Institutions Columbia University Institution Columbia University Doctoral advisor Thomas Jessell | Name Thomas Reardon Notable awards TR35 (2003) | |
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Fields Information technology
Computational neuroscience Alma mater Columbia University, Duke University Known for Internet Explorer, World Wide Web Consortium | ||
Funny thomas reardon
Thomas "TR" Reardon (born 1969) is an American computational neuroscientist and the CEO and co-founder of CTRL-Labs (formerly Cognescent Corporation). Formerly, he was a computer programmer and developer at Microsoft. He is credited with creating Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer, which is currently discontinued, but was the world's most used browser during its peak (2002/03).
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Early life and career
Reardon is originally from New Hampshire, from an Irish-Catholic background. He is one of 18 siblings. Described as a "math and computer prodigy," Reardon took graduate-level math and science classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while in high school. After graduating from high school, he moved to North Carolina to start a software company. While there, he met Bill Gates and joined Microsoft as a program manager on the Windows 95 and Windows 98 projects.
At one point, Reardon constituted Microsoft's entire Internet Explorer development team. He developed and oversaw the release of Internet Explorer 3 in 1996, and came up with the idea of bundling Internet Explorer with the Microsoft Windows operating system. IE3 was the first incarnation of Explorer to seriously compete with Netscape Navigator, which until that point had been the most popular browser. Under Reardon's leadership, Internet Explorer surpassed Netscape Navigator as the most-used web browser in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in what came to be known as the First Browser War. Reardon is one of the founders of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and worked with W3C and other standards agencies as Microsoft's representative to establish many of the standards and precedents that still govern the World Wide Web. Reardon was one of the earliest advocates and architects of the XML, CSS, and HTML languages.
In 2001, Microsoft became embroiled in antitrust litigation, United States v. Microsoft Corp as a result of the browser war with Netscape. Reardon expressed disillusionment with Microsoft after the Netscape ordeal, ultimately deciding to leave to start a wireless networking startup called Avogadro. He later joined OpenWave, a mobile software company, where he served as general manager and then Vice President, finally being appointed Chief Technology Officer, a post he held until 2004. At OpenWave, he worked on developing the first mobile web browser. In 2003, the MIT Technology Review named Reardon, then 34, one of its Top 35 Innovators Under 35, an annually published list recognizing innovators for "accomplishments that are poised to have a dramatic impact on the world as we know it". In 2012 Reardon gave the graduation address at Columbia University.
Education
In 2004, Reardon left OpenWave and the tech industry to study Classics at the Columbia University School of General Studies. He credits a conversation with physicist Freeman Dyson for inspiring him to "widen my world view":
"One conversation with Freeman Dyson provided me a tremendous desire to widen my world view—it amazed me that a legendary physicist would be so well read in the classics and have such affection for it. It pushed me to stretch a six-month sabbatical in 2004 into four years of a liberal arts education at Columbia GS"
In 2008, Reardon graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University with a B.A. in Literature and Classical Languages; in 2010, he earned an M.S. in Neurobiology from Duke University. He then received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Behavior from Columbia University in 2016, where he worked with Thomas Jessell and Attila Losonczy.