- 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, …
- Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds ; born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland, is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of the Linux kernel. He now acts as the project's coordinator. Linus was inspired by Minix (an operating system developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum) to develop a capable Unix-like operating system that could be run on a PC. Linux now also runs on many other architectures.
- Hans Reiser
Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 1963) is an American computer programmer famous for his contributions to the free software community in the field of file systems. In particular he is deeply involved in the Linux kernel development with his widespread ReiserFS journaling file system and its successor Reiser4. In 1997 Reiser founded and has since headed Namesys Inc., …
- Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. Builder AU recently caught up with RMS about his achievements, the Free Software movement and his concerns with the US-Australian Free Trade Agreement. He will be in Australia on October 5 to speak at the Builder Conference in Sydney.
- Paul Graham
Paul Graham (b. Weymouth, England, 1964) is a Lisp programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is the author of "On Lisp" (1993), "ANSI Common Lisp" (1995), and "Hackers & Painters" (2004).
- Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Founder of the World Wide Web
- Paul Allen
Paul Gardner Allen (born January 21, 1953 in Seattle, Washington) is an American entrepreneur. With Bill Gates, he formed Microsoft. Allen regularly appears on lists of the richest people in the world; as of 2007 "Forbes" ranks him the fifth richest American, worth an estimated $18.0 billion. He is the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc. (his private asset management company)and chairman of Charter Communications.
- Steve Wozniak
Dr. Stephan Gary "Woz" Wozniak (born August 11 1950 in San Jose, California) is a U.S. computer engineer and the co-founder of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing greatly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, …
- Larry Wall
Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer, linguist, and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976. Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the nearly universally used patch program.
- 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.
- Grace Hopper
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace".
- Eric S. Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is a computer programmer, author and advocate for the open source movement. His reputation within hacker culture was established when he became the maintainer of the "Jargon File". After the 1997 publication of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond became a high-profile representative of the open source movement, and is today one of its most recognized and controversial characters.
- Dan Bricklin
Daniel S. Bricklin (born 16 July 1951) is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, and Trellix Corporation, which is currently owned by Web.com. Bricklin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, where he attended Akiba Hebrew Academy during his High School years.
- Dmitry Sklyarov
Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian computer programmer known for his 2001 arrest by American law enforcement over software copyright restrictions. He was later released and the charges were dropped.
- Ward Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is the American computer programmer who invented the wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham (commonly known by its domain name, c2.com), on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He currently lives in Beaverton, Oregon.
- Orlando
Orlando M Pilchard (real name Nick Pelling) is a computer games programmer, perhaps most famous for his work on Frak!. His unreleased games include 3D Wars
- John Walker
John Walker is a computer programmer and a co-founder of the computer-aided design software company Autodesk, and a co-author of early versions of AutoCAD, a product which Autodesk originally acquired from programmer Michael Riddle. Before Autodesk, John founded a hardware integration manufacturing company called Marinchip. Among other things, Marinchip pioneered the translation of numerous computer language compilers to Intel platforms.
- Donald Knuth
Don's father was a Lutheran school teacher and church organist. Don studied piano, and for a brief time organ, through high school. Later as a faculty member of Caltech, he was called upon to be a long-term substitute organist at Faith Lutheran Church in Pasadena, California. He became a member of the American Guild of Organists in 1965, and saw his first Abbott and Sieker organ at that time.
- Dave Winer
Dave Winer , 39, has been a commercial software developer, marketer and software demoer since 1979. Winer pioneered the category of outline processing, shipping ThinkTank for the IBM PC, Apple II and Macintosh in 1983 and 1984; Ready for the IBM PC in 1985 and MORE for Macintosh in 1986. MORE won MacUser's first Product of the Year Eddy in 1986. He founded and was president of Living Videotext, Inc., which merged with Symantec in 1987.
- Ken Thompson
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4 1943), commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply Ken in hacker circles), is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding the UNIX and Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating systems.
- Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971, in New Lisbon, Wisconsin) is the chair of Opsware, a software company, and cofounder of Ning, a consumer Internet company. He is best known as a cofounder of Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser. In 2005, it was revealed that he is one of the people behind Ning, which recently launched a free "playground" for social software.
- Alan Cox
Alan Cox (born 1968) is a British computer programmer heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel since its early days (1991).
