“Behind every great technology there’s almost always a great geek, the men and women whose vision and invention helped create the world and its technology as we know it,” Iain Thomson and Shaun Nichols report for iTNews Australia. “Often unsung and underappreciated, their own personalities or lifestyles usually keep them from gaining greater public recognition.”
“You won’t find any smooth-talking chief executives or business masterminds who built computing empires on this list (that comes next week). These people are the geek’s geeks,” Thomson and Nichols report. “They are the truly magnificent eggheads that worked their magic on the most basic levels, from invention and development to silicon and command lines.”
“With so many great minds to choose from, it was all but impossible to narrow this list down to ten but after considerable argument we’re managed it, nearly,” Thomson and Nichols report. “So at the end you’ll find a couple of honourable mentions – it was either that or a fight would have broken out.”
iTNews Australia’s Top 10 Greatest Geeks of All Time:
1: Linus Torvalds
2: Steve Wozniak: It can be argued that nobody did more to bring about the advent of home computing than Apple. While Steve Jobs was the marketing mastermind who brought the whole thing about, Woz was the engineering muscle who developed the company’s first products…
3. Sir Tim Berners-Lee
4: Seymour Cray
5: Marc Andreessen
6: Rear Admiral Grace Hopper
7: Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce
8: Alan Turing
9: Richard Stallman
10: Paul Allen
Full article here.
These lists are stupid. Nothing more than a slow news day.
Yes the list is stupid, but notice that Billy Gates isn’t on it!
Jobs is also a geek. He may not stay up nights coding, but he’s sincerely passionate about technology — there’s nothing geekier.
The guys at #7 must have gotten married before the election in California.
Aaaah… what about me? And I’m very glad that Gill Bates isn’t on there.
The only woman in the group is also the only one to have a US Navy destroyer named after her:
http://www.hopper.navy.mil/site pages/Our Namesake.aspx
what about einstein, newton, da vinci, etc.?
@ ABQ Peter
Albert Einstein didn’t have acces to a supercomputer in his time (he died in 1955). Can you imagine what he could have done if he had? I can’t.
“…While Steve Jobs was the marketing mastermind who brought the whole thing about,”
Precisely for that reason, he is the #1 geek, because if it wasn’t for him, the world wouldn’t know the personal computer, or the iPod, or the iPhone, or the OSX, or Pixar, or…..
And no Jay Minor.
No offense to Apple, but I think the Amiga did much more for modern computing than Apple did.
When Apple was using monochrome monitors, Amiga was doing full color graphics, animation and steroe sound.
@Quad Core
Exactly what I was thinking. The Amiga made the Mac and IBM PC look like toys in its day. Had Commodore not been the most inept company in history as it relates to marketing, computers would look very differently today – and I doubt that Apple would have been relegated to a footnote as the Amiga is.
Unfortunately, the revisionists have heavily favored Silicon Valley when they tell the story of personal computing’s infancy. But although the Amiga is largely forgotten, it was instrumental in driving things like true pre-emptive multitasking, multimedia and parallel processing for the masses.
If Alan Turing is on the list, how can we omit John von Neumann? Certainly, not JUST a computer geek, but he made such fundamental advances….
@ Al
Kilby & Noyce are credited with inventing the integrated circuit.
The election was last week. Time to drop the political blather and get on with life..
@Quad Core;
The Amiga was released in 1985
By your logic, Atari did more than Amiga for personal computing, as Atari had everything you listed in 1979.
Amiga trailed Atari by 6 years!
I didn’t notice The Professor on this ‘list’.
Anyone who can run a radio on coconut juice and monkey dung while at the same time ignoring the needs of a movie starlet and a girl next door should, in my humble opinion, be at the very top of any so called “geek list”….
my amiga was just a wonderful computer. i could use the terminal mode when i wanted or a graphical interface when that was best. it just took apple a few decades to get that sorted out.
Tim Berners-Lee?? Gee, I wish I had ripped off HyperCard…
For those of you using a mouse today, I’d pull for Doug Engelbart replacing Paul Allen in the list. Allen’s greatest accomplishment is
to own a bball team that he cannot control.
I have an astronomy book published in 1906 that mentions a small control called a “mouse” that controls a huge telescope.
Engelbart is a fraud.
Konrad Zuse surely deserves a spot…as does John Von Neumann
The list is missing Vinton Cerf.
??? How does Thomas Edison not make the list? ???
I’d think things like the electric light and the phonograph would earn him a spot!
Eureka! The #1 should be Archimedes!
Why isn’t Sarah Palin on this list? Afterall, she can see her husband’s computer from the kitchen.
@ABQ Peter
You’re high and unimpressive. terminal mode or graphical interface?
Who are you kidding. Amiga? Pffttttt!