- Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft he has held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and he remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8% of the common stock. "Forbes" magazine's list of The World's Billionaires has ranked him as the richest person in the world since 1995, …
- Rob Enderle
Rob Enderle, founder of the Enderle Group, is a consultant, writer, and widely quoted technical and legal analyst in the information technology industry. Microsoft, Advanced Micro Devices, the SCO Group, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell are (or have been) among his clients. Enderle has been critical of Apple Computer and Linux, as well as Unix and the open source/free software movements in general.
- Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold (born February 2, 1953, New Brunswick, New Jersey) is an American programmer and technical author on Microsoft Windows applications. His surname is pronounced like "pet's old." He graduated with a Master of Science in Mathematics from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1975. Aside from writing books about Windows programming he has contributed to various magazines about computers.
- Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen is a well-known developer on the Windows Shell team at Microsoft. Since joining Microsoft in 1992, Chen has worked on OS/2, Windows 95, DirectX, and later versions of Windows. Outside of Microsoft, he is known for his articles on Windows programming. He is a popular speaker at Microsoft PDCs and other conferences. He is also known for his dry humor, and his custom of wearing suits at work.
- Andy Rathbone
Andy Rathbone, a 1986 graduate of San Diego State University, is the author of a number of ...for Dummies books concerning Microsoft Windows as well as other computing books. The character of Marc "The Rat" Ratner in the movie "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" was modeled on Rathbone after writer Cameron Crowe befriended him during his research for the original book at San Diego's Clairemont High School. Rathbone currently lives with his wife Tina in Ocean Beach, …
- Jeffrey Richter
Jeffrey Richter is a co-founder of Wintellect. He has written a number of books on programming for Windows and .NET.
- Robert
Robert (Bob) Barton is recognized as the chief architect of the Burroughs B5000 and other computers such as the B1700. He directed a research lab for Burroughs Corporation in La Jolla, CA. He also taught, from 1968-1973, as a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah with David C. Evans, Ivan Sutherland and Thomas Stockham.
- Laura Didio
Laura DiDio is a senior analyst, formerly with Giga Information Group (now Forrester Research) and currently (2004) with The Yankee Group consulting firm in Boston. She received a B.A. in communications from Fordham University and worked for many years as a reporter and editor covering computer networking. Her recent work has included an assessment of Microsoft Windows.
- David A. Solomon
David A. Solomon is a computer expert in the category of the Microsoft Windows operating system. He is well known for his in-depth knowledge of system internals. Together with Mark Russinovich he published several books on this topic. Under the hood of the sysinternals.com label both are doing teaching for the software industry in courses held all over the world.
- Bob Kelly
Bob Kelly was born April 17, 1971 in the U.S. state of Massachusetts. He worked as a cryptologic technician in the US Navy from 1989 to 1997, finishing his service as the systems administrator for communications system at the White House during the Clinton administration. Bob Kelly is a subject matter expert on Microsoft Windows deployment and Windows Installer technologies.
- Jeff Prosise
Jeff Prosise is a technical author on Microsoft Windows applications. He is very experienced in Microsoft Windows technologies like MFC, .NET framework, C# and others.
- Brad Wardell
Bradley R. Wardell (born 24 June, 1971 in Texas), commonly known as Brad Wardell, is an American residing in Michigan. He is the founder and current President and CEO of Stardock, a software development and computer games company. Brad graduated in 1994 from Western Michigan University with a degree in Electronic Engineering. His first notable achievement was the design and implementation of "Galactic Civilizations" for OS/2, …
- Eric Sink
Eric Sink is a software developer and writer. He is the author of "Eric Sink on the Business of Software" (2006), a collection of essays from his blog and the "Business of Software" column for the Microsoft Developer Network. He founded SourceGear, which sells version control software for Microsoft Windows and started the AbiWord project. Before that, he led the browser team at Spyglass.
- Brad Silverberg
Brad is a founding partner of Ignition. He invests in software, infrastructure, and consumer companies. Brad represents Ignition as director on the boards of GlobalScholar, Seven, SourceLabs, and ice.com. Prior to founding Ignition, Brad is best known as an industry pioneer who built the Microsoft Windows franchise and led Microsoft's Internet turnaround.
