Ed Roberts
Many diverse events and developments throughout history played a part in building the industry as we know it today. But two events clearly sparked the desktop PC revolution and the IT industry that sprang up around it: the 1974 release of the Intel 8080 microprocessor and the 1975 launch of the first commercial microcomputer, the Altair 8800. The Altair was the brainchild of Ed Roberts, president and cofounder of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, calculator company called Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS). The Altair was a kit—you had to build it yourself, and it didn't have a way to connect any peripherals such as a keyboard or a monitor. But enthusiasts snapped up Altair kits by the thousands and started devising ways to use them. Within 5 years, the PC moved from a hobbyist toy to a mainstream tool.
Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Murto
In 1982, three senior managers left Texas Instruments and invested $1000 each to form their own company, Compaq. They sketched the idea for their first product, the first portable IBM-compatible PC, on a paper placemat in a Houston pie shop. When Compaq released the 28-pound computer, one engineer described the suitcase-sized portable as "a luggable that would fit under an airline seat provided no one too heavy was sitting there." Compaq shipped 53,000 portable PCs in 1983. The company acquired DEC in 1998 and merged with HP in May 2002.
Michael Dell
When Michael Dell was 15, he bought an Apple II computer and promptly took it apart. Then he put it back together again and used it to set up a bulletin board. In 1984, when Dell was 19 years old, he founded Dell Computer in his dorm room at the University of Texas. The following year the fledgling company released its first computer system, the Turbo. The company went public in 1988 with a unique concept: selling computer systems directly to customers and eliminating the middleman. Today, Dell is the largest computer company in the world. In 1992, Dell became the youngest CEO to earn a spot on the Fortune 500.
Software Innovators
Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson
Soon after Dennis Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967, he and Ken Thompson began work on UNIX, a general-purpose timesharing OS for the DEC PDP-7. Originally developed by programmers for programmers, UNIX's power and versatility soon made it a standard in business, academia, and industry. Ritchie also wrote the C programming language, and Thompson wrote the B language on which C is based.
Edgar Codd
In 1970, when Edgar Codd worked at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory, he published a mathematical theory that proposed replacing hierarchical and navigational structures with simple tables containing rows and columns. Codd believed that computer users should be able to work at a "natural-language level" and not worry about where or how the data was stored. The relational database was thus born. In 2002, Forbes Magazine listed Codd's relational model of data as one of the most important innovations of the previous 85 years.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates
When Intel released the 8080 processor and MITS announced the Altair, two young men in Cambridge, Massachusetts, realized the significance of those pivotal events. Bill Gates, then a student at Harvard, and Paul Allen, who was working as a programmer at Honeywell, realized that the Altair would need software to make it usable. In 1975, they set to work on a BASIC interpreter that converted the BASIC programming language into a useable language for the Altair. At that time, no companies existed that sold only software. By 1980, Microsoft was the largest supplier of PC software in the industry. The company released its first GUI-based Windows OS in 1983.
Bill Atkinson
As a member of the original Macintosh team at Apple, Bill Atkinson designed much of the Mac UI and wrote the original QuickDraw, MacPaint, and HyperCard software. In 1990, Atkinson and Apple veteran Andy Hertzfeld founded General Magic, a handheld computer software company. Today Atkinson is a successful nature photographer and still uses HyperCard every day. He's written custom applications to manage his photography and Web site.
David N. Cutler
Now a Microsoft Senior Distinguished Engineer, David Cutler holds more than 20 patents and is considered one of the top programmers in the world. After graduating from Olivet College with an "overwhelming desire to be an engineer and build things," Cutler went to work for DuPont, where he developed and ran computer simulations and acquired a lifelong interest in OSs. At DEC, Cutler designed the VAX/VMS, RSX-11M, and VAXELN OSs. When he joined Microsoft in 1988, Cutler helped launch the Windows NT group and was eventually responsible for three iterations of the OS, including Windows 2000. These days, Cutler concentrates on 64-bit versions of Windows and on his nonwork-related pursuit—racing cars.
Linus Torvalds
He keeps such a low profile that you might not realize what an impact Linus Torvalds has had on the IT world. Inspired by the teaching system Minix, Torvalds decided to develop a version of UNIX that he could use on his home computer, which became known as Linux (Linus' Minix). Although Torvalds wrote only about two percent of the current Linux kernel, he remains the ultimate authority on the open-source development project. He's the inspiration for Linus' Law, which states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
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