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Top 50 Tech Visionaries
By Christopher Null , PC World , 05/19/2008
Sponsored by:

It's easy to look at a laptop, an iPod, or a laser printer as nothing
more than a tool to get work done with or to while away your free time
on, but these and many other high-tech devices didn't fall off a tree.
They emerged following years of hard work--and in some cases, an entire
career devoted to a single technology--by inspired researchers,
designers, and developers.

Our list of technology visionaries includes the guy who invented a way
to store data in a portable form--and who almost got demoted as a
result. It recognizes the woman who popularized the term "bug" after a
moth flew into a computer relay. And it acknowledges a genius who might
have saved modern gaming by inventing Jump Man.

So it's time to pay homage where homage is due. Here's our take on the
50 most important people in the recent history of technology--the most
critical players (including a few forgotten heroes) who've been
instrumental in crafting the last 50 years of technical innovation.

Our opinion doesn't have to be the last word on the subject, however.
If you have additional nominees who deserve recognition, or if you want
to chime in to agree with or reminisce about or rail against our
choices, please add a comment to let us know.

1. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce

Unlike most of the other multiperson entries on our list, Robert Noyce
and Jack Kilby didn't work together. But their common invention is still
utterly crucial. In 1959, both men came up with the first integrated
circuits--Kilby while he was at Texas Instruments, and Noyce at
Fairchild Semiconductor. The IC solved the problem of size that got
worse and worse as the need to jam additional transistors into a device
grew more and more critical. Packing them all into a single chip
effectively ended the era of the room-size computer. Ultimately, Noyce's
design based on silicon, rather than Kilby's based on germanium, became
the standard--one that we still use today--but both designs were
instrumental in pushing the technology forward. Kilby and Noyce are
often overlooked, but the importance of their contribution to technology
cannot be overstated. Nothing else on this list could exist without the
underpinning of the integrated circuit.

2. Sergey Brin and Larry Page

What is the defining contribution to technology made by Larry Page and
Sergey Brin, the fathers of Google? The company is the single most
important business in Silicon Valley today, but of course search engines
had existed long before Google came along. What impressed so many early
fans was Google's relentless pursuit of refinement and accuracy in its
search algorithm: Whereas other search engines' results tended to be
laden with spam, Google's were generally on target. The company had lots
of other tricks up its sleeve as well: The rapidly expanding Google
universe now offers dozens of productivity and entertainment tools--from
word processing to video--most of them free, underwritten by the
company's ubiquitous ad-serving system.

3. Bill Gates

The world's richest man (well, depending on that day's stock price) is
also one of its most noteworthy technologists--a guy who dropped out of
Harvard to launch Microsoft, a company that all techies are intimately
familiar with, like it or not. No hands-off executive, Bill Gates has
been involved with Microsoft product development at an incredibly
detailed level over the company's entire 30-year history. Though he'll
continue to serve as the company's chairman, Gates will effectively
leave Microsoft this July to focus full-time on his nonprofit endeavor,
the Gates Foundation, which he has endowed with an eye-popping $29
billion to support global health and learning. Critics love to
caricature Gates as a ruthless corporate tyrant who rules
the tech
industry with an iron fist, but evidently he has a conscience and a
social vision too.

4. Steve Jobs

The once and future King of Apple, Steve Jobs is familiar to even the
most casual technophile. Jobs lays claim to two critical moments in tech
history. First, with the original Apples, he pioneered the idea that
computers belong in the home; and then, 20 years later, he convinced the
world that people ought to carry their (digital) music with them
everywhere they go. Apple may not have invented the PC, and it certainly
didn't invent the MP3 player, but Jobs's famous "reality distortion
field" has proved that who got there first is sometimes less important
than what they brought with them. Today, after more than one brush with
corporate death, Apple is bigger than ever, boasting market share that
the company hadn't seen since the 1980s.

5. Tim Berners-Lee

No bones about it: You wouldn't be reading this if not for Tim
Berners-Lee and his 1989 invention, the World Wide Web. Everything from
URL structure to hyperlinks were part of Berners-Lee's original
specifications; and though they've been extensively revised (in large
part under his guidance as director of the World Wide Web Consortium),
they remain in use today. Berners-Lee continues to be a key figure in
the development of Web standards, and these days he spends his time
developing what many think is the next step for the Internet: The
Semantic Web.

