In a similar vein, you can't do much with an operating system without a computer to run it on, and you can't use either without access to electricity, or a phone line for that matter. Technology is cumulative - all innovations or inventions are derived from previous innovations and inventions, and many go on to spark others.
And while the IT industry isn't exactly recognised for the modesty of its participants, scratch the surface of most cowboy hackers and you'll discover their careers were in fact inspired by former greats.
When we asked ZDNet Australia's readers to tell us who have been the greatest contributors to IT, we got a wide range of replies. From former work colleges and authors to high profile corporate leaders, readers came up with a veritable who's who of computing history.
In response, ZDNet has tracked down the people whose inventions have been central to the development of computing in the 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries, in an attempt to discover how those that inspire others, were inspired themselves.
Jump to: Thomas Edison - Seymour Cray - Bruce Schneier - Bill Gates - Alan Cox
But if you don't find any inspiration here, stay tuned next week for the second part of this series when we will profile Steve Gibson, Donald Knuth, Sir Clive Sinclair, Ivan Sutherland, Linus Torvalds and Alan Turing.
Thomas Edison
Better known for electronics rather than logic machines, Edison gets a guernsey as a hexadecimal 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.
Born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin in 1925, Seymour Cray became involved in computing when digital circuits were still very much in a developmental phase, and went on to design and build the world's first general purpose supercomputers.
Cryptographer, network security guru and food writer, Bruce Schneier grew up in New York in the sixties. His first introduction to computers was a punch-tape terminal which he learnt to program in BASIC. Although he says he enjoyed school, the opening screening of Star Wars was too much to miss out on.
If you've been inhabiting a cave in the outer reaches of Nepal for the last decade or so there is a slim chance you are not aware of William Gates III. Bespectacled, socks-and-sandals shod, sporting a characteristic drab cardigan, Gates emerged as the world's richest man in the mid nineties, thanks to the growing prevalence of personal computers.
Born in Birmingham, in the mid the sixties, Alan Cox grew up in a family of model train tinkerers and chemical engineers, and made it to puberty just as the Commodore PET and Sinclair ZX81 were coming onto the market. 
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Seymour Cray
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Bruce Schneier
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Bill Gates
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Alan Cox
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.