February 9th, 2007
SYS-CON’s list of 150 all time technology heroes, published on February 19, had on it both the technology world’s famous and obscure. Regardless of their fame, they all have a share in the creation of technology and computing as we know it today. What’s more, many of those on the list have been featured on IT Conversations.
Here are the Top 150 All-Time 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.
Accessing IT Conversations’ back-catalog can be a little tricky, so I’ve gone through the list and linked to some of their interviews and presentations.
Marc Andreessen — Pioneer of Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape
Kent Beck — Creator of JUnit and pioneer of eXtreme Programming
Steve Bellovin — One of the originators of USENET
Adam Bosworth — Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4
David J. Bradley — Inventor of the three-finger salute, Ctrl-Alt-Del
Tim Bray — One of the prime movers of XML, now with Sun
Dan Bricklin — Co-creator of VisiCalc
Sergey Brin — Co-founder of Google
Vinton Cerf — Co-inventor with Robert Kahn of TCP
Alistair Cockburn — Helped craft the Agile Development Manifesto
Bram Cohen — Developer of BitTorrent
Brendan Eich — Inventor of JavaScript; Chief Architect of the Mozilla Project
Doug Engelbart — Invented the idea of a mouse, overlapping windows, hypertext, outlining, and video collaboration
Bob Frankston — Co-creator of VisiCalc
Andy Hertzfield — Eazel developer and Macintosh forefather
Daniel W. Hillis — VP of R&D at the Walt Disney Company; co-founder, Thinking Machines
Mitch Kapor — Designer of Lotus 1−2−3, founder of Lotus Development Corporation
Mitchell Kertzman — Former programmer, founder, and CEO of Powersoft (later Sybase)
Jaron Lanier — Popularizer of the term “virtual reality”
Rasmus Lerdorf — Author of PHP
Yukihiro Matsumoto — Author of Ruby
Bob Metcalfe — Inventor of ethernet
Gordon Moore — Co-founder of Intel; author of Moore’s Law
Andrew Morton — Linus’s #2 in the Linux kernel group
Nicholas Negroponte — Father of the MIT Media Lab
Tim O’Reilly — Publisher, open source advocate; believer that great technology needs great books
John Patrick — Former VP of Internet technology at IBM
Dave Sifry — CEO of Technorati
Guido van Rossum — Author of Python
Larry Wall — Author of Perl
Michael “Monty” Widenius — Creator of MySQL
Ann Winblad — Former programmer, co-founder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Stephen Wolfram — Scientist, creator of Mathematica
Steve Wozniak — Co-founder of Apple; creator of Apple I and Apple II
Jerry Yang — Co-founder of Yahoo!