Hillman Curtis
1961 
San Diego [USA]
† 2012
He stood out as a web designer and a pioneer in the use of Macromedia Flash Player, which for many years was an intrinsic part of the most advanced web pages.
Curtis began studying art to design posters and flyers for his band. When the band disbanded, Curtis, now in his thirties, began taking Photoshop classes at night.
This led to some part-time design work and eventually an entry-level position at Macromedia, where he gradually became design director.
There, in 1996, he designed the first website using a new technology, the Flash Player browser plug-in, which became a landmark in web design.
In 1997, Curtis founded HillmanCurtis, Inc., a New York-based design firm that focused on web design and, later, film production. In 2000, he published a practical guide, Flash Web Design, which sold over 100,000 copies and remains a reference text for online design.
In total, he has published four books on new media design, which have sold more than 150,000 copies and have been translated into 14 languages.
He has designed sites for Yahoo, Adobe Systems, and the Metropolitan Opera, among others.
Contemporary computing celebrities to Hillman Curtis
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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.
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Richard Altwasser
1957
[United Kingdom]
Engineer responsible for the hardware design of the ZX Spectrum.
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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.
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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. -
Anders Hejlsberg
1960
Copenhagen [Denmark]
In 1983, while working at Borland, Anders developed Turbo Pascal, a development IDE that integrated a compiler for the Pascal programming language. He later became the principal architect of Delphi. In 1996, he was hired by Microsoft, where he led the development of the J++ programming language. He is credited with creating the C# programming language (C Sharp) and has been the principal architect of the team developing this language since 2000. In 2012, Hejlsberg led the development of TypeScript, Microsoft's open source programming language.
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Michael Z. Land
1961
Boston [USA]
Mivchael Land is an American electronic musician and composer known for his compositions for several video games produced by LucasArts.
His first work was for The Secret of Monkey Island, but he wasn't entirely satisfied with the synchronization of the music with the game, and began working on the iMUSE interactive music system, which would be used to create subsequent games in the Monkey Island series and other LucasArts titles. -
Jeff Minter
1962
Reading [United Kingdom]
Jeff Minter (often called Yak) is an English video game designer and programmer, founder of the software company Llamasoft, and has created dozens of games throughout his career, which began in 1981 with games for the ZX80.
Minter's games are shoot 'em ups that contain references in the title or gameplay that demonstrate his fondness for ruminants (llamas, sheep, camels, etc.).
Many of his programs also contain psychedelic elements, as in some of the early "light synthesizer" programs, such as Trip-a-Tron.
Minter's works include the music visualization program Neon (2004), integrated into the Xbox 360 console, and the video games Gridrunner, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Tempest 2000, and Polybius. -
Kevin Mitnick
1963
Van Nuys [USA]
The most famous hacker of all time.
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Martin Galway
1966
Belfast [United Kingdom]
He is one of the most famous and prestigious composers of music for the Commodore 64's SID sound chip.
His best-known works include Arkanoid, Wizball, and Green Beret, as well as numerous melodies used during game loading, such as those developed by Ocean Software.
