- 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.
- Douglas Adams
Douglas Noël Adams was an English author, comic radio dramatist, and musician. He is best known as author of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series. "Hitchhiker's" began on radio, and developed into a "trilogy" of five books (which sold more than fifteen million copies during his lifetime) as well as a television series, a towel, a comic book series, a computer game and a feature film that was completed after Adams' death.
- Henry Spencer
Henry Spencer is a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote 'regex', a widely-used Library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News. He also co-authored "The Ten Commandments for C Programmers". Whilst working at the University of Toronto he ran the first active Usenet site outside the US, starting in 1981. His records from that period were eventually acquired by Google to provide an archive of Usenet in the 1980s.
- Gene Spafford
Eugene H. Spafford (born 1956) (known colloquially as "Spaf") is a professor of computer science at Purdue University and a leading computer security expert.
- 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".
- Mike Godwin
Mike Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the creator of the Internet adage Godwin's Law. As of July 2007 he is general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. __TOC_
- Jorn Barger
Jorn Barger (born 1953 in Yellow Springs, Ohio) is an American blogger, best known today as editor of "Robot Wisdom", an influential early weblog. Barger coined the term "weblog" to describe the process of "logging the web" as he surfed. Some of his writings have been a source of controversy, provoking accusations of anti-Semitism. He has also written extensively on James Joyce and artificial intelligence, …
- J. Michael Straczynski
Joseph Michael Straczynski (born July 17, 1954) is an award-winning American writer/producer of television series, novels, short stories, comic books, and radio dramas. He is also a playwright, journalist and author of a well-regarded tome on scriptwriting. He was the creator, executive producer and head writer for the science fiction TV series "Babylon 5" and its spin-off "Crusade". Straczynski wrote 91 out of the 110 "Babylon 5" episodes, …
- Tom Christiansen
Tom Christiansen (also nicknamed "tchrist" or occasionally "thoth") is a well-known Unix developer and user especially known for his many contributions to the Perl programming language. He was the author of much of the core Perl documentation, including the manual pages perlfaq and perltoot. In 1999, he was one of the original recipients of the White Camel Awards from Perl Mongers for his contribution to Perl's documentation.
- Jim Ellis
James Tice Ellis was a computer scientist best known as the co-creator of Usenet. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Ellis grew up in Orlando, Florida. Before developing Usenet, Ellis attended Duke University. He later worked as an Internet security consultant for Sun Microsystems. He was married and had three children when he died of lymphoma in 2001 in Harmony, Pennsylvania.
- John Gilmore
John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU project. As the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems and founder of Cygnus Support, he accumulated sufficient wealth to take an early retirement and pursue other interests. He is a frequent contributor to free software, and worked on several GNU projects, …
- Tom Truscott
Tom Truscott is a computer scientist best known for creating Usenet with Jim Ellis, when both were graduate students at Duke University.
- Sam Sloan
Samuel Howard Sloan (b. September 7, 1944), also known as M. Ismail Sloan, is an American author, chess player and former securities trader. While having no formal legal training, he once orally argued and won a case in front of the U. S. Supreme Court. In July 2006, he was elected to the Executive Board of the United States Chess Federation. He has been married five times and has eight children.
- Chris Lewis
Chris Lewis is a Canadian expert on Usenet and spam. He is perhaps best known for his work in writing and running auto-cancelers for newsgroup spam, and his help in implementing (and avoiding the need for) UDPs. He is employed by Nortel/BNR and helps maintain the Ottawa-Carleton Unix Users Group (Ocunix). He is generally considered to be a leading member of the so-called cabal that allegedly runs Usenet.
- Ed Conrad
Ed Conrad is a part-time journalist, dealer in antiques, and critic of the theories of human evolution. His notoriety stems from his vast posting history to Usenet and his belief that, in his words, man is "as old as coal."
- Rich Salz
Rich Salz is currently Chief Security Officer of Datapower, which was recently acquired by IBM. He has made numerous contributions to recent work on XML and SOAP specifications, particularly involving security. For many years, he spelled his name 'Rich $alz' and was an early contributor to the free software movement. In 1986 he replaced John P. Nelson as editor of the original "moderated" Usenet group for free source code, mod.sources (later renamed to comp.sources.unix).