- Alexandre Julliard
Alexandre Julliard is a computer programmer who is best known as the project leader and Benevolent Dictator for Life for Wine, a compatibility layer to run Microsoft Windows programs on Unix-like operating systems. Julliard studied computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He spent most of the 1990s working on embedded systems. He now works full-time on Wine for CodeWeavers. Alexandre enjoys astronomy and currently lives in Lausanne, …
- Diomidis Spinellis
Diomidis D. Spinellis is a Greek computer science academic and author of the book Code Reading. He is also a committer in the FreeBSD project, and author of a number of popular free or open-source systems: the UMLGraph declarative UML diagram generator, the bib2xhtml BibTeX to XHTML converter, the outwit Microsoft Windows data with command line programs integration tool suite, the CScout source code analyzer and refactoring browser, …
- Inxile Entertainment
InXile Entertainment was formed in late 2002 by Brian Fargo, a founder of Interplay Productions. The company is located in Newport Beach, California. While pitching his idea for a "snarky" version of the classic fantasy role-playing game "The Bard's Tale" at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Brian commented that he felt as though he was in exile - hence the company's name.
- Cody Brocious
Cody Brocious is a computer programmer who helped Travis Watkins and Jon Lech Johansen developing the Python program PyMusique. He's also a developer of the Alky Project, a tool that converts a Windows executable to a Mac OS X or Linux binary. The Alky Project is maintained by Falling Leaf Systems, LLC, which he co-founded in 2006.
- Marc McDonald
Marc B. McDonald was Microsoft's first salaried employee (not counting Monte Davidoff, who wrote the maths package for Basic for a flat fee). He is credited with designing the FAT File System for Standalone Basic which was the file system for the MS-DOS operating system and Microsoft Windows. He left the company in January 1984, citing a reason that Microsoft had gotten "too big" (Microsoft was at around four hundred employees at that time).
- Mike Muuss
Michael John Muuss (October 16, 1958 - November 20, 2000) was the author of the freeware network tool Ping. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Muuss was a senior scientist at the U.S. Army Research Lab in Maryland when he died, specialising in geometric solid modeling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures and digital computer networks.
- Servan Keondjian
In 1993, Servan Keondjian co-founded RenderMorphics, a company specialising in cutting-edge 3D graphics technologies. RenderMorphics rapidly became a world leader in its field with the widely acclaimed RealityLab technology. Microsoft bought RenderMorphics in 1995 with the aim of incorporating the RealityLab technology into Windows. Servan subsequently headed up the DirectX 3D team at Microsoft responsible for integrating 3D graphics into Windows (Direct3D).
- Ellen Feiss
Ellen Feiss (born circa 1987) became an Internet phenomenon after her 2002 Errol Morris-directed television commercial for Apple Computer's Switch campaign grew into a cult hit. In the commercial, the then-14-year-old American high school student complained that her father's Windows PC had broken. Fueling the popularity of the advertisement was the speculation that Feiss was under the influence of illicit drugs during the filming of the commercial, …
- Tjeerd Hoek
Tjeerd Hoek (born 1970 in Netherlands) is the director of user experience design for Microsoft Windows. He manages the team that designs the interface and user experience across Windows and its subset of applications. In 1992, he graduated from Delft University of Technology with a masters in Industrial Design Engineering to pursue a career in industrial design. Later in 1994, he joined Microsoft to work on products such as Office, MSN and most recently, …
- Jim Keogh
Jim Keogh is the author of more than 70 books including five "...For Dummies" books. Keogh introduced PC programming across America in his "Popular Electronics" magazine column in 1982, four years after Apple Computer started in a garage. He developed the Electronic Commerce Track at Columbia University and was a team member who built one of the first Windows applications by a Wall Street firm, featured by Bill Gates in 1986 on Windows on Wall Street.
- Dj Delorie
DJ Delorie is a US-American software developer. He initiated and maintains the DJGPP project, a very successful, free port of the GNU C/C++ compiler and tools suite, targeted to PCs running MS-DOS or DOS terminals under Microsoft Windows. He makes a point of having his first name actually spelled "DJ", and not "D.J." or similar. "DJ" is the actual name, not the initials of first and middle name.
- Ryan Gordon
Ryan Gordon (also known as Icculus) is a former Loki Software employee, now responsible for Icculus.org, which hosts many Loki Software projects, as well as hosts new projects started by himself which include, a port of Duke Nukem 3D, a port of Shadow Warrior, an enhanced port of Quake III Arena (ioquake3), and many other projects for Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows.
- Bob Denny
Bob Denny (fl. late 20th century) is an American software developer who writes software for robotic telescope and remote telescope systems. He is the inventor of the Astronomy Common Object Model (ASCOM) standard, which has resulted in the easy availability of freeware device drivers for telescopes, telescope focusers, and astronomical observatory domes and enclosures. Denny is also noted for developing the first web server software for Microsoft Windows (Windows HTTPd), …
- Seetharaman Narayanan
Seetharaman Narayanan (or Seetha Narayanan) is a programmer for Adobe Photoshop. He started working on version 2.5 on September 23, 1991. Because of his work porting version 3.0 to Microsoft Windows, he is thought of as the "Windows Guy" on the Photoshop team. He also was primarily responsible for porting Photoshop 7 to Mac OS X, and he did the early work for multi-threading.
