FREE COMPUTING HISTORY · 1969–1977
Internet platforms & open source
Open-source communities and internet companies turn software into global infrastructure.
1969–1977
Open-source communities and internet companies turn software into global infrastructure.
- Tony Fadell: Led iPod and iPhone hardware at Apple; founded Nest
- Marc Ewing: Red Hat Linux; Red Hat Inc.
- John Carmack: Doom, Quake; real-time 3D rendering; BSP trees; Mega Texture; VR (Oculus CTO)
- Vincent Rijmen: Co-designed Rijndael/AES
- Adam Back: Hashcash: proof-of-work system cited in Bitcoin whitepaper; Blockstream CEO
- Jeff Atwood: Co-founded Stack Overflow; Discourse; Coding Horror blog
- Igor Sysoev: Created nginx: powers ~34% of all web servers; event-driven architecture
- Tim Sweeney: Unreal Engine; Epic Games; Fortnite; game engine technology
- Ion Stoica: Apache Spark co-creator; Chord DHT; Databricks co-founder; Ray
- Daniel Stenberg: curl: ubiquitous data transfer tool; libcurl
- Marc Andreessen: Mosaic browser; Netscape; Andreessen Horowitz; "software is eating the world"
- Elon Musk: PayPal; Tesla (Autopilot); SpaceX; xAI (Grok); Neuralink; Starlink
- Todd Howard: Elder Scrolls; Fallout; Bethesda Game Studios director
- Josh Tenenbaum: Bayesian cognition; probabilistic programming; computational cognitive science
- Sundar Pichai: Google/Alphabet CEO; Chrome; Android; Gemini AI
- Bryan Cantrill: DTrace; illumos; Oxide Computer; systems programming advocate
- Greg Kroah-Hartman: Linux kernel stable maintainer; Linux driver model; USB subsystem
- Rusty Russell: Linux netfilter/iptables; virtio; CCAN; Bitcoin Lightning Network
- Larry Page: Co-founded Google; PageRank algorithm
- Sergey Brin: Co-founded Google; PageRank
- Stewart Butterfield: Co-founded Slack and Flickr
- Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence; existential risk from AI; simulation argument
- Alex Graves: Connectionist temporal classification (CTC); attention in RNNs; neural Turing machines; handwriting generation
- Max Levchin: Co-founded PayPal; fraud detection systems
- Graydon Hoare: Created Rust: memory safety without garbage collection; Mozilla Research
- Bram Cohen: BitTorrent protocol; peer-to-peer file sharing revolution
- Cliff Bleszinski: Gears of War; Unreal Tournament; game design innovation
- Andrew Ng: Google Brain co-founder; Coursera co-founder; Stanford ML course; deeplearning.ai; democratized ML education
- Demis Hassabis: DeepMind; AlphaGo; AlphaFold; Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2024); neuroscience-inspired AI
- David Silver: AlphaGo; AlphaZero; reinforcement learning; UCB algorithms
- Fei-Fei Li: ImageNet; Stanford HAI; human-centered AI; visual recognition datasets
- Jack Dorsey: Co-founded Twitter; Square/Block
- Travis Kalanick: Co-founded Uber
- Brendan Burns: Co-created Kubernetes at Google
- Joe Beda: Co-created Kubernetes at Google
- Craig McLuckie: Co-created Kubernetes at Google; Heptio
- Noam Shazeer: Transformer co-author; co-founded Character.AI; Google Brain researcher; sparse mixture of experts
- Changpeng "CZ" Zhao: Founded Binance: largest crypto exchange
- Chad Hurley: Co-founded YouTube
- Pieter Abbeel: Robot learning from demonstration; deep RL for robotics; Covariant AI; UC Berkeley