“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.
Tesla?
Much of our tech is running off his alternating current system, you know.
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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
Might explain how he got that monkey dung……..
Damn straight! And lest we forget, without Nicola Tesla, we would not have bad metal rock bands like Tesla or Frank Marino & Mohagany Rush.
The defense rests. Actually, we snore and drool. Your witless, counselor…
MDN Keyword (how appropos): hell
I’m surprised no one mentioned Alan Kay. He is a man who both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (as well as many others) looked up to — the man who said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
That’s right! And to paraphrase Gretzky, skate not to where the puck is but to where it will be.
That’s what all these people we’re talking about have in common; they invented the future.
Go Woz.
And he didn’t just build things, he built them with incredible pride and precision to be the best.
Moog: Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. He bought the patents. See Wikipedia.