- 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, …
- 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.
- Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus Lerdorf (born November 22 1968 in Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland) is a Danish-Greenlandic programmer and the creator of the PHP programming language. He authored the first two versions. Rasmus also participated in the development of later versions of PHP led by a group of developers including Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, who later founded Zend Technologies.
- John Backus
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it. The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN.
- Ellen Ullman
Ellen Ullman, a software engineer, writes with the energy of Boswell, the clarity of Orwell, and the warmth of Montaigne. You may wonder: how could a software engineer write so well? But you shouldn't wonder, you should read. Ullman is a wonderful writer and 'Close To The Machine' is a wonderful book.
- Masi Oka
Oka: I got to see a little bit of it, but I guess the crowd reacted well. It was very cool, because I realize that Hiro is kind of representative of all the comic book geeks. I myself am a big Manga freak as well, so I was just happy that I could give it justice, and it seemed like a lot of the audience members did connect to the character, so that was very cool.
- George Williams
George Williams (also known as, "George Walton Williams") (b. 1959 in Durham, NC) is a renowned computer programmer and font developer. He is famous for his font editor, converter and creator software FontForge, which was previously called "PfaEdit". Many notable fonts were edited and developed with this versatile cross-platform software. He is also a type designer (font developer) of various fonts since 1987, …
- Daniel J. Bernstein
Daniel Julius Bernstein (sometimes known simply as djb; born October 29, 1971) is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a mathematician, a cryptologist, and a programmer. Bernstein is the author of the computer software qmail, publicfile and djbdns. He has a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from New York University (1991), and a PhD in Mathematics from University of California, Berkeley (1995), studying under Hendrik Lenstra.
- Bob Whitehead
Bob Whitehead is a game designer and programmer. He is a renowned pioneer and entrepreneur of the video game industry.
- Andrew Fluegelman
Andrew Cardoza Fluegelman (born November 27 1943 -- presumably died July 6 1985) was a publisher, programmer and attorney best known as the inventor of what is now known as the shareware business model for software marketing. He was also the leader of the 1970s "New Games" movement which advocated the development of noncompetitive games.
- David Mullich
David: I was just about to accept a job offer from a large game publisher when I noticed a game producer want ad in the Los Angeles Times, from a small company called ISG. I decided to check them out, and learned that they wanted to develop games for CD-I. I was somewhat familiar with the platform, having been invited to demonstrations at PIMA when I worked at Disney, but wasn't very impressed with it as a game machine.
- Jeffrey Ventrella
Jeffrey Ventrella (born 1960) is an artist and programmer who has developed a series of interactive free-download software programs. He has written research papers on artificial life, and works in the virtual world industry. Ventrella created the animated artificial life program "Gene Pool", which is derived from Darwin Pond. His website, Ventrella.com includes these and many other free software programs, …
- Theodore Ts'O
Theodore Y. "Ted" Ts'o (born 1968) is a software developer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems. He graduated in 1990 from MIT with a degree in Computing science. After graduation he worked in the "Information Systems & Technology" (IS&T) department at MIT until 1999, where among other things he was project leader of the Kerberos V5 team. After IS&T he went to work for VA Linux Systems for two years.
- Fyodor
Fyodor is the pseudonym of network security expert, open source programmer, writer, and self-proclaimed hacker Gordon Lyon. He authored the open source Nmap Security Scanner and numerous books, web sites, and technical papers focusing on network security. Fyodor is a founding member of the Honeynet Project and a board member of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
- 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.
- Ytcracker
Bryce Case, Jr. (b. August 23, 1982), otherwise known as YTCracker, is a rapper, former hacker, and Internet entrepreneur. YTCracker began producing rap music in 1998 in the genre that has since become known as nerdcore hip hop. His early work mainly focused on documenting and amusing the participants of the America Online hacking scene. YTCracker is a self-proclaimed "jack of all trades", also making a name for himself as a professional disc jockey, …
- John Carlsen
Syncopated founder John R. Carlsen has nearly 30 years experience analyzing circuits of computer systems ranging in size from video games to the world's first supercomputer. Early in his career, Mr. Carlsen aided notable video game industry pioneers including Atari , the first successful video game company and former fastest-growing company in the history of American business, and Activision , the first third-party video game software developer.
- 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., …
- Tantek Çelik
Tantek Çelik, of San Francisco, is a computer scientist of Turkish-American descent and was the Chief Technologist at Technorati. He is mostly known for his time at Microsoft (1997-2004), where he worked on the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer.
- Tom Anderson
Tom Anderson (born October 13, 1975) is the President of the social networking website, MySpace. He founded the site along with CEO Chris DeWolfe. Since newly created MySpace accounts include Tom as a default "friend," he has become known as the face of MySpace. As of Nov 17, 2008, Tom has 250,216,689 "friends". Anderson attended UC Berkeley from 1994 to 1998, UCLA 1999-2001
- Marshall Kirk McKusick
Marshall Kirk McKusick (b. January 19, 1954 in Wilmington, Delaware) is a computer scientist, famous for his extensive work on BSD, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2004, and still serves on the board. He is also on the editorial board of ACM Queue Magazine. He is known to friends and colleagues as "Kirk".
