Steve Wozniak: He is a nerd of computer architecture design. He created first Apple computers and coded most of the first Apple software.
Dave Cutler: He developed many operating systems including Windows NT kernel (still partly used by Windows).
Richard Stallman: He programmed first versions of GCC and Emacs.
Donald Knuth: Besides literally writing the book of programming, he created TeX (a typesetting system) which is still being used and he originally created this for writing better-looking TAOCP books.
John Carmack: He wrote the game engine for Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein games only by himself. He also used a square root algorithm faster than respective machine instruction:
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/...
Anders Hejlsberg: He created Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C# languages.
Bjarne Stroustrup: He implemented first version of C++, still Computer Science Chairman at Texas A&M University.
Linus Torvalds: Creator of the Linux kernel, used by hundreds of millions of devices worldwide.
Jeff Dean: See Quora: What are all the Jeff Dean facts?
