Okay hold onto your hats, our final list is now ready: here are the All-Time Top 150 i-Technology Heroes according to SYS-CON's globe-girdling network of editors, columnists, commentators, and (above all) readers. Between them, these individuals conceived, created, built out, and maintained the Internet and indeed, before that, created modern computing as we know it today -- without which the Internet would never have been possible in the first place. Enjoy!
[The hyperlinks are to brief potted biographies of some of these luminaries...to which I will add in coming days as time permits. JG]
Gene Amdahl: Implementer in the 60s of a milestone in computer technology: the concept of compatibility between systems Marc Andreessen: Pioneer of Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the WWW; co-founder of Netscape John Atanasoff: "Forgotten Father of the Computer"; inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer Bill Atkinson: Author of the "Quickdraw" graphics layer in Macintosh, proving that advanced bitmapped graphics was possible on a low-end processor Charles Babbage: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1828; inventor of the 'calculating machine' John Backus: Inventor (with IBM) of FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) in 1956 John Bardeen: Winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the transistor (with Walter Brattain and William Buckley) Kent Beck: Creator of JUnit and pioneer of eXtreme Programming (XP) David Bell: Developer (with Len LaPadula) of the Bell-LaPadula Model of security Steve Bellovin: One of the originators of USENET Bob Bemer: One of the developers of COBOL and the ASCII naming standard for IBM (1960s) Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web D J Bernstein: Author of qmail Gerrit Blaauw: Principal designer of first system to implement the VM (virtual machine) concept Joshua Bloch: Formerly at Sun, where he helped architect Java's core platform; now at Google Grady Booch: One of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language Adam Bosworth: Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; then BEA, now Google Don Box: Co-author of SOAP David J. Bradley: Inventor of the three-finger salute, Ctrl.-Alt-Del Stewart Brand: Cofounder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board Walter Brattain: Co-inventor (with John Bardeen and William Shockley) of the transistor. Tim Bray: One of the prime movers of XML, now with Sun Dan Bricklin: Co-creator (with Bob Frankston) of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet Larry Brilliant: Co-founder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board Sergey Brin: Son-of-college-math-professor turned cofounder of Google Fred Brooks: Co-creator of OS/390, helping change the way we think about software development; winner of the1999 Turing Award Vannevar Bush: Electrical engineer and physicist who designed (1928) the "differential analyzer" Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace: First female geek in recorded history Luca Cardelli: Implementer of the first compiler for ML (the most popular typed functional language) and one of the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors Vint(on) Cerf: "The Father of the Internet," co-inventor with Robert Kahn of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP Ward Christensen: Founder of the first BBS ever brought online (built by Randy Suess) Ward Cunningham: Father of the wiki Alonzo Church: Co-creator with Alan Turing of the "Church-Turing Thesis" Alistair Cockburn: Helped craft the Agile Development Manifesto Edgar (Ted) Codd: "Father of Relational Databases," inventor of SQL and creator of RDBMS systems Larry Constantine: Inventor of data flow diagrams; presented first paper on concepts of structured design in 1968 Bram Cohen: developer of BitTorrent Brad Cox: Father of Objective-C Dave Cutler: The brains behind VMS; hired away by Microsoft for Windows NT Ole-Johan Dahl: Developer (with Kristen Nygaard) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language Miguel de Icaza: Now with Novell, cofounder of Ximian Tom DeMarco: A principal of the computer systems think tank, Atlantic Systems Guild Theo de Raadt: Founder of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects Edsger W. Dijkstra: One of the moving forces behind the acceptance of computer programming as a scientific discipline; developer of the first compilers Presper Eckert: Co-inventor (with John Maunchly) of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC) Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript; Chief