- Andrew Morton
Andrew Keith Paul Morton (born 1959 in England) is an Australian software engineer, best known as one of the lead developers on the Linux kernel project. He currently maintains a patchset known as the "mm" tree, which contains not yet sufficiently tested patches that might later be accepted into the official 2.6 kernel maintained by Linus Torvalds. In the late 1980s, he was one of the partners of a company in Sydney, …
- Bill Joy
Bill Joy served as Sun's Chief Scientist until 2003, and is now a partner with venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.
- Miguel de Icaza
Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects. Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) but never received a degree. He came from a family of scientists in which his father was a physicist and his mother a biologist. He started writing free software in 1992.
- Andy Hertzfeld
Andy Hertzfeld (born April 6, 1953) was a key member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer from August 1979 until March 1984, where he was a key designer of the Macintosh system software. Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990 and Eazel in 1999. Hertzfeld joined Google in 2005 and has been working there since.
- Darren Barefoot
Darren Barefoot is a writer and marketing executive based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is a founding partner at Capulet Communications, a public relations firm specializing in high technology companies. Barefoot wrote a monthly column for the "Yaletown View", whose parent company publishes magazines in British Columbia and California. Barefoot has also written for the Vancouver Sun and "Victoria News" newspapers, …
- James Gosling
James Gosling is a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems ,and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint-based drawing editor, and a text editor called "Emacs" for Unix systems. At Sun, his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system.
- Dave Thomas
Dave Thomas is a computer programmer and author/editor. He has written about Ruby. Dave and partner Andy Hunt wrote the The Pragmatic Programmer and run The Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing company, publishing award-winning and critically acclaimed books for software developers. Dave Thomas lives in Dallas, Texas. He moved to the United States from England in 1994. Dave has also coined the phrase 'Code Kata'.
- Joel Spolsky
Joel Spolsky started his web log, www.joelonsoftware.com, in March 2000 in order to offer his insights, based on years of experience, on how to improve the world of programming. His extraordinary writing skills, technical knowledge, and caustic wit have made him a programming guru. This log, now legend in the programming world, is linked to more than 600 other websites and translated into more than 30 languages!
- Greg Egan
Greg Egan (August 20, 1961, Perth, Western Australia) is an Australian computer programmer and science fiction author. Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational materialism over religion.
- Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator for Life", meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary.
- Shawn Fanning
Shawn "Napster" Fanning (born November 22, 1980, Brockton, Massachusetts<sup></sup>), is a computer programmer. He is best known for developing "Napster", the first popular peer-to-peer filesharing platform, in 1998.
- John Carmack
John D. Carmack II (born August 20 1970) is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. A prolific American programmer, Carmack co-founded id Software, a computer game development company, in 1991. Carmack was the lead programmer of the highly successful id computer games "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D", "Doom", "Quake", and subsequent sequels to "Doom" and "Quake".
- Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus E. Wirth (b. February 15, 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
- Brad Templeton
Brad Templeton (born near Toronto in 1960), son of Charles Templeton and Sylvia Murphy, is a software engineer and entrepreneur. Templeton is considered one of the early luminaries of Usenet, and in 1989 founded ClariNet, which uses Usenet protocols to distribute news articles, one of the first commercial examples of electronic publishing. In his "Net History in Brief" post, he coined the phrase "Imminent death of net predicted".
- Matt Dillon
Matt Dillon is a computer scientist, born July 1, 1966 in the Bay Area and living in Berkeley, California. He is best known for his contributions to FreeBSD and for starting the DragonFly BSD project. Dillon studied electronic engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he first became involved with BSD in 1985. He also became known for his Amiga programming, his C compiler DICE and his work on the Linux kernel.
- Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan, (born 1942 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed greatly to Unix and its school of thought. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie.
- Charles Simonyi
Charles Simonyi is a computer software executive who, as head of Microsoft's application software group, oversaw the creation of Microsoft's flagship office applications. He now heads his own company, "Intentional Software", with the aim of developing and marketing his concept of Intentional programming. In 2007, he became the fifth space tourist and the second Hungarian in space. His estimated net worth is $1 billion.
- Gary Kildall
Gary Arlen Kildall (May 19, 1942 - July 11, 1994) was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur who created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc.(DRI). Kildall was one of the first people to see microprocessors as fully capable computers rather than equipment controllers and to organize a company around this concept. He also co-hosted the PBS TV show "The Computer Chronicles".