Giants of IT. The giants on whose shoulders we stand. One each day (opens in new tab)

A small correction on Gates: he did not create BASIC. “The language BASIC was an acronym for Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was developed by Dartmouth mathematicians John George Kemeny and Tom Kurtzas as a teaching tool for undergraduates.”[1]

The rest generally applies.

[1] http://inventors.about.com/od/famousinventions/fl/The-Histor...

gotcha. nice job btw :)

Well, Lovelace disputedly created the first program for the Babbage machine under Babbage's guidance. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Controversy_over_...). Although, more difficult perhaps than morse code I wouldnt consider the first person to send morse code a "Giant" by merit of that act alone... And Gates well, thats too long of a story, but for me it boils down to the fact that I dont think he created outstanding products and he didnt contribute to theoretical CS or EE in any direct way. About the only case you can make for him is as an entrepreneur or visionary, for which I personally think there are other candidates that have better arguments for that position.

Which is irrelevant because the claim being made is that he created the language.

The being

Kudos to you for paying attention to the licensing instead of just ripping them off.

FWIW Bertrand Meyer's picture is licensed CC-BY-SA so you're free to use it as long as you share it with the same license.

i first thought it is by birth/or death date. some relation to "now" might make this more interesting, like the astronomy picture of the day. if there are two on the same day they could simply be shifted.

For example, it would be interesting to see if or how Linus Torvalds connected to Charles Babbage via the various relationships through the IT giants. If there are 4(as an example) people between them, their degree of separation is 4.

It is similar to the Erdös number.