- Frank Warmerdam
Frank Warmerdam is an independent software developer with a focus on remote sensing, geographic information system, cartography, and development of geospatial data translators. He is best known in the GIS community as the author of the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library or GDAL. He is also a founding member, director and the initial president of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). Frank Warmerdam lives near Eganville, Ontario, Canada.
- Weld Pond
Chris Wysopal (better known as Weld Pond) was a member of the high profile hacker think tank, the L0pht. Weld Pond earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Systems & Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Weld Pond was the seventh member to join the L0pht. His projects there included L0phtCrack and Netcat for Windows. He was also webmaster/graphic designer for the L0pht's web site, and for Hacker News Network (the first hacker blog).
- Mobman
Mobman is the author of Subseven, a trojan horse and a backdoor for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Mobman was born in approximately 1981 and began programming at the age 15, when he first picked up Pascal and then Delphi. The exact identity of Mobman is still unknown, but his program has been installed on millions of machines around the world, often used for mischievous and criminal behavior. Mobman denies that his tool promotes illegal activities, …
- Jared Smith
Jared Smith is an American amateur singer specializing in Spanish. His singing career achieved some notoriety in the mid-1990s when his brothers Colin and Ian of Freeverse Software combined a recording of his singing with an animated smiley face. The resulting program was intended to be their mother's birthday gift. The two brothers later sent the singing software to their friends, who subsequently passed it to their own friends.
- Jacek Skalmierski
Jacek Skalmierski is a Polish computer programmer. He was the creator of the first widely popular English-Polish, Polish-English dictionary software. The DOS version monopolized the market in the early 1990s, and had thousands of enthusiastic users. However, the Windows version did not match the original in popularity. In the late 1990s, it was largely displaced by the Collins dictionary by Young Digital Poland.
- Venetian Snares
Venetian Snares is the performing name of Aaron Funk, an electronic music producer and performer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is known for making experimental electronic music often in odd numbered time signatures. He is a prolific artist, having released records on the History of the Future, Isolate/DySLeXiC ResPonSe, Addict, Zod, Distort, Sublight, Low-Res, Planet Mu and Hymen record labels.
- Edgar Vigdal
Edgar M. Vigdal is a Norwegian game programmer. He first became famous for his Amiga ShareWare games "Deluxe Pacman" and "Deluxe Galaga" in the 1990s. After Commodore's bankruptcy, Vigdal moved from the Amiga to Microsoft Windows, and has developed a "Deluxe Galaga" remake for Windows called "Warblade". Also created a remake for the PC and Mac of his old Amiga game Deluxe PacMan. Now Called Deluxe PocMon.
- Vincent Connare
Vincent Connare is a former Microsoft in-house font designer. Amongst his creations are the Comic Sans font, and the Trebuchet MS font, both of which ship as standard on current releases of Microsoft Windows. Besides text typefaces he finalized and hinted the font Marlett which has been used for scalable User Interface icons in Microsoft Windows since 1995 and created portions of the font Webdings that was first shipped with Internet Explorer.
- Brian Fargo
Brian Fargo is a computer game developer and notable game industry figure. In 1984 Fargo founded Interplay Entertainment, where he worked on most of Interplay's early games (e.g. "Bard's Tale" and "Wasteland"). He was the company's CEO until 2002, when majority control of Interplay was acquired by Titus Interactive, and he left the company. He had also worked with Brainstorm (Publisher), developing Chess Mates.
- Jeff Vogel
Jeff Vogel is the president and primary programmer for the Spiderweb Software company, which produces shareware computer games for Macintosh and Windows PC platforms. Jeff currently lives in Seattle, Washington. To date, his most successful games have been the "Exile" series, its facelifted cousin the "Avernum" series, and the "Geneforge" series. His personal site, Irony Central, is home to sarcastic social commentary, humor pieces, …
- Harri Porten
Harri Porten (born 1972) is a software engineer. Porten, a KDE developer and former Trolltech employee, is the CEO of Froglogic, a consultancy company related to Qt development. He currently lives in Hamburg, Germany. Porten originally wrote the KJS JavaScript engine for Konqueror, the KDE project's file manager and web browser. He also contributed to the development of KPPP, the KDE project's Internet dialer.
- John Vanderslice
John Vanderslice (born May 22, 1967 in Gainesville, Florida) is an American musician, formerly of mk Ultra but now performing with his own band. After mk Ultra broke up in 1999, Vanderslice wasted little time building a solo reputation.