The Most Famous Programmers of All Time

Legendary programmers who contributed hugely to and had a lasting influence on the software development profession, as well as an extraordinary personal background:

• Ada Lovelace, for the first algorithm on a Turing machine (Bernoulli numbers), which included conditional branches, loops and subroutines, and for recognizing such a machine is capable of more than solving numerical problems.
• Donald Knuth, for a work of beauty on TAOCP and TeX.
• Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, for Unix and C, laying the groundwork for today's server operating systems.
• Bill Gates, for his contribution to the microcomputer software revolution, combining technical brilliance (Altair Basic) with business instinct (dealing with IBM) at a very young age.
• John Carmack, for revolutionizing game programming several times.
• Linus Torvalds, for bestowing Linux and git upon the world.

Read about their story in my slide deck below:

Programming Legends from Arno Huetter