Jarkko Oikarinen (born 16 August, 1967), known on IRC as WiZ, was the developer of the first Internet chat network, called IRC, short for Internet Relay Chat. He wrote the first server and client in August 1988, while working at the University of Oulu in Finland. It was first written to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox in Finland. Jarkko Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, …

Khaled Mardam-Bey (born March 19, 1968) is the creator of mIRC, a popular IRC client for Windows. He was born in Amman, Jordan, to a Syrian father and a Palestinian mother, and currently resides in London, England.

MafiaBoy (Mike Calce) was the Internet alias of a high school student from the upscale area of The West Island in Montreal, Canada who launched a series of highly publicized denial-of-service attacks in February 2000 against large commercial websites including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act forbids Canadian news outlets from publication of MafiaBoy's real name in connection with this incident.

Szymon Stefanek was the creator of the UNIX IRC client, KVIrc. He at first developed it for Linux systems, but then made builds for Windows. He was born in lublin and he lives in Siena (Italy). He also plays guitar in many Bands.

Joi Ito , an activist, entrepreneur and venture capitalist, has received much recognition for his role as an entrepreneur of Internet and technology companies. He has founded companies such as PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and is the founder and currently the CEO of the venture capital firm, Neoteny Co., Ltd.

BassHunter is the pseudonym of the Swedish musician and DJ Jonas Erik Altberg, born December 22, 1984, in Halmstad, Sweden. BassHunter describes his own music as Eurodance, but others also classify it as Hard Dance. According to Altberg, he makes the music on his own computer using the program FL Studio. He started making music in 1999 and released his first album, "The Bassmachine", through his own home page in 2004.

Brandon Carl Vedas, (also known by his nickname ripper on IRC) was a member of the Shroomery.org community who died of an overdose on mostly prescription drugs. His death led to considerable debate about the responsibilities and roles of online communities in life-threatening situations.

Chris "Jesus" Ferguson (born Christopher Philip Ferguson April 11 1963, in Los Angeles, California) is a professional poker player. Ferguson attended UCLA where he earned a Ph.D. in computer science (focusing on virtual network algorithms) in 1999 after five years as an undergraduate and 13 years as a graduate student. His Ph.D. advisor was Leonard Kleinrock. Ferguson's parents have doctoral degrees in mathematics and his father, Thomas Ferguson, …

Robert Levin, also known as lilo, was the founder of the freenode IRC network and Executive Director of the PDPC charity that helped fund freenode. A computer programmer since 1968, he worked as an administrator and an applications programmer from 1978 onwards. From 1994 onwards, he worked to encourage the use of Internet Relay Chat for Free and Open Source projects. He was one of the founders of the OpenProjects Network (OPN), …

Tim Riker is a software developer, most known for his contributions to the open source community as the maintainer of the BZFlag 3D multiplayer game project. Other open source projects he has led or maintained include the TuxScreen web phone, and the StrongARM Linux kernel for the Sharp Zaurus SL-5000D, the blootbot IRC bot. Riker is also a member of the Debian GNU/Linux development team.

Jamie Frater, born in Naenae (a suburb in Lower Hutt), New Zealand, is an opera singer based in London. In 2005 Frater was second runner up in New Zealand's premiere opera song competition the Lexus Song Quest (previously won by greats such as Dame Kiri Te Kanawa). Frater, who has studied under Flora Edwards, Margaret Medlyn, and Margaret Kingsley is a recipient of the Opera Waikato Scholarship (New Zealand), the Moyra Todd Foundation Scholarship (New Zealand), …

Sean Parker (born 3 December, 1979) is an American businessman and entrepreneur. Parker gained early notoriety as a co-founder of Napster Inc. in 1999. An IRC friend of Shawn Fanning, Parker helped convince Fanning to incorporate Napster as a business. He joined Fanning in California and developed the early business strategy of the firm.

Dennis M. Moran, also known as Coolio, (born in Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1982) is an American hacker who was accused in February 2000 of a series of denial of service attacks that shut down some of the most popular websites on the Internet. He was later arrested and pled guilty to defacing the websites of DARE and RSA Security, as well as unauthorized access of US Army and Air Force computer systems at four military bases.

Nicolas Jacobsen is a hacker who during much of 2004 had illegal access to the backbone of the T-Mobile USA network. Besides stealing classified US Secret Service documents and selling them on IRC, he amused himself and friends by finding out celebrity phone numbers (including that of Paris Hilton, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher) and intercepting recently made photos from their handsets. Jacobsen could access information on any of the Bellevue, …

A C-level ICT industry professional with extensive executive level management and technical expertise gained in all aspects of telecommunications, networks, desktop support and software development businesses.

.