6. Ray Tomlinson

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the message that would ultimately be heard
'round the world: An e-mail from one ARPANet host to another. When you
open your e-mail program and see that your inbox has 112 unread
messages, you may not feel like thanking Tomlinson, but imagine where
digital communications would be without e-mail. Tomlinson also came up
with the idea of using the @ symbol to separate the username from the
host name in an e-mail address.

7. Douglas Engelbart

Quick, click on this link. You now understand the importance of Doug
Engelbart's creation, the computer mouse. Engelbart patented the idea of
his "X-Y position indicator for a display system" in 1967, and also
nicknamed the device the mouse (owing to its tail). Though it's hard to
imagine working without one now, the mouse didn't catch on for more than
a decade, until Apple computers started using them. Engelbart didn't
stop at one invention, either: He and his research lab also developed an
early online storage system--and even demonstrated videoconferencing
back in 1968.

8. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard

No company has touched so many facets of technology as the brainchild
of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, two titans of Silicon Valley who built
a monster computing company out of nothing but spit and gumption.
Originally responsible for building audio oscillators for Walt Disney in
the 1940s, HP went on to create all manner of test equipment for
electronics before jumping into computer servers, desktops, calculators,
cameras, and of course printers. After a few rocky years, HP is back on
top as the largest technology company in the world. And what other
people have had their garage turned into a national historic landmark?

9. Shigeru Miyamoto

The video game industry collapsed in the early 1980s, and for a while
it looked as though the phenomenon would go down in history as just a
quirky fad, like the pet rock. But Shigeru Miyamoto almost
singlehandedly kept the industry alive with his creation of an animated
character named Jump Man, who soon became known as Mario. Miyamoto's
influence in the gaming business--he's now a senior director of
Nintendo--has been crucial ever since. His latest creation: Wii Fit,
arrives on U.S. shores this month.

10. Shawn Fanning

With Napster, Shawn Fanning introduced the technology that, some
doomsayers warn, could spell the end of the Internet. Today traffic from
peer-to-peer programs consumes an estimated 70 percent of all broadband
bandwidth, and AT&T says that peer-to-peer is a major reason why it will
have to r
adically upgrade its infrastructure if it is to avert the
collapse of the Internet as we know it by 2010. All of this because a
guy was looking for an easier way to share a few tunes with strangers?
Sheesh.

11. Gordon Moore

You can't go wrong with a guy who's got his own scientific law, can
you? Moore's Law, posited in 1965, three years before Gordon Moore
founded a little company called Intel, predicted that the number of
components on a computer chip would double every year (later, he amended
it to every two years). As Intel notes, Moore's Law remains the "guiding
principle for the semiconductor industry"; but, in truth, every field of
high-tech--from hard drives to TVs--validates to some degree the
almighty Law of Moore. Moore remains involved with Intel, which--at 40
years old--may be number one on the list of companies that Silicon
Valley could not exist without.

12. Bill Atkinson

Mouse up to your PC's File menu, open a new window, and thank Bill
Atkinson for being able to do that. His early ideas regarding user
interface design elements like the menu bar became graphical user
interface standbys not just on Apple computers (where he worked), but on
every major operating system that has followed. As a programmer,
Atkinson designed MacPaint, QuickDraw, and HyperCard, a sort of
proto-Web system that clearly inspired the creation of the World Wide
Web. After starting his own company, General Magic, Atkinson mostly
retired from tech to work as a nature photographer.

13. Steve Case

Don't laugh. The brainchild of Steve Case, America Online was a big
deal back in the early 1990s. The timing was perfect for a service that
offered online training wheels for millions of intrigued but trepid
people looking for an introduction to the World Wide Web. AOL pioneered
more than just the chat rooms for which it became infamous. Case
launched Neverwinter Nights--one of the first MMOs (massively
multiplayer online games)--was an early champion of user avatars, and
(most notoriously) started the blending of online and big media by
selling out to Time Warner in 2001. Not such great timing there, alas.

14. Martin Cooper

Quick, check your pockets. Whether you're toting an iPhone, a Razr, or
an enV, you owe a debt to Martin Cooper and his 1973 patent responsible
for the mobile phone as we know it. His invention, created during his
tenure at Motorola, weighed just shy of 2 pounds, and ten years would
pass before mobile phones broke the 1-pound barrier. Cooper is still
active in the telephone business. His company ArrayComm develops antenna
technology so today's 2-ounce phones can reach their network.

15. Nolan Bushnell

Atari is synonymous with video gaming--so much so that the name remains
in use (though now far removed from founder Nolan Bushnell, the
undisputed father of video gaming) 36 years after it originated.
Bushnell's inspiration--a world where everyone could play games in the
comfort of their own home--is a rare instance where the vision panned
out almost exactly as envisioned. Though no one is thrilling over
Atari's consoles any more, Atari and Bushnell paved the way for every
video game platform that has followed.

