Andrew Fluegelman
1943 
[USA]
† 1985
He was an editor, programmer, and lawyer, known as a pioneer of what is now known as the shareware business model for software marketing.
He was also the founding editor of PC World and Macworld and a leader of the New Games movement of the 1970s, which advocated for non-competitive game development.
In 1981, Fluegelman was the owner and sole employee of The Headlands Press, a small book publishing house in Tiburon, California. He had attended one of the first computer expos in San Francisco in the late 1970s and, after agreeing to publish and co-author Writing in the Computer Age, decided to buy his first computer. In October, Fluegelman received one of the first IBM PCs sold in San Francisco and within two weeks began writing his own accounting program in IBM BASIC.
In late 1982, Fluegelman developed PC-Talk, a very popular and successful communications program. He marketed it under a system he called "Freeware," which he characterized as "an experiment in economics rather than altruism." His software was licensed under terms that encouraged users to make voluntary payments for the software and allowed users to freely copy and redistribute the software as long as the terms and text of the license were not changed. He collaborated with PC-File (database software) developer Jim Knopf to adopt similar names (PC-File was originally "Easy-File") and pricing for their initial shareware offerings; they also agreed to mention each other's products in their program documentation.
Fluegelman edited PC World magazine from its launch in 1982 to 1985, and Macworld magazine from its launch in 1984 to 1985.
In 1985, Fluegelman, already suffering from colitis, was diagnosed with cancer. On the afternoon of July 6, 1985, he left his office in Tiburon, California. A week later, his abandoned car was found at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge near San Francisco.
His family held his funeral, and he is presumed dead, although his body has never been found. Kevin Strehlo, then a columnist for InfoWorld, submitted a memorial article mentioning that "friends say a suicide note was found inside his car." InfoWorld declined to publish this article, but an online news service did republish it.
Contemporary computing celebrities to Andrew Fluegelman
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Stephen P. Morse
1940
New York [USA]
He was the chief architect of the Intel 8086 microprocessor, the first processor of the x86 architecture, which went on sale in 1978, and which served as the basis for its version with a reduced 8-bit bus for the IBM-PC and compatible computers.
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Clive Sinclair
1940
Richmond (London) [United Kingdom]
† 2021
The inventor who set out to bring microcomputer technology to everyone, father of the hugely popular ZX Spectrum, the first computer on the market that families could afford.
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Dennis Ritchie
1941
Bronxville (New York) [USA]
† 2011
He was an American scientist who collaborated in the design and development of the Multics and Unix operating systems, and in the development of several programming languages such as C.
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Ed Roberts
1941
Miami [USA]
† 2010
He developed the first commercially successful personal computer, the Altair 8800, which was featured on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics magazine and could be purchased as a kit from MITS (which he co-founded with Forrest Mims) for $397.
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Larry Boucher
1942
[USA]
Larry Bouncher was the creator of the SCSI interface, originally developed at Shugart Associates, for transferring data between different devices on a computer bus.
It was standardized in 1986 and is commonly used on the Commodore Amiga and some Apple models. -
Brian Wilson Kernighan
1942
Toronto [Canada]
He is world-renowned for being one of the pioneering programmers who developed the Unix operating system kernel alongside Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. He is also known as the father of the B programming language, the basis for the C programming language.
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Gary Kildall
1942
Seattle [USA]
He was the creator of the CP/M operating system and founder of Digital Research, Inc., which refused to license the rights to its operating system to IBM, instead opting for Microsoft's DOS operating system, which would end up pushing it out of the market.
Paradoxically, years later, his company, Digital Research, released a version of DOS called DR-DOS, at the end of the operating system's lifespan, which enjoyed some success. -
Ken Thompson
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Nolan Bushnell
1943
Clearfield [USA]
The electronic engineer who founded Atari with Ted Dabney at the age of 29.
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Jef Raskin
1943
New York [USA]
† 2005
User interface designer. He is best known for founding the Macintosh project for Apple Computer in the late 1970s and for the Canon Cat computers for the Japanese company Canon, which were designed for the word processing market.
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John Draper
1943
[USA]
Known as Captain Crunch, he is an American programmer and phreaker, known within hacker culture for his research into telephone operation in the early 1970s, which allowed him to make long-distance calls for free.
He is well-known in the programming and cybersecurity worlds and often leads a nomadic lifestyle. -
Paul Lutus
1945
Cambridge [USA]
He is the author of the word processor "Apple Writer".
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Alan Sugar
1947
Hackney (London) [United Kingdom]
Sugar founded Amstrad (Alan Michael Sugar Trading) in 1968. It began as an importer/exporter and general wholesaler, but soon specialized in consumer electronics, eventually manufacturing its own products.
In 1984, recognizing the opportunity of the personal computing era, Amstrad launched the Amstrad CPC 464, an 8-bit machine that competed with machines like the Commodore 64 and the popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum. -
Terry Colligan
1947
[USA]
† 2018
Terrance Colligan was the founder of Rational Systems (later renamed Tenberry Software), which, among other things, developed the DOS extender DOS/16M (for 16-bit systems) and DOS/4G (for 32-bit systems). This extension would be remembered for its DOS/4GW version included with Watcom compilers, which would eventually become an industry standard.
There was also a DOS/4GX for Quarterdeck's DESQview/X.
This allowed programs that took advantage of the new processors' real mode to run, even though DOS ran in protected mode for backward compatibility.
