Vint Cerf's name is Vinton Cerf, not Vincent Cerf.

I'd begin with:

N°1 : Charles Babbage (designed the first computer)
N°2 : Konrad Zuse (built the first working computer)

What about Seymour Cray?

Bill Gates was a "hero of i-Technology" and I didn't know? What technology did he invented?

In your list of IT heroes, I am missing some of the important people involved in the Graphical User Interface, as first instantiated in Macintosh UI (and later was copied by Microsoft):
Douglas Engelbart, who at SRI in the 60's invented, among other things, the idea of a mouse, overlapping windows, hypertext, outlining, video collaboration, and many other things that later inspired a lot of people to improve interaction with computers;
Larry Tesler, who at Xerox Parc (working with Alan Kay on Smalltalk) invented among other things the modeless editor and, I believe, cut/copy/paste, and later moved to Apple and worked on the Lisa and Macintosh;
Bill Atkinson, who wrote the "Quickdraw" graphics layer in Macintosh, proving that advanced bitmapped graphics was possible on a low-end processor; the orignal MacPaint, basically the predecessor to Photoshop, without which the graphical world today would be lost; and Apple HyperCard, which with its successors showed what "user programming" could mean, and accustomed people to the idea of "linking" pieces of information with clickable buttons, which subsequently exploded in the World Wide Web.

- kjell

|| m6 commented on the 6 Feb 2007:
|| Can someone explain to me why Jamie Z is
|| a hero?

The word "hero" should of course be used sparingly, and probably not in adjunction to "tech", but JWZ holds his place among the Big Hackers, IMHO.

Some of his accomplishments, in no particular order:
* XEmacs. He was one of (the?) main people making a user-friendly version of GNU Emacs.
* XKeyCaps. This little application has really helped me getting a sane keyboard layout under X a few times.
* Mosaic. I believe he was the main hacker on the Unix version of the first "real" browser. And one of the first employees at Netscape.

Can someone explain to me why Jamie Z is a hero? I only know him from reading his comments in the Netscape keyboard resource file when I was trying to get the browser to behave under Linux. These left me with a permanent dislike for the dude: instead of explaining the format of the file, he put in lengthy sarcastic (and misinformed) rants about the "mistakes" made by various Unix vendors in designing their keyboards.

Every time I see one of the computer Hall of Fame articles in a magazine
it seems to me there is always one glaring omission. I know there are
many that have contributed but I feel like there are two people that
deserve to be mentioned and always seem to be missed. Ward Christensen
and Randy Suess, in my opinion, started what eventually led to our
current Internet when they launched the first dialup Bulletin Board
system called CBBS. In addition, Ward developed the first widespread
file transfer protocol, XMODEM, which allowed files to be transferred
error free between bulletin boards around the world.

...Ron Blessing

I'm quite flatted that you've numbered me among your top twenty all-time technology heroes.

As for the Renaissance jazz bit, I play the Celtic harp, on which I perform a number of medieval and renaissance pieces. I once had an instructor who taught me some great improvisational skills, and thus the phrase, Renaissance jazz, for I like to do riffs off of really old themes.

I think I would have been an itinerant musician or a priest if I were not doing software :-)

Grady

Yakov Fain has devised his own version over here: http://yakovfain.javadevelopersjournal.com/who_are_the_heroes_of_itechno... in case anyone wants to take a look.

There's a great supplemetary list by Mark Hinkle here: http://www.encoreopus.com/content/view/334/35/.

Among the new names he adds are Jarkko Oikarinen, Bram Cohen, and Jerry Yang & David Filo, the founders of Yahoo!

Congratulaions, you have just insured that I will never willing used AJAX in any of my projects. Your pop-over add that blocks the article is annoying at best.

Vannevar Bush
Norbert Weiner
John Von Neumann
Claude Shannon
John Pierce

You have to include Claude Shannon, and you might want to consider Oliver Selfridge. Shannon was the mathematician who figured information theory, and Selfridge started everything behind neural networks--which have never caught up with modal programming, but whose promise is unbounded.

You should also remember Michael J. Muuss. He developed "ping" and was instrumental in some of the developments of TCP/IP and Unix in the early days. He worked at the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory.

Jeremy,
I am a bit disappointed you forgot Konrad Zuse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuse). His problem is that he doesn't have an Anglosaxon name....
Judge for yourself.

Cheers,

Carsten