16. Vint Cerf

Turing Award. National Medal of Technology. Presidential Medal of
Freedom. Vint Cerf has one of the most impressive résumés in technology.
Cerf's work as an Internet pioneer has largely taken place in
universities and government agencies, which in the early 1970s led
directly to the creation of ARPANet, the predecessor to today's
Internet. Cerf now works for--who else?--Google.

17. Don Estridge

IBM veteran Don Estridge is widely known as "the father of the PC," at
least in its Big Blue incarnation. Estridge developed a number of
computer systems, even tinkering with NASA radar equipment. But he is
best known for his work as a manager--leading a "skunk works" staff of
just 14 people that ultimately produced the IBM PC, an "open" platform
that could run third-party software and accept third-party upgrades,
that wou
ld become the standard for business. Tragically, Estridge died
in a plane crash in 1985 and never saw his creation achieve ubiquity.

18. Michael Dell

The origin story of Dell Computer Corporation is so well-known it has
become part of the canon of the tech business. Michael Dell started his
company, PC's Limited, at age 19 out of his dorm room at the University
of Texas. Eventually he dropped out of school to found Dell Computer,
which grew at breakneck pace throughout the 1990s. Dell's marketing
philosophy turned the industry on its ear: Rather than offer
predetermined configurations, Dell's machines were totally customizable
and built to order. Eventually almost every competing PC manufacturer
followed suit--or went out of business.

19. Alan Kay

A jack-of-all-tech-trades, Alan Kay lays claim to at least two
watershed innovations, starting with HP's original Dynabook, one of the
first usable mobile laptop computers. Kay ideal was to design a laptop
that weighed no more than 2 pounds. We still aren't there yet, but Kay's
contributions to software--which include shepherding the idea of
object-oriented programming and the notion of multiple, overlapping
windows in a GUI--rank as essential milestones in computing.

20. Marc Andreessen

The Mosaic Web browser devised by Marc Andreessen may seem quaint now,
but bits and pieces of Mosaic code remain standard software components
of most of today's commercial browsers. It's a safe bet that many of
Andreessen's other creations will leave similar legacies: Netscape, the
company he founded, set off the tech stock craze of the 1990s, and his
Ning Web site continues to grow in popularity as an outlet where anyone
can build a topic-oriented social network. He even finds time to blog
regularly about all this stuff.

21. Linus Torvalds

Given the exorbitant cost of most Apple computers, Linus Torvalds is
the godfather of what may be the last, best hope for an affordable
alternative to Windows. The Linux operating system has been in
continuous development since Torvalds conceived it in 1991, and has
experienced steady gains in popular acceptance every year. And a long
last, Linux is making the jump from server rooms to large numbers of
desktop PCs, most visibly in low-cost laptops like the Asus Eee PC. The
OS now has a market share in excess of 2 percent on the desktop.

22. Chuck Thacker

Chuck Thacker has had his hands in a surprisingly wide array of tech
projects, from the development of ethernet to the first laser printers.
His most enduring legacy, however, involves a product that never reached
market: The fabled Xerox Alto. The Alto, which Thacker designed, was the
first computer with a GUI (and a mouse); as the story goes, it directly
inspired Apple to build the Macintosh after Steve Jobs paid a friendly
visit to Xerox. Thacker now works for Microsoft.

23. Bob Metcalfe

Moore's Law may be better known, but the law formulated by Bob Metcalfe
has wider general application. Posited around 1980, Metcalfe's Law
conjectured that the value of a telecommunications network is equal to
the square of the number of nodes on the network. In other words, even a
small increase in the size of a network makes it worth far more because
of the enlarged number of new connections that each user can make.
Metcalfe's invention of ethernet and his founding of 3Com are essential
tech milestones as well, but his eponymous law--now in use to quantify
value in the Facebook/MySpace milieu--will be around long after wired
networking has passed on.

24. Vic Hayes

Wi-Fi has long been one of technology's messiest standards--and without
Vic Hayes, it might never have come together at all. In the Hayes-less
universe we might be left to wallow in a morass similar to the a Blu-ray
vs. HD-DVD swamp with multiple incompatible wireless standards. In 1990,
Hayes formed the Wireless LAN working group and rallied some 130
companies to work together to develop open standards. The result:
802.11, and the cutting of a very firmly attached cord
Hayes continues
to be actively involved in Wi-Fi development today.

25. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston

Accounting departments around the world would be lost without the work
of Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who worked together in 1979 to
develop VisiCalc, the world's first spreadsheet and arguably the first
"killer app" written for a personal computer. The 27KB program can run
on PCs today, and its simplicity is a big reason why early PCs sold in
droves, especially to business customers. But never mind the
bean-counters: You probably owe a lot to VisiCalc yourself. After all,
if it weren't for Bricklin and Frankston, you might not be getting your
paycheck regularly.

26. Grace Murray Hopper

That's Admiral Hopper, bud. Naval officer "Amazing" Grace Hopper was a
computing pioneer who cut her teeth in the calculator era. Later she
worked on the team that developed the UNIVAC, the world's first
commercial computer, and wrote the compiler software for it (the first
such software ever developed). Hopper was instrumental again in the
development of the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages, and she
remained a major figure on the technology scene until her death in 1992.
Even our language owes a debt to Hopper: She popularized (and possibly
coined) the term "bug" after a moth was found in a computer relay during
her years at Harvard.

27. Jeff Hawkins

Portable computing was shaped in large part by Jeff Hawkins, who
invented the acclaimed PalmPilot, and then followed that up by
spearheading development of the Treo six years later. Both Palm and Treo
became household names, though Palm as a company has suffered numerous
setbacks in recent years. Hawkins is now working on a startup called
Numenta with his longtime partner Donna Dubinsky, focusing on the
subjects of machine learning and neuroscience, which Hawkins has long
had a deep interest in.

28. Fujio Masuoka

If anything is positioned to challenge the dominance of Al Shugart's
hard drive (see #33 below), it's Flash memory--an invention of Fujio
Masuoka. Masuoka developed solid-state storage during his tenure at
Toshiba (Masuoka says that the company initially tried to demote him
after he came up with the technology). The technology is now seen as a
possible way around the fragility of hard drives, as capacity ramps up
and prices fall. For smaller gadgets, Flash has become essential...or
would you prefer to be saving your digital pictures on floppy disks
still?

29. Jonathan Ive

Aside from its showman/CEO Steve Jobs, Apple tends to keep its
employees out of the limelight, but Apple VP and design guru Jonathan
Ive has broken that mold. That's appropriate, since he broke another
mold too, killing off the beige boxes and bricklike pocket gizmos that
had become standard-issue in the tech industry. Ive's designs for the
original iMac and for the iPod got people thinking about tech products
as fashion accessories and decorative items instead of as impersonal and
purely utilitarian objects.

30. Jeff Bezos

Long scorned by Wall Street, Amazon.com--the creation of Jeff Bezos--is
today the one Internet service that many people can't live without. But
Bezos hasn't stopped at hawking Harry Potter on the Web. His company has
also become one of the leading providers of Web services, online
storage, and by-the-hour CPU rentals, as Bezos pushes Amazon toward
becoming a platform that anyone can use to sell anything that Amazon
itself doesn't.

31. Meg Whitman

A longtime Hasbro marketing executive, Meg Whitman went from the
child's toy box to the grown-up's as CEO of eBay. Whitman joined the
online auction site in its infancy and over the course of a ten-year run
shepherded it into one of the most successful businesses on the Web.
(She retired in March of this year.) Aside from squabbles over policy
changes and the baffling purchase of Skype, eBay's run has encountered
few speed bumps. That success, some say, might lead her to run for
governor of California in 2010, but Whitman denies harboring any suc
h
ambitions.

32. Bill Joy

A legend in tech circles, Bill Joy was chief scientist for Sun
Microsystems for over 20 years, where he oversaw numerous critical
technology advances, the most important of which was the development of
Java--the first major programming language designed for use on the Web.
Still, Joy's greatest achievement is probably an academic project he
worked on at Berkeley: The development of Berkeley Software Distribution
(BSD), a major flavor of Unix; even Mac OS X uses BSD as its basis.
Today Joy spends his days worrying about the evils of technology, such
as bad robots and Grey Goo (a scenario where renegade nanomachines run
amok and destroy the world).

33. Al Shugart

You're probably using a product conceived by Al Shugart right now
without even knowing it. Shugart's company, Shugart Technology, switched
to the more exotic-sounding name Seagate Technology soon after opening
for business. At Seagate, Shugart developed technology that he had
tinkered with during a stint at IBM (where he led the team that invented
the floppy disk) into the hard drive for the mass market. The colorful
Shugart ran Seagate for nearly 20 years before redefining himself as a
sort of venture capitalist/promoter, a role that made him a staple at
big tech shows like Comdex. Shugart died in 2006.

