Gene Amdahl: Implementer in the 60s of a milestone in computer technology: the concept of compatibility between systems

Marc Andreessen: Pioneer of Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the WWW; co-founder of Netscape

John Vincent Atanasoff: Inventor of an electronic computer in the late 1930s not for fun or glory, but because he had problems for it to solve

Charles Babbage: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1828; inventor of the 'calculating machine'

John Backus: Inventor (with IBM) of FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) in 1956

Ralph Baer: "The man who invented video games" (Pong)

Kent Beck: Creator of JUnit and pioneer of eXtreme Programming (XP)

Bob Bemer: One of the developers of COBOL and the ASCII naming standard for IBM (1960s)

Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web

D J Bernstein: Author of qmail

Joshua Bloch: Formerly at Sun, where he helped architect Java's core platform; now at Google

Grady Booch: One of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language

Adam Bosworth: Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; then BEA, now Google

Don Box: Coauthor of SOAP

Stewart Brand: Cofounder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board

Tim Bray: One of the prime movers of XML, now with Sun

Dan Bricklin: Cocreator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet

Larry Brilliant: Cofounder in 1984 of the WELL bulletin board

Sergey Brin: Son-of-college-math-professor turned cofounder of Google, Inc.

Fred Brooks: Co-creator of OS/390, helping change the way we think about software development

Luca Cardelli: Implementer of the first compiler for ML (the most popular typed functional language) and one of the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors

Vincent Cerf: "The Father of the Internet," co-inventor with Robert Kahn of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP

Brad Cox: Father of Objective-C

Alonzo Church: Co-creator with Alan Turing of the "Church-Turing Thesis"

Alistair Cockburn: Helped craft the Agile Development Manifesto

Edgar (Ted) Codd: "Father of Relational Databases," inventor of SQL and creator of RDBMS systems

Larry Constantine: Inventor of data flow diagrams; presented first paper on concepts of structured design in 1968

Dave Cutler: The brains behind VMS; hired away by Microsoft for Windows NT

Ole-Johan Dahl: Developer (with Kristen Nygaard) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language.

Miguel de Icaza: Now with Novell, cofounder of Ximian, GNOME, Mono

Tom DeMarco: A principal of the computer systems think tank, Atlantic Systems Guild

Theo de Raadt: Founder of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects

Edsger W. Dijkstra: One of the moving forces behind the acceptance of computer programming as a scientific discipline; developer of the first compilers

Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript; Chief Architect of the Mozilla Project

Robert Elz: University of Melbourne Department of Computer Science

Doug Englebart: Father of the Mouse; devised the Open Hyperdocument System; interactive computing's founding pioneer

Don Ferguson: Inventor of the J2EE application server at IBM

Roy T. Fielding: Primary architect of HTTP 1.1 and a founder of the Apache Web server

Richard P. Feynman: Legendary physicist and teacher, teacher of Caltech course 1983-86 called Potentialities and Limitations of Computing Machines

Martin Fowler: Famous for work on refactoring, XP, and UML

Bob Frankston: Cocreator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet

Jon Gay: The "Father of Flash"

Bill Gates: Chief Software Architect (and Lord High Chief Everything Else) of "the world's #1 company" (Hoovers.com)

Adele Goldberg: Developer of SmallTalk along with Alan Kay; wrote much of the documentation

James Gosling: "Father of Java" (though not its sole parent)

Anders Hejlsberg: Genius behind the Turbo Pascal compiler, subsequently "Father of C#"

Andy Hertzfield: Eazel developer and Macintosh forefather

Daniel W. Hillis: VP of R&D at the Walt Disney Company; cofounder, Thinking Machines

Grace Murray Hopper: developer of the first compiled high level programming language, COBOL

Jordan Hubbard: One of the creators of FreeBSD; currently a manager of Apple's Darwin project

Jean D Ichbiah: Principal designer, Ada language (1977)

Ken Iverson: Inventor of APL, later J

Bill Joy: Cofounder and former chief scientist of Sun; main author of Berkeley Unix

William Kahan: "The Old Man of Floating-Point;" primary architect behind the IEEE 754 standard for loating-point computation

