Tim O'Reilly
| Tim O'Reilly | |
|---|---|
Tim O'Reilly in 2009.
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| Born |
June 6, 1954 Cork, Ireland |
| Alma mater | Harvard College |
| Occupation | Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media |
| Website | Tim O'Reilly |
Tim O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularized the terms open source and Web 2.0.
Born in County Cork, Ireland, O'Reilly moved to San Francisco, California, with his family when he was a baby. He has three brothers and three sisters. As a teenager, encouraged by his older brother Sean, O'Reilly became a follower of George Simon, a writer and adherent of the general semantics program. Through Simon, O'Reilly became acquainted with the work of Alfred Korzybski, which he has cited as a formative experience.
In 1973, O'Reilly went to Harvard College to study classics and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in 1975. During O'Reilly's freshman year at Harvard, George Simon died in an accident. After graduating, O'Reilly completed an edition of Simon's Notebooks, 1965-1973. He also wrote a well-received book on the science fiction writer Frank Herbert and edited a collection of Herbert's essays and interviews. After graduating, O'Reilly married his first wife, Christina, with whom he moved to the Boston area. The couple raised two daughters.
O'Reilly got started as a technical writer in 1977. He started publishing computer manuals in 1983, setting up his business in a converted barn in Newton, Massachusetts, where about a dozen employees worked in a single open room. In 1989, O'Reilly moved his company to Sebastopol, California, and published the Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, which was a best-seller in 1992. O'Reilly's business, then known as O'Reilly & Associates, steadily grew through the 1990s, during which period it expanded from paper printed materials to web publishing. In 1993, the company's catalog became an early web portal, the Global Network Navigator, which in 1995 was sold to America Online for $11 million. The company suffered in the dotcom crash of 2000. As book sales decreased, O'Reilly had to lay off about seventy people, about a quarter of the staff, but thereafter successfully rebuilt the company around ebook publishing, events, and online learning. The company has about 500 employees worldwide.
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