Like someone said, there are few people who change history. And then again there are a few who created it.
This is a gallery of people who I feel are heroes, in the sense that they have done things for computing that have changed the way we see and feel things. Most of these people are the reason why people like you and me and here in front of our systems, most believing that this was the way it was meant to be.
This is firstly the legendary hacker team... the guys behind Unix and C. The guys without whom computing would have had a radically different shape.
This is a picture from AT&T Bell Labs from the 70s. Shows Dennis Ritchie (standing) and Ken Thompson. These were the people who may have probably ruled computing. They were the geniuses who about 30 years back conceived the most legendary OS of all times. AT&T was split up by a government litigation spawned by an Antitrust-motion, into 7 different companies.
Professor Brian Kernighan (left), one of the co-developers of Unix.
Kernighan went onto write many books along with others like Ritchie and Pike,
many of which went onto cult status in computing.
Rob Pike (right), part of the AT&T team, an olympics medal medal
holder, wrote the first bitmap window for unix, one of the design geniuses
behind Inferno and Plan9. These two are more recent pics. These guys are simply
gods of programming.
The Plan9 newsgroup is a nice placing to be. If you can appreciate the
metaphor, a nice wolf pack.
Microsoft, the company that went onto change computing as we knew it (ps
and they still do). I liked the caption that went with this picture, Microsoft
in the 70's, would you invest ?
And of-course Bill Gates. Everyone loves to hate top-dog. But this man
is more of a visionary than people give him credit for. It takes some very
special genius to be able to collect and inspire the kind of will that this man
has managed to and see years ahead of most around him. MS has grown on to
become the software super power of the world. Recently I got a chance to
interface with some of the guys from there... its understandable why they are
on top.
Some other people I would like to mention.
Linus Torvalds - Programmer extraordinaire... cant say much for all the scum that the open source has collecting, but this man has my respect. More than a programmer, for being able to project-manage an arbitrary grouping of programmers over the world and to be able to group and discipline that energy without almost ever directly pursuing it... :) genius.
Anders Hejlsberg - One of the demigods of Microsoft. he was originally working with Borland, writing some old favorites like Turbo Pascal. Now one of the fathers of the .net framework, C# and the CLR.
Richard Stallman - The rhetorical master 'high priest of the church of emacs', founder of the free software foundation. One of the major architects and propagandists of the public domain software dialectic and thought. I had a chance to meet him and speak a bit, interesting person person .. zen style.