- Rick Adams
Rick Adams was an Internet pioneer and the founder of UUNET, which, in the mid and late 1990s, was the world's largest Internet Service Provider (ISP). Rick Adams was responsible for the first widely available Serial Line IP (SLIP) implementation and founding UUNET, thereby making the Internet widely accessible. In 1982 Rick ran the first international UUCP email link at the machine "seismo" (owned by the Center for Seismic Studies in Northern Virginia), …
- John McCarthy
John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts, sometimes known affectionately as Uncle John McCarthy), is a prominent computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence.
- Joel Furr
Joel "Jay" K. Furr (born 1967 in Roanoke, Virginia) was a Usenet personality in the early and mid 1990s, immortalized in the newsgroups alt.fan.joel-furr, alt.bonehead.joel-furr, and alt.joel-furr.die.die.die. He was a pretender to the throne of James "Kibo" Parry, and the bitter enemy of Serdar Argic. One reason for Furr's fame on Usenet was his self-appointed leadership over the alt hierarchy, …
- David Boothroyd
David Boothroyd (born November 9, 1972) is a British political researcher, author and local councillor. Boothroyd was born in Leeds. His family moved to Scarborough in 1976 where he attended Newby County Primary School, and to Congleton, Cheshire, in 1983 where he attended Quinta County Primary School, and from 1984, Heathfield High School. From 1989 to 1991 he attended The King's School, Macclesfield, a public school/independent school. He then went to St.
- Archimedes Plutonium
Archimedes Plutonium (born July 5, 1950 as Ludwig Poehlmann) is primarily noted for his varied and eccentric contributions to Usenet. Plutonium repeatedly claimed to be the greatest living scientist, and referred to himself at least once as "The King of Science", although he is almost universally regarded as a crank. One of Plutonium's earliest and most memorable posts in December, 1993 replies to Andrew Wiles' report on the status of his proof of Fermat's last theorem.
- Brian Reid
Brian Keith Reid (born 1949) is a computer scientist most famous for developing the Scribe word processing system, the subject of his 1980 doctoral dissertation, for which he received the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1982. Scribe was a pioneer in the use of descriptive markup. Reid presented a paper describing Scribe in the same conference session in 1981 in which Charles Goldfarb presented GML, the immediate predecessor of SGML.
- Tim Pierce
Tim Pierce is a Boston-area software engineer and former Usenetter known in that medium for moderating rec.arts.erotica and ambushing alt.*-group proposers on alt.config with repetitive objections to new "alt."-group proposals. Pierce followed up his objections by removing alt-group newgroups that had previously gone unmentioned on alt.config. These activities have caused him to be designated as a Net legend alongside with Joel Furr, in the category of Lesser Lights.
- Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Patrick James Nielsen Hayden (born January 2, 1959 in Lansing, Michigan) is an American science fiction editor, fanzine publisher, essayist, reviewer, anthologist, and teacher. He is a World Fantasy Award winner, has been nominated for the Hugo Award eight times, and is a Senior Editor and the Manager of Science Fiction at Tor Books. The former Patrick Hayden changed his last name to "Nielsen Hayden" on his marriage to Teresa Nielsen (now Teresa Nielsen Hayden) in 1979.
- Andrew Plotkin
Andrew Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is an award-winning interactive fiction author and an important figure in the modern interactive fiction community. Plotkin was one of the earliest writers to use Graham Nelson's Inform development system, and one of the first since Infocom's heyday to explore the boundaries of interactive fiction as an artistic medium. Many later authors cite him as a primary influence. He has won many awards within the community, …
- Elf Sternberg
Elf Mathieu Sternberg, a database programmer, born May 7, 1966, is the former keeper of the alt.sex FAQ. He is also the author of many erotic stories and articles on sexuality and sexual practices. Elf Sternberg's best known piece of writing is probably the erotic short story "The Only Fair Game", which became famous/infamous for raising legal questions about fan fiction.
- Barbara Schwarz
Barbara Schwarz is a German national, living in the United States, who has made a record number of requests under the United States' Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The "Lexington Herald-Leader" referred to Schwarz as "history's most prolific filer" of Freedom of Information Act requests. Since 1989, she has issued thousands of FOIA requests, and dozens of lawsuits to numerous federal and state governmental departments and agencies, …
- Helena Kobrin
Helena Kempner Kobrin (born April 27, 1948) is an American Scientologist and lawyer at the firm Moxon & Kobrin, working for the Religious Technology Center, which controls the trademarks of Scientology and the copyright of the works of L. Ron Hubbard. She received her B.A. at Hofstra University and her J.D. at Seton Hall University. She was admitted to the bar in 1978, and at the California bar in 1991.
