Top Ten Technologists

Posted Tuesday 29th January 2008 by Tom P in Uncategorized.

The technology industry has seen unimaginable changes in the last 150 years; it is only recently that tech journalists have compiled a list of the most influential figures in the technological world over the period. Here are the top ten figures from the shortlist they managed to compile.

Tim Berners Lee as the founder of the modern internet was a dead cert to be involved in the list, his invention has revolutionised communication and information during its 18 year existence.

Two founders of Google are in the top ten, Sergey Brin and Larry Page who have changed the way information is retrieved from the internet. Their paper ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’ is largely seen as their seminal work and has since become the tenth most widely read paper at Stanford University.

Guglielmo Marconi, for his work on the radiotelegraph system has been included, somewhat unsurprisingly after his 1909 Nobel Prize and his efforts to completely overhaul the way the world communicated.

A number of components inventors have been included in the top ten; notably two of the founders of Intel (Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce) as well as Jack Kilby (the inventor of the integrated circuit and calculator). An influential component that was invented during the fifties was the transistor. It revolutionised electronics and subsequently William Shockley has been included for his work with semi-conductors.

An obvious inclusion is Don Estridge; as ‘father of the IBM PC’ he led the development of the first personal computers and changed the computer industry wholesale. It is this man who is responsible for the numbers of computers in the world; more so than Bill Gates, who strangely is not included in the top ten, but did make the short list.

Finally there is a man who not only changed the technological world but helped to save the world from almost complete annihilation. It may sound extreme but the work of Alan Turing was fundamental to the war effort as his cracking of the enigma code marked the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. Widely regarded as the father of modern computer science his contribution cannot be underestimated.

These ten men have done more than most to advance the technology we have at our fingertips. There is a shortlist of forty five figures which are all worthy of mention, but these ten are the elite. Without the work of these ten the world would undoubtedly be less developed and no-where near as advanced.

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