Thomas Edison
(1847 - 1931)
Better known for electronics rather than logic machines, Edison gets a guernsey as a hexidecimal hero on the basis that if it wasn't for his capacity for invention, we may well have been left to design CPUs and code in the dark.
Edison was home schooled by his mother after an altercation with a teacher who described the child as "addled", although his apparent absentmindedness could well have been due to his gradually deteriorating hearing. And while it probably appeared to the rest of the world as though he was ignoring them, Edison credited his disability for removing distractions and enabling him to concentrate on his research.
In a 1800s equivalent to connecting up a neighbourhood LAN, Edison hitched up a telegraph service between the houses in his area so he could pass messages to his neighbours. He also read voraciously, consuming a wide variety of texts on a range of subjects, from Edmund Gibbons' Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, to Issac Newton's Principia. He began self-funded research at 12, selling newspapers on trains to pay for chemicals and equipment.
An act of bravery in his mid teens saw the local station-master offer to take him on as an assistant, and Edison became a telegraph operator. As necessity is often the mother of invention, his first innovation enabled messages to be automatically "repeated", allowing him to catch up on his sleep during work hours.
At the ripe old age of 21, Edison returned home to find his mother gradually losing her grip on sanity, and his father jobless and virtually destitute, so he took to invention in an attempt to revive the family's fortunes. With his first patent, an electronic vote tallier, rejected by the parliament on the grounds it would be too efficient, he trained his skills on developing projects which would be commercially successful.
He made his way to New York City, and despite spending his first couple of weeks in the city begging for food, he eventually found himself work in the financial sector and was once again able to fund his own research.
By 1876, after a string of successful patents he managed to establish a laboratory in New Jersey where he pumped out up to 400 patents a year including the phonograph and the light bulb.
By the end of his life Edison managed to amass 1,093 patents, including the alkaline storage battery, carbon-button telephone transmitter, the cement mixer, an electric distributing system, an electric generator, the electric locomotive, an electric pen, the incandescent lamp (yep the light bulb), a kinetoscope (movie camera), a loud-speaking telephone, microphone, mimeograph, magnetic iron ore separator, a perforator for the automatic telegraph, a phonograph, a printer for stock ticker, a printer for telegraph, a sonar system to detect submarines and torpedoes and of course his telegraph repeater.
I think it is east to guess that the median age of your voters was below 30, and that those who wrote the salutory articles were slightly lacking in experience or balance. The extremely heavy leaning towards Unix and Linux does make the listing a little biased.
I suggest you read "Fire in the Valley" (both editions: Freiberger and Swaine, 1984 and 2000) for a different viewpoint on Bill Gates than he provides in his semi-fictional hagiography. If you read between the lines it becomes apparent the Microsoft achieved its eminence by inventing only one thing: the first software anti-piracy crusade, when Gates objected to people stealing the BASIC he stole from his time working as a hacker at DEC.
I am sorry, but my age must be showing. I can't see how any Web-based artcile doesn't put Douglas C. Engelbart at the head of the PC revolution. It is the obvious place for the man who invented the VDU, windowing, the mouse, and hypertext.
I feel despair that in the same week that I read two articles by prominent authors decrying the fact that because the young and inexperienced see something published on the Internet, they consider it true, that this piece of distortion is published on, guess what, the Internet.