- 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.
- Matthew Haughey
Matthew Haughey (born October 10 1972) is an American programmer, web designer, and blogger best known as the founder of the community weblog MetaFilter, where he is known as "mathowie".
- Alan Curtis Kay
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. He is the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Until mid 2005, he was a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, …
- William Chen
William (Bill) Chen (born 1970) is a quantitative analyst, poker player and software designer with a Ph.D. in mathematics (1999) from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently in the Statistical arbitrage department at Susquehanna International Group. At the 2006 World Series of Poker Chen won two events, a $3000 limit hold 'em event with a prize of $343,618, and a $2500 no limit hold 'em short-handed event with a prize of $442,511.
- Steve Gibson
Steve Gibson (born March 1955) is a computer enthusiast, software engineer and security expert based in Laguna Hills, California. Gibson founded Gibson Research Corporation in 1985, and is currently its primary of three employees. Gibson studied EECS at UC Berkeley.
- Michael Deering
Michael Frank Deering, PhD, (b. 1956) is a computer scientist, a former chief engineer for Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, California, and a widely recognized expert on artificial intelligence, computer vision, 3D graphics hardware/software, very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design and virtual reality. Deering oversaw Sun's 3D graphics technical strategy as the chief hardware graphics architect and is a co-architect of the Java 3D API, …
- Spencer Kimball
Spencer Kimball is a computer programmer most notable for his early work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). In 1995, while students at the University of California at Berkeley, Kimball and his classmate Peter Mattis developed the first version of The GIMP as a class project. The two were also members of a student club at Berkeley called the eXperimental Computer Facility (XCF). Kimball said in 1999 that, "From the first line of source code to the last, …
- Cleve Moler
Cleve Barry Moler is a mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to these libraries without writing Fortran. In 1984, he co-founded The MathWorks with Jack Little to commercialize this program.
- 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.
- Jim Kent
Jim Kent is an American research scientist and computer programmer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been a major contributor to genome database projects. While a graduate student in biology there, he wrote the program that allowed the publicly funded Human Genome Project to assemble and publish the human genome database before the commercial effort by the company Celera Genomics.
- Daniel Keys Moran
Daniel Keys Moran, also known by his initials DKM, is a computer programmer and a science fiction writer. He was born to Richard Joseph Moran and Marilynn Joyce Moran. He has three sisters, Kari Lynn Moran, Jodi Anne Moran and Kathleen Moran. A native of Southern California, he once lived (with his former wife Holly Thomas Moran) in North Hollywood. DKM, his third wife Amy Stout-Moran, and their sons Richard Moran and Connor Moran, …
- Jeffrey Peterson
Jeffrey Peterson (born October 11, 1972 in Santa Barbara, California) is an American technology entrepreneur and Arizona millionaire who is considered the pioneer of Hispanic Internet in the United States. Known for both technological and business savvy, he is best known as the founder of Quepasa, one of the most popular Hispanic online communities.
- Joe Monzo
Joe Monzo (born January 5, 1962) is an American microtonal composer and tuning-theorist who has authored books and multiple webpages on music theory. He specializes in applying tuning-theory and computing to microtonal musical composition, and tutors people in computing and music composition. Monzo was born and rasied in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, graduated from Ocean City High School (class of 1979), attended Manhattan School of Music in New York, …
- 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.
- Rodnay Zaks
Rodnay Zaks is a prolific author of books on computer programming, including the seminal "Programming the Z80" and "Programming the 6502". He is the founder of independent computer books publisher Sybex and was its president and CEO until it was bought out by John Wiley and Sons in May 2005. Zaks has an engineering degree from the renowned École Centrale Paris and a Master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, …
- Matt Lebofsky
Matt Lebofsky is an Oakland, California based musician. He is a main member of the Immersion Composition Society Origin Lodge, recently toured nationally with Faun Fables and Fuzzy Cousins, and contributes to several other bands such as Three Piece Combo and JOB. He is also a computer programmer and systems administrator, …
- Paul Jardetzky
Paul Jardetzky was instrumental in the creation of the Trojan room coffee pot. He wrote the server program which transmitted the state of the coffee pot to the XCoffee client program. He graduated from Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California in 1981 and later the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge, England.
- Danny Goodman
Danny Goodman is a computer programmer, technology consultant, and a well known award-winning author of over three dozen books and hundreds of magazine articles on computer-related topics. He is best known as the author of "The Complete Hypercard Handbook" (1987, Bantam Books, 650,000 copies in print), "The JavaScript Bible" (1996, IDG Books, 500,000 copies in print), and "Dynamic HTML" (1998, O'Reilly & Associates, 100,000 copies in print).
- Craig Shaynak
I'm jovial and outgoing when in social settings; intraspective, quiet and thoughtful at heart. If I have a spare hour, I'll play the piano over anything else. I love the ocean. I get excited when I teach people about music or computers. I'm an artsy geek! I started working out two months ago! I do a comedy show called FAT, BALD & LOUD every Saturday in Los Angeles. Visit www.fatbaldloud.com for info!;.