Architect of the Mozilla Project Robert Elz: University of Melbourne Department of Computer Science Doug Engelbart: Invented while at SRI in the 60s the idea of a mouse, overlapping windows, hypertext, outlining, and video collaboration Don Ferguson: Inventor of the J2EE application server at IBM; now with Microsoft Richard P. Feynman: Legendary physicist and teacher, teacher of Caltech course 1983-86 called "Potentialities and Limitations of Computing Machines" Roy T. Fielding: Primary architect of HTTP 1.1 and a founder of the Apache Web server David Filo: Co-founder of Yahoo! Martin Fowler: Famous for work on refactoring, XP, and UML Bob Frankston: Co-creator (with Dan Bricklin) of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet Bill Gates: Chief Software Architect (and Lord High Chief Everything Else) of "the world's #1 company" (Hoovers.com) Jon Gay: The "Father of Flash" Adele Goldberg: Developer of SmallTalk along with Alan Kay; wrote much of the documentation James Gosling: "Father of Java" (though not its sole parent) Anders Hejlsberg: Genius behind the Turbo Pascal compiler, subsequently "Father of C#" Andy Hertzfield: Eazel developer and Macintosh forefather Daniel W. Hillis: VP of R&D at the Walt Disney Company; cofounder, Thinking Machines Grace Murray Hopper: The so-called "Mother of COBOL," she created FLOW-MATIC that later inspired COBOL, the first compiled high-level programming language Jordan Hubbard: One of the creators of FreeBSD Jean D Ichbiah: Principal designer, Ada language (1977) Jonathan Ive: Principal designer of the iMac and iPod Ken Iverson: Inventor of APL, later J Steve Jobs: Business genius at the core of Apple; co-founder (with Steve Wozniak) and currently CEO Bill Joy: Co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun; main author of Berkeley Unix William Kahan: "The Old Man of Floating-Point;" primary architect behind the IEEE 754 standard for loating-point computation Robert Kahn: Co-inventor with Vint Cerf of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP Mitch Kapor: Designer of Lotus 1-2-3, founder of Lotus Development Corporation Mike Karels: System architect for 4.3BSD Alan Kay: Inventor of SmallTalk Jack Kilby: Inventor of the microchip Gary Kildall: Author of the archetypical OS known as CP/M (control Program for Microcomputers) Brian Kernighan: One of the creators of the AWK and AMPL languages Mitchell Kertzman: Former programmer, founder, and CEO of Powersoft (later Sybase) Klaus Knopper: Prime mover of Knoppix, a Linux distro that runs directly from a CD Donald Knuth: "Father of Computer Science" - author of The Art of Computer Programming; inventor of TeX, allowing typesetting of text and mathematical formulas on a PC (and thus also the Father of Word Processing.) Butler Lampson: Architect of Cedar/Mesa; Implementer of Xerox Alto Jaron Lanier: Popularizer of the term "virtual reality" (in the early 1980s) Len LaPadula: Developer (with David Bell) of the Bell-LaPadula Model of security Leon Post: Developer of a Post-Turing machine Rasmus Lerdorf: Creator of the PHP scripting language Ada Lovelace: see Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace Craig McClanahan: Of Tomcat, Struts, and JSF fame Robert C. Martin: Agile software development proponent; CEO, president, and founder of Object Mentor Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"): Creator of Ruby John McCarthy: Creator, with his graduate students, of Lisp Doug McIlroy: Head of department at Bell Labs where UNIX started John Maunchly: Co-inventor (with Presper Eckert) of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC) Bob Metcalfe: Inventor of the Ethernet Chuck Moore: Inventor of Forth, a high-level programming language Gordon Moore: Co-founder of Intel; author of Moore's Law (1965) Andrew Morton: Linus's No. 2 in the Linux kernel group Michael J. Muuss: Author of the freeware network tool Ping. Nathan Myhrvold: Theoretical and mathematical physicist, former CTO at Microsoft Nicholas Negroponte: Father of the MIT Media Lab Ted Nelson: Creator of the Xanadu project - universal, democratic hypertext library; precursor to the WWW Robert Noyce: a.k.a. "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", one of the inventors of the integrated circuit or microchip Kristen Nygaard: Developer (with Ole-Johan Dahl) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language Jarkko Oikarinen: Developer of the IRC protocol Tim O'Reilly: Publisher, open source advocate; believer that great technology