Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items12
1
Gary Kildall
Born
CP/M and the portable operating system. Kildall wrote the PL/M language for Intel's microprocessors and then CP/M, an operating system whose hardware-specific code sat in a separate layer, the BIOS, so the same software could run on many different microcomputers. Digital Research, which he founded with his wife Dorothy McEwen, sold it widely in the late 1970s before IBM chose Microsoft's DOS for its PC. He died in 1994.
More about Gary Kildall2
Paul Allen
Programming languages as a business. Allen and Bill Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 in 1975, with Allen building an Altair emulator on a university minicomputer so they could develop it before seeing the real machine. Microsoft's first products were language tools such as BASIC, FORTRAN and COBOL for microcomputers, long before Windows. Allen left Microsoft in 1983 after illness and died in 2018.
More about Paul Allen3
Philippe Kahn
Born
The cheap, fast compiler. Kahn, a French mathematician, co-founded Borland in California in 1983 and sold Turbo Pascal, written by Danish programmer Anders Hejlsberg, for $49.95 through magazine adverts, when compilers usually cost hundreds of dollars. Editing, compiling and running in one fast program made the edit-compile cycle almost instant and set the pattern for integrated development environments. Hejlsberg later created C# and TypeScript at Microsoft.
More about Philippe Kahn4
Michael Tiemann
Selling support for free software. Tiemann wrote the first native-code C++ compiler, g++, for the GNU project, and in 1989 co-founded Cygnus Support with John Gilmore and David Henkel-Wallace to sell maintenance, porting and support for free tools such as GCC and GDB to companies building embedded systems. It proved there was money in open-source developer tools without owning them, and Red Hat bought Cygnus in 1999.
More about Michael Tiemann5
Michael Widenius
Born
The free database behind the early web. Widenius, a Finnish programmer known as Monty, wrote most of MySQL's early code, and in 1995 co-founded MySQL AB in Sweden with David Axmark and Allan Larsson, offering the database free under an open-source licence and selling commercial licences and support. As the M in the LAMP stack, it powered countless websites. After Oracle acquired it through Sun, he forked it as MariaDB in 2009.
More about Michael Widenius6
Miguel de Icaza
Born
Open-source .NET and cross-platform apps. De Icaza, from Mexico City, co-founded the GNOME desktop project in 1997 and then led Mono, an open-source version of Microsoft's .NET platform. In 2011 he and Nat Friedman founded Xamarin, which let developers write iPhone and Android apps in C# and share most of the code. Microsoft, once the target of open-source suspicion, bought Xamarin in 2016.
More about Miguel de Icaza7
Dries Buytaert
An open-source framework and a company to support it. Buytaert started Drupal as a student project in Antwerp in 2001, a content management framework built from modules that developers could combine and extend, which grew a large volunteer community and ran sites for governments and universities. In 2007 he co-founded Acquia to sell hosting and support around it, an example of keeping a project open while building a business alongside.
More about Dries Buytaert8
David Heinemeier Hansson
Born
Ruby on Rails. Heinemeier Hansson, a Danish programmer working for the small firm that became 37signals, extracted the web framework behind its Basecamp product and released it as Ruby on Rails in 2004. Its conventions over configuration and built-in tools for databases and testing let small teams build web apps quickly, influencing frameworks in many languages. He co-owns 37signals and is known for blunt opinions as well as code.
More about David Heinemeier Hansson9
Joel Spolsky
Writing about how software teams work. Spolsky, a former Microsoft Excel programme manager, co-founded Fog Creek Software in 2000, whose bug tracker FogBugz and blog Joel on Software, with its twelve-point Joel Test of team practices, shaped how many developers judged employers. In 2008 he co-founded Stack Overflow with Jeff Atwood, and Fog Creek later produced the Trello task board and Glitch.
More about Joel Spolsky10
Jeff Atwood
Answers that rank. Atwood, author of the Coding Horror blog, co-founded Stack Overflow in 2008 and designed much of how it works: questions and answers voted up or down, reputation points and badges earned by helping, and editing by trusted users. For over a decade it was where developers found working solutions, though AI assistants have since sharply reduced its traffic. He later co-founded the open-source forum software Discourse.
More about Jeff Atwood11
Chris Wanstrath
Born
GitHub. Wanstrath co-founded GitHub in 2008 with Tom Preston-Werner, PJ Hyett and Scott Chacon, building a website around Linus Torvalds's Git version control system. Pull requests, forks and public profiles turned code review and contribution into a social process, and GitHub became the default home of open-source projects. He led it as chief executive for much of its independent life, before Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018.
More about Chris Wanstrath12
Tom Preston-Werner
Born
Tools around the code. Preston-Werner, GitHub's other main founder and for a time its chief executive, also wrote Jekyll, the static site generator behind GitHub Pages, created the TOML configuration format and wrote the Semantic Versioning specification that many projects use to number releases. He resigned from GitHub in 2014 after an internal investigation, and later co-founded RedwoodJS, a JavaScript framework.
More about Tom Preston-Werner
