Greatest “IT” People

Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple Computer, topped the Computer Weekly 40th anniversary poll due to the devoted following he has generated through his pioneering work in personal computing and product design.

Dotcoms, bloggers and Google all have one man to thank for their place in the 21st century world. In 1990,
Tim Berners-Lee made the imaginative leap to combine the internet with the hypertext concept, and the worldwide web was born.

As joint founder of the world’s biggest software company, Microsoft, Bill Gates’s approach to technology and business was instrumental in making technology available to the masses.

Born in 1955 near Calgary, Canada, Gosling is best known as the father of the Java programming language, the first programme language designed with the internet in mind and which could adapt to highly distributed applications.

As the creator of the Linux operating system, Linus Torvalds has been a driving force behind the whole open source movement, which represents not only an ever increasing challenge to proprietary software, but is also the inspiration for the industry to move to open standards.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, an initiative to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software. Stallman has written several popular tools, created the GNU licence and campaigns against software patents.

2001: A Space Odyssey writer Arthur C Clarke has consistently been ahead of his time in predicting how technology will change the world. Most notably, in 1945 he suggested that geostationary satellites would make ideal telecoms relays.

Ted Codd created 12 rules on which every relational database is built – an essential ingredient for building business computer systems.

Steve Shirley was an early champion of women in IT. She founded the company now known as Xansa, pioneered new work practices and in doing so created new opportunities for women in technology.

With Brent Hoberman, Martha Lane Fox created Lastminute.com in 1998, and as “the face” of Lastminute raised the profile of e-commerce ever higher in the public consciousness.

They were the great person in this world. Everybody knew about them and their world.