needs great books Peter Pag: Pioneer of 4GLS (1979); developed Software AG's Natural Jean Paoli: One of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the W3C; now with Microsoft Bob Pasker: founder of WebLogic, author of the first Java Application Server John Patrick: Former VP of Internet technology at IBM, now "e-tired" Benjamin Pierce: Harvard University faculty member for 49 years; recognized in his time as one of America's leading mathematicians Rob Pike: An early developer of Unix and windowing system (GUI) technology P J Plauger: Chair of the ANSI C committee Jon Postel: "The 'North Star' Who Defined the Internet" John Postley: Developed Mark IV (1967), the first million dollar software product, for Informatics Jef Raskin: Mac pioneer who wrote the original Macintosh specification Martin Richards: Designer of the BCPL Cintcode System Dennis Ritchie: Creator of C and co-inventor (with Ken Thompson) of Unix Martin Roesch: Author of the open-source program Snort in 1998 Jonathan Rotenberg: Founder of the Boston Computer Society Gurusamy Sarathy: Heavily involved in maintaining the mainstream releases of Perl for the past 7 years Carl Sassenrath: Author of REBOL, a scripting language Roger Schell: Encryption expert; founding Deputy Director of the (now) National Computer Security Center Claude E. Shannon: Father of Information Theory and digital circuit design William Shockley: Co-inventor (with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) of the transistor Dave Sifry: CEO of Technorati and a founding member of the Linux International board of directors Gene Spafford: First analyst of the Morris Worm, one of the earliest computer worms Richard Stallman: Free software movement's leading figure; founder of the GNU Project, author of the GPL Guy L. Steele: Author of authoritative books and papers on Lisp Bjarne Stroustrup: The designer and original implementor of C++ W. Richard Stevens: "Guru of the Unix Gurus"; author and consultant Michael Stonebreaker: Author of Ingres and Postgres Randy Suess: Builder of the first BBS (programmed by Ward Christensen) Ivan Sutherland: Considered by many to be the creator of Computer Graphics Larry Tesler: Inventor of the modeless editor while at Xerox Parc working with Alan Kay on Smalltalk Guy (Bud) Tribble: One of the industry's top experts in software design and object-oriented programming Andy Tanenbaum: Professor of computer science, author of Minix Avadis (Avie) Tevanian: Chief Software Technology Officer, Apple Ken Thompson: Co-inventor (with Dennis Ritchie) of Unix Bruce Tognazzini ("Tog"): Worked a lot on "understandablilty" in Mac GUI Ray Tomlinson: Developer of the first e-mail network Linus Torvalds: "Benevolent dictator" of the Linux kernel Guy (Bud) Tribble: One of the industry's top experts in software design and object-oriented programming Alan Turing: Mathematician; author of the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" Guido van Rossum: Author of the Python programming language Patrick Volkerding: Creator of Slackware Linux John von Neumann: Co-creator of Game Theory and designer of a computer architecture in which data and program memory are mapped into the same address space Larry Wall: Author of Perl John Warnock: Inventor of PostScript; CEO of Adobe Systems Michael "Monty" Widenius: Creator of MySQL Ann Winblad: Former programmer, cofounder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners Nicklaus Wirth: Inventor of Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon Stephen Wolfram: Scientist, creator of Mathematica Steve Wozniak: a.k.a. "The Woz," co-founder (with Steve Jobs) of Apple; creator of Apple I and Apple II in the mid-1970s Jerry Yang: Co-founder of Yahoo! Jamie Zawinski: Instrumental in the creation of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs) Konrad Zuse: Creator of the first full automatic, program-controlled and freely programmable working computer
About Aaron Reed Aaron Reed is an assistant professor specializing in software architecture and design and .NET development at Neumont University in Salt Lake City, UT. He has worked professionally in the industry for over 12 years as a lead architect/designer, development manager, and VP of development. When he isn't spending time reading up on the latest in software development, Aaron loves spending time with his beautiful wife and three children.
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[The hyperlinks are to brief potted biographies of some of these luminaries...to which I will add in coming days as time permits. 