34. Karlheinz Brandenburg and James D. Johnston

Who says grad school is all impractical theory? At Friedrich-Alexander
University, Karlheinz Brandenburg used his dissertation to work out a
way of compressing digital audio files to radically smaller size without
greatly diminishing their quality. We know the result now as MP3 coding.
At AT&T Labs, American engineer James D. Johnston improved on
Brandenburg's work by introducing "perceptual coding," which strips out
inaudible parts of an audio signal to compress the file further.
Johnston's contribution, too, has become a standard feature of most
audio compression schemes.

35. Ann Winblad

Half of the well-known Hummer Winblad Venture Partners investment
group, Ann Winblad was a key figure in the Web 1.0 boom, investing in
such proto-companies as Napster, Gazoontite, Liquid Audio, and Pets.com.
Despite some ill-fated investments, Hummer Winblad picked enough winners
to remain a lead investor in dozens of tech companies, primarily
back-end enterprises. And lest you think that Winblad is merely a
stuffed shirt, consider this: She began her career as a computer
programmer in the 1970s and achieved indisputable nerd cred by having
dated Bill Gates.

36. Charles Simonyi

Charles Simonyi (plus a little Gatesian muscle, natch) is the reason
you use Word and Excel instead of WordPerfect and Quattro Pro. As head
of Microsoft's application development group, Simonyi oversaw
development of both Word and Excel back in the MS-DOS days and
superintended the app suite for more than 20 years. The programs are now
as close to ubiquitous as Windows itself (perhaps even closer, since
Office is the standard app suite for the Mac as well). Fun facts to know
and tell: Simonyi was the second Hungarian in space in space and is
Martha Stewart's boyfriend.

37. Thomas Penfield Jackson

Few people would have imagined that it a 62-year-old man unaffiliated
with the company would have the most profound effect on Microsoft in
years. But in 1999 U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
shook the tech world to its foundations when he handed down a landmark
ruling declaring Microsoft to be an abusive monopoly and ordering it
split into two companies. Though appellate courts eventually overturned
many of Jackson's rulings, Microsoft has been on the defensive against
antitrust actions here and abroad ever since, and all tech companies
looking to merge have had to tread more cautiously in Jackson's wake.

38. Jerry Yang and David Filo

This unassuming twosome got their start in 1994 while still at
Stanford, with a truly humble idea: Populate a directory with cool
places that they had found on the then-infant World Wide Web. Yahoo w
as
born on a lark but Jerry Yang and David Filo helped it become one of the
Web's top destinations: Today it is the home page for millions of people
seeking the easiest entry point into the Internet. After an unfruitful
turn with Hollywood insider Terry Semel at the helm, Yang retook the
reins as CEO in June 2007. Yahoo is now coping with separate forays for
control of the company by Microsoft and by Carl Icahn. (Full disclosure:
The author writes a blog for Yahoo Tech.)

39. Peter Norton

A Buddhist monk before becoming involved in the tech world, Peter
Norton has been a major figure in the computer industry for three
decades, having made his mark early in the DOS era with Norton
Utilities, the first major data recovery tool for the PC. Norton went on
to produce a gaggle of related utilities for the PC and write a series
of essential technical manuals before selling his company to Symantec in
1990. Symantec still uses his name on its utility apps.

40. Phil Zimmermann

Phil Zimmermann fought the law so you don't have to. His Pretty Good
Privacy (PGP) application, the first mainstream encryption software,
published in 1991, made Zimmermann a pariah in the eyes of the U.S.
government. The feds spent three years investigating the possibility
that Zimmermann had violated rules forbidding the export of
cryptographic tools. The case was ultimately dropped, however, paving
the way for everyday people to protect the material on their hard drives
and in their e-mail with the same encryption standards that the
government itself uses.

41. Jon Postel

How do you move from one IP address to another? Easily, thanks to Jon
Postel, the so-called Father of DNS--the system that translates
70.42.185.10 into http://www.pcworld.com/. Postel also did substantial
work on the TCP/IP and SMTP protocols, authoring some 200 Internet spec
documents overall. But Postel didn't just envision the DNS system; he
ran it himself for years as founding head of the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (a position that led him into a memorable conflict
with President Bill Clinton's science advisor when he tried to move
control of DNS from Network Solutions to IANA). Postel died in 1998.

42. Alan Emtage with Bill Heelan and Mike Parker

Before Google--before the Web even--people had to find a way to locate
files and programs hiding out on FTP servers around the world. The
answer: Archie (a derivative of "archive"), a 1990 application devised
by McGill University student Alan Emtage, who was assisted by Bill
Heelan and Mike Parker. In its original incarnation, Archie contacted
far-off FTP servers regularly and kept a local list of the files they
contained, for easy indexing. That may sound like simple stuff by
today's standards, but it inspired everything about the way we currently
work with search, from the Web to the desktop.

43. Trip Hawkins

Electronic Arts is one of the few pure software companies that
continues to be important 25 years after its founding--and it wouldn't
have existed at all if not for gaming pioneer Trip Hawkins, a Harvard
and Stanford grad and Apple alumnus who in 1982 saw the future in
consoles and computer-based games. Hawkins's foray into hardware--he
left EA to launch the 3DO in 1991--met with considerably less success,
but his first baby continues to thrive. Just ask John Madden.

44. Arianna Huffington

Political insider Arianna Huffington has had a major influence on
technology, but one that has been felt only recently. She spent her
early career inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway as a columnist,
author, pundit, and TV show writer, far from the geek wiring of Silicon
Valley. But in 2005 she launched a little online project called The
Huffington Post, which rapidly grew into one of the Web's most powerful
political voices. More than anything, the HuffPo has proven the power of
the blog by attracting celebrity writers ranging from John Kerry to
Jamie Lee Curtis, all eager to have their message heard through
Huffington's medium.

45. Susan Kare

Anot
her Macintosh 1.0 innovator, Susan Kare worked behind the scenes,
but came up with essential innovations. Her earliest achievement was
designing the typefaces--and some of the, er, iconic icons--that shipped
with the Macintosh. The "Happy Mac" remains one of computing's most
visible expressions of things working well. Today Kare works as an
independent designer: She designed the cards for Windows' ubiquitous
Solitaire game and now designs Facebook's "Gifts" feature.

46. Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Sure, give Arthur C. Clarke credit for inspiring the minds of thousands
of technology pioneers. But Clarke didn't just write seminal works of
science fiction (including 2001: A Space Odyssey ); he also conceived of
geostationary communications satellites (satellites that orbit the earth
at a speed proportional to the earth's rotation, so that the satellite
always remains positioned above the same geographical point). Satellites
with such orbits, sometimes termed the "Clarke satellite orbit," are
essential to the telecommunications infrastructure, to GPS, and to
numerous other technologies. Clarke died in March 2008 at age 90.

47. Herbie Hancock

When Herbie Hancock released his single, "Rockit" (from the album
"Future Shock") in 1983, few listeners knew what to make of it. But
everyone was struck by its unique sound--it was perhaps the first
mainstream offering to use scratching. Though Hancock was by no means
the first person to make heavy use of synthesizers, drum machines, and
other computer-based musical equipment, few musicians relied so heavily
on such gear and reached such a wide audience. "Rockit," with its
innovative music video, is now considered a turning point in the
electronic music-making scene, where Hancock is revered as an elder
statesman.

48. William Gibson

The king of cyberpunk, William Gibson, has dreamed up all manner of
high-minded techno wizardry, some of which has actually started to come
true. His early stories introduced the term "cyberspace" and the
visualization concepts behind it, which in turn prompted people to start
thinking about networks in a way that transcended text and a command
line. We may not be plugging chips directly into our brains yet, but
Gibson's fiction-based prophecies have a strange way of panning out.

49. Gary Kildall

Called "The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates" by BusinessWeek, Gary
Kildall was the guy Gates beat out in the bidding to supply IBM with the
operating system for the original PC. According to legend, Kildall blew
off the meeting with IBM to "go flying," though Kildall denied that
rumor, posthumously, in his unpublished memoirs. Controversy aside,
Kildall made significant contributions to the tech business--especially
as the head of Digital Research, which created the seminal pre-DOS
operating system CP/M, and (later) as a host of the classic Public TV
program, Computer Chronicles . Kildall died in 1994.

50. Udi Manber

If there is a search engine anywhere that doesn't have the thumbprint
of Udi Manber on it, we don't know about it. From Yahoo to Amazon's A9
to Google, Manber has been one of the search business's greatest
contributors. But Manber's work goes back even farther than that, to
AltaVista. He was a key member of the design team on what many feel was
the best engine running until Google came along.

Christopher Null writes regularly for PC World and blogs about
technology daily at tech.yahoo.com.

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