Steve Jobs Named Greatest IT Person

by , 2:15 PM EST, October 30th, 2006

Computer Weekly has issued its list of the ten greatest IT people, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs topping the chart, followed by HTML creator Tim Berners-Lee, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Java father James Gosling, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, Ted Codd, who formulated 12 rules for relational databases, Steve Shirley, who was an early advocate for women in IT, and Martha Lane Fox, who co-created Lastminute.com.

Of Mr. Jobs, the publication wrote: "Whether Jobs' next creation changes the world like the Apple II, or turns out to bomb like the Apple Lisa, his place in computing history is guaranteed." It also noted that Mr. Berners-Lee used the NeXT interface builder to create the first Web browser and build the first Web site, http://info.cern.ch/, which is still in existence today.

Computer Weekly noted that the top four people on the list were born in 1955, the same year Albert Einstein died. Those who made the list of also-rans were: Ken Olsen, founder of Dec, who invented the minicomputer; Clive Sinclair, home computer visionary; Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers; Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle; Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder; Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language; Donald Davies, co-inventor of packet switching; Ken Thompson, co-creator of Unix; and Grace Hopper, Cobol pioneer.