Contemporary computing celebrities to Bill Gates

• 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.

• Bill Atkinson
  
  1951 [USA] † 1951
  

  He was a prominent employee of Apple Computer, in charge of part of the graphical interface.

• 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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• 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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• Tim Paterson
  
  1956 [USA]
  

  Tim Paterson was the creator of the QDOS operating system, which was an adaptation of CP/M (at that time the most common operating system for 8-bit computers) to the 8086 chip from Intel, which was acquired by Microsoft to be used as the operating system for the IBM PC with the name PC DOS, and which would later be widely known as MS-DOS. Microsoft also commissioned him to port the system to MSX computers, creating MSX-DOS.

• Richard Altwasser
  
  1957 [United Kingdom]
  

  Engineer responsible for the hardware design of the ZX Spectrum.

• Rick Dickinson
  
  1957 [United Kingdom] † 2018
  

  Rick Dickinson was the industrial designer working at Sinclair who designed the cases for the ZX80, ZX81 and Sinclair QL, as well as the distinctive rubber keypad for the ZX Spectrum.

• Brent Townshend
  
  1960 Toronto [Canada]
  

  The inventor and electrical engineer who created the concept for 56k modems in 1996.
  These modems, which operated in the voice frequency band, were capable of download speeds of up to 56,000 bits per second.
  
  Initially, there were two competing modem systems: K56flex and X2.
  By the late 1990s, 56k modems were the most popular method of personal Internet access.
  The characteristic sounds emitted by these modems were not, as with previous generations, a modulated signal of the data being transferred, but rather the data being transferred.
  Communications were beginning to shift from analog to digital.

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