- Jef Poskanzer
Jeffrey A. Poskanzer is a computer programmer. He was the first person to post a weekly FAQ to Usenet, he developed the portable pixmap file format, he owns the internet address acme.com (which is notable for receiving over one million e-mail spams a day), invented the original PBM file format, and worked on the team that ported A/UX.
- Rich Skrenta
Richard "Rich" Skrenta (b.1967 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a computer programmer. In 1982, as a high school student at Mt. Lebanon High School, Skrenta wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines. It is considered the first computer virus to be found "in the wild." Skrenta graduated from Northwestern University. Between 1989 and 1991 he worked at Commodore Business Machines with Amiga Unix.
- Steven M. Bellovin
Steven M. Bellovin is a researcher on computer networking and security. He is currently a Professor in the Computer Science department at Columbia University, having previously been a long time employee at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, New Jersey. As a graduate student, Bellovin was one of the originators of USENET. He later suggested that Gene Spafford should create the Phage mailing list as a response to the Morris Worm.
- Kibo
Kibo is the nickname, username and e-mail address of James Parry (b. July 13 1967), a Usenetter known for his sense of humor, various surrealist net pranks, an absurdly long .signature, and a machine-assisted knack for joining any thread in which his nom de guerre is mentioned (to "kiboze"). His exploits have earned him a multitude of enthusiasts, who celebrate him as the head deity of the parody religion kibology, …
- Chip Salzenberg
Chip Salzenberg is an American programmer mostly noted for his involvement in the Perl and Free Software communities. Salzenberg has been involved with Perl development for over 15 years, and with Free Software for more than 20 years. In 1996 and 1997, he was project manager for Perl 5.004, a Perl release widely praised for its high quality. Salzenberg went on to teach Perl and write professionally. He was one of the founding board members of the Open Source Initiative, …
- Dorothy J. Heydt
Dorothy J. Heydt is a U.S. editor and author of science fiction and fantasy. She lives on the West Coast and is an active participant in the Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.fandom, and in science fiction fandom in general. She is the originator of the Eight Deadly Words, and other pithy fannish quotes. A linguist, she invented one of the first widely used Vulcan conlangs in 1967 for a Star Trek fan fiction series.
- Casper Dik
Casper Dik is a "Senior Staff Engineer " at Sun Microsystems and a OpenSolaris Governing Board member. He previously served on the OGB's predecessor, the Community Advisory Board. He is a regular contributor to the Solaris usenet community and the maintainer of the Solaris 2 FAQ.
- Phil Lapsley
Phil Lapsley (b. 1965) is an electrical engineer, hacker, and entrepreneur. Lapsley attended the University of California, Berkeley in the 1980s, graduating with a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1988 and 1991. While there he became involved in the Berkeley UNIX project and co-founded the EXperimental Computing Facility, where he was involved in defending against the Internet Worm in 1988.
- Geoff Collyer
Geoff Collyer is a Canadian computer scientist. He is the senior author of "C News", a protocol-neutral news transport, and the designer of NOV, the News Overview database (article index) used by all modern newsreaders. In the past he worked as a Unix system programmer, but since 1994 he has been living on and developing "Plan 9". He is now back at Bell Labs Research. The asteroid 129101 Geoffcollyer is named in his honour.
- Jo Walton
Jo Walton (born December 1, 1964) is a fantasy and science fiction writer and poet. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002 and the World Fantasy award for her novel "Tooth and Claw" in 2004. Welsh in origin, she now lives in Montreal. She is married to Dr. Emmet O'Brien.
- Sheldon Brown
Sheldon Brown (born July 14, 1944) is an American bicycle mechanic and technical authority. He maintains an extensive website containing authoritative articles relating to bicycle mechanics and maintenance, as well as a thorough glossary of bicycling terminology. He also mirrors the technical work of Damon Rinard, among others. He is an accomplished amateur photographer and his site is well illustrated with his own photographs.
- Bob Larson
Bob Larson (born 1944 in McCook, Nebraska) is a radio and television evangelist, currently based in Colorado. Larson has authored numerous books on the subjects of rock music, cults, and Satanism, written from a Christian perspective. He has an active following in the Usenet community at alt.fan.bob-larson. Larson plays guitar; he has claimed his early experiences as a musician led to his concerns about occult and destructive influences in rock music.