Robert Kahn: Co-inventor with Vincent Cerf of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP

Mitch Kapor: Designer of Lotus 1-2-3, founder of Lotus Development Corporation

Mike Karels: System architect for 4.3BSD

Alan Kay: Inventor of SmallTalk

Brian Kernighan: One of the creators of the AWK and AMPL languages; coauthor of the 'bible' on C programming

Mitchell Kertzman: Former programmer, founder, and CEO of Powersoft (later Sybase)

Gary Kildall: Author of the archetpical OS known as CP/M (control Program for Microcomputers)

Klaus Knopper: Prime mover of Knoppix, a Linux distro that runs directly from a CD

Donald Knuth: "Father of Computer Science" - author of The Art of Computer Programming; inventor of TeX, allowing typesetting of text and mathematical formulas on a PC

Butler Lampson: Architect of Cedar/Mesa; Implementer of Xerox Alto

Robert C. Martin: Agile software development proponent; CEO, president, and founder of Object Mentor

Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"): Creator of Ruby

John McCarthy: Creator, with his graduate students, of Lisp

Craig McClanahan: Of Tomcat, Struts, and JSF fame

Doug McIlroy: Head of department at Bell Labs where UNIX started

Bob Metcalfe: Creator of Ethernet

Chuck Moore: Inventor of Forth, a high-level programming language

Andrew Morton: Linus's No. 2 in the kernel group

Nathan Myhrvold: Theoretical and mathematical physicist, former CTO at Microsoft

Ted Nelson: Creator of the Xanadu project - universal, democratic hypertext library; precursor to the WWW

Kristen Nygaard: Developer (with Ole-Johan Dahl) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language.

Tim O'Reilly: Publisher, open source advocate; believer that great technology needs great books

Peter Pag: Pioneer of 4GLS (1979); developed Software AG's Natural

Jean Paoli: One of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the W3C; now with Microsoft

Bob Pasker: founder of WebLogic, author of the first Java Application Server

John Patrick: Former VP of Internet technology at IBM, now "e-tired"

Benjamin Pierce: Harvard University faculty member for 49 years; recognized in his time as one of America's leading mathematicians

Rob Pike: An early developer of Unix and windowing system (GUI) technology

P J Plauger: Chair of the ANSI C committee

Jon Postel: "The 'North Star' Who Defined the Internet"

John Postley: Developed Mark IV (1967), the first million dollar software product, for Informatics

Martin Richards: Designer of the BCPL Cintcode System

Dennis Ritchie: Creator of C and coinventor of Unix

Martin Roesch: Author of the open-source program Snort in 1998

Gurusamy Sarathy: Heavily involved in maintaining the mainstream releases of Perl for the past 7 years

Carl Sassenrath: Author of REBOL, a scripting language

Richard Stallman: Free software movement's leading figure; founder of the GNU Project

Guy L. Steele: Author of athoritative books and papers on Lisp

W. Richard Stevens: "Guru of the Unix Gurus"; author and consultant

Bjarne Stroustrup: The designer and original implementor of C++

Ivan Sutherland: Considered by many to be the creator of Computer Graphics

Andy Tanenbaum: Professor of computer science, author of Minix

Avadis (Avie) Tevanian: Chief Software Technology Officer, Apple

Ken Thompson: Coinventor of Unix

Linus Torvalds: "Benevolent dictator" of the Linux kernel

Guy (Bud) Tribble: One of the industry's top experts in software design and object-oriented programming

Alan Turing: Mathematician; author of the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"

Guido van Rossum: Author of the Python programming language

Patrick Volkerding: Creator of Slackware Linux

John von Neumann: Pioneer of logical design; first computer theorist to tackle the problem of obtaining reliable answers from a machine with unreliable components

Larry Wall: Author of Perl

John Warnock: Inventor of PostScript; CEO of Adobe Systems

Michael "Monty" Widenius: Creator of MySQL

Ann Winblad: Former programmer, cofounder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners

Nicklaus Wirth: Inventor of Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon

Stephen Wolfram: Scientist, creator of Mathematica

Jamie Zawinski: Instrumental in the creation of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs)