Who are your top 5 heroes of computing?

[andymorton]

I don't know why but I woke up this morning thinking about this and who people on here would pick. Apologies if it's been asked before but I couldn't find it after searching the forums.

I'm going with (in no particular order) -

1. Charles Babbage
2. Alan Turing
3. Sir Tim Berners-Lee
4. Linus Torvalds
5. Richard Stallman

andy

[Barrucadu]

I don't think I can disagree with your top five; those people are the heroes of computing.

[cascade9]

Hard to pick 5, but I'd have to put Ada Lovelace in there, no matter who else appeared-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

[matthew.ball]

1. Alonzo Church
2. Haskell Curry
3. Alan Turing
4. Dana Scott
5. Richard Stallman

Honourable mentions to:
1. Stephen Kleene
2. Martin Davis
3. John Rosser
4. Marvin Minsky
5. John McCarthy
6. Edsger Dijkstra
7. Donald Knuth
8. John Backus
9. Brian Kernighan
10. Dennis Ritchie
11. Ken Thompson
12. Linus Torvalds
13. Andrew Tanenbaum
14. John von Neumann
15. Seymour Cray

On that note, I've probably spent far too long in computer science.

[Naiki Muliaina]

Not sure who I would choose as I don't know many names in programming, but Stallman and Linus regularly used to annoy me. Stallman often struck me as a 'hippy bully' and Linus struck me as having a mouth so big you could have floated the titanic into it.

[MooPi]

Not sure who I would choose as I don't know many names in programming, but Stallman and Linus regularly used to annoy me. Stallman often struck me as a 'hippy bully' and Linus struck me as having a mouth so big you could have floated the titanic into it.

Brilliant people tend to be blunt in my experience.

[Naiki Muliaina]

Blunt is fine. But I found neither as blunt as I would have liked.

[standingwave]

Leibnitz
Babbage (& Lovelace)
Shannon
Von Neumann
Turing

[bakelitedoorbell]

Woz
Linus
Cray
Jay Miner
Jean-Louis Gassée

[ronnielsen1]

Hmm, no mention yet of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer or Ricemonster