Sometimes it’s easy to forget or take it for granted, but software has fundamentally changed the human race forever. It has allowed globalisation to expand at an unprecedented rate; it has given billions of people access to all the information that the human race has acquired so far, and it has allowed us to create methods of communication that were once shrugged off as nothing more than science fiction.

There are hundreds of thousands of programmers in the world, but there was a time where there was only a small handful of people developing software, and it’s these individuals that we have to thank for the computer revolution that has changed civilisation as we know it.

Dennis Ritchie

Anyone with any knowledge of computer history will know that Dennis Ritchie played a vital part in creating much of the software that we use today. He was a pioneer of the digital age and helped developed the B programming language in 1969. It was created in Bell Labs alongside other legendary programmers Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan.

Not long after that, he developed the C language, which remains extremely popular today, and has itself been developed into subset languages, many of which power that software that billions of people use on a daily basis. Later on, Ritchie would help develop the UNIX operating system, which became the basis for Linux.

Guido van Rossum

While van Rossum’s name isn’t as well-known as a lot of other programmers, there’s no doubt that his contributions to the world of computer software are just as important as many others. Van Rossum is the creator of the Python programming language, now one of the most popular in the industry, and is used in a wide variety of well-known applications and other software. Van Rossum created Python out of boredom in 1989 and took the name from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Linus Torvalds

Within the world of open source software, Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds is a true legend. He was the creator of the Linux kernel in 1991 – nothing more than a hobby project at the time – which would develop into the GNU/Linux operating system that powers the vast majority of the world’s servers in the modern era.

Along with this incredible achievement, Torvalds also developed the git version control system in 2005, which would become the most common way of controlling versions within programming, and would lead to massive hosting projects like GitHub, which is the home of thousands of programmers and their works, from games, office software to FIFA betting 2022 tracking apps.

Alan Turing

Alan Turing is widely recognised as history’s first true computer scientist. Active during the Second World War, Turing created the Turing machine, which is considered to be the first true computer. His and his team’s contributions during the war are believed to have saved millions of lives and brought the war to an end much more quickly, and it was his work that would eventually lead to the creation of more advanced computers later on.