Bill Gates Cocky wizard, Harvard dropout who wrote Altair BASIC, and complained when hackers copied it.
Bill Gosper
Horwitz of computer keyboards, master math and LIFE hacker
at MIT AI lab, guru of the Hacker Ethic and student of
Chinese restaurant menus.
Richard Greenblatt Single-minded, unkempt, prolific, and canonical MIT hacker who went into night phase so often that he zorched his academic career. The hacker's hacker.
John Harris The young Atari 800 game hacker who became Sierra On-Line's star programmer, but yearned for female companionship.
IBM-PC IBM's entry into the personal computer market which amazingly included a bit of the Hacker Ethic, and took over. [H.E. as open architecture.]
IBM 704
IBM was The Enemy, and this was its machine,
the Hulking Giant computer in MIT's Building 26.
Later modified into the IBM 709, then the IBM 7090.
Batch-processed and intolerable.
Jerry Jewell
Vietnam vet turned programmer who founded Sirius Software.
Steven Jobs
Visionary, beaded, non-hacking youngster who took
Wozniak's Apple II ][, made a lot of deals,
and formed a company that would make a billion dollars.
Tom Knight
At sixteen, an MIT hacker who would name the
Incompatible Time-sharing System. Later a
Greenblatt nemesis over the LISP machine schism.
Alan Kotok The chubby MIT student from Jersey who worked under the rail layout at TMRC, learned the phone system at Western Electric, and became a legendary TX-0 and PDP-1 hacker.