Contemporary computing celebrities to Bill Atkinson

• 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.
  

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• Bob Frankston
  
  1949 New York [USA]
  

  Creator of the famous VisiCalc spreadsheet along with Dan Bricklin that boosted sales of the Apple II computer.

• Steve Wozniak
  
  1950 San Jose [USA]
  

  In 1976, he co-founded Apple Inc. with Steve Jobs.

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• Bjarne Stroustrup
  
  1950 Aarhus [Denmark]
  

  Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University, known for developing the C++ programming language.

• Steven Levy
  
  1951 Philadelphia [USA]
  

  He is an American journalist who writes about computing, technology, cryptography, the Internet, computer security, and privacy.
  
  He has published articles on the subject in Newsweek magazine, to which he contributes regularly.
  
  He is the author of Hackers (1984) and Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (1994), among other books.

• Dan Bricklin
  
  1951 Philadelphia [USA]
  

  Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston are the authors of the famous Visicalc software. The first version of Visicalc was developed for the Apple II; many believe the success of the latter was due to this combination.

• Philippe Kahn
  
  1952 Paris [France]
  

  Kahn is one of the four founders of Borland, created in 1983 when young Danish programmer Anders Hejlsberg reached an agreement with Philip Khan to sell the Pascal compiler that Anders had created for personal computers. Turbo Pascal was a compiler with an “environment” concept that was revolutionary at the time.
  The company would be acquired by Micro Focus in 2009.
  Then came:
  Starfish Software, founded in 1994 (acquired by Motorola in 1998), LightSurf Technologies, founded in 1998 (acquired by VeriSign in 2005),
  and Fullpower Technologies, founded in 2003.

• Dave DiOrio
  
  1953 [USA] † 2018
  

  Designer of the integrated circuits that came with the Commodores.

• Steve Vickers
  
  1953 [United Kingdom]
  

  He wrote Sinclair BASIC for the ZX80, while working for Nine Tiles, and the ROM firmware and manuals for the Sinclair ZX81 and later the ROM for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as well as helping with user documentation, while at Sinclair.

• Paul Allen
  
  1953 Seattle [USA] † 2018
  

  Founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates.

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• Richard Stallman
  
  1953 New York [USA]
  

  The MIT hacker and founder of the free software movement and the Free Software Foundation.

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• Andy Hertzfeld
  
  1953 Philadelphia [USA]
  

  After purchasing an Apple II in January 1978, he joined Apple Computer from August 1979 to March 1984, where he was a software designer for the Macintosh system.

• Susan Kare
  
  1954 Ithaca [USA]
  

  She was the graphic designer who created many of the elements of the Apple Macintosh graphical interface in the 1980s.

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• Michael Sperberg-McQueen
  
  1954 [USA]
  

  C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen is an American markup language specialist. He was co-editor of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 spec (1998) and chair of the XML Schema working group.

• Steve Jobs
  
  1955 San Francisco [USA] † 2011
  

  Steve Jobs was the co-founder and CEO of Apple, which he founded in 1976 with a childhood friend, Steve Wozniak, and with the help of Jobs's former Atari colleague, Ronald Wayne, in his garage.

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• James Gosling
  
  1955 Calgary [Canada]
  

  Father of the Java programming language.

• Tim Berners-Lee
  
  1955 London [United Kingdom]
  

  He is the father of the World Wide Web.

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• Tim Bray
  
  1955 Alberta [Canada]
  

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• Bill Gates
  
  1955 Seattle [USA]
  

  Bill Gates is a computer industry magnate, founder, along with Paul Allen, of the Microsoft company.

• Burrell Smith
  
  1955 [USA]
  

  The hardware engineer who designed the original Macintosh motherboard.

• Kazuhiko 'Kay' Nishi
  
  1956 Kobe [Japan]
  

  He is known as the father of MSX computers.

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