtual memory came from Burroughs.
I think it was the first commercial computer to support it, but much of the theoretical groundwork wasn't really figured out till 68 and 70
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=363095.363141
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=356571.356573
That sounds like the old joke, "I can see that it works in practice but will it work in theory?" If the Burroughs guys both invented it and commercialized it then surely they should get the credit for it.
The story is in this wonderful memoir: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2928672).
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In fact it did. It didn't enter into "mainstream" consciousness until IBM "invented" it.