ARPA Network

ARPANet (Advanced Research Project Agency Network) the Internet predecessor, started in 1969. The first four nodes (networks) consisted of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), University of Utah and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Arpanet was finally decommissioned in 1990 having been largely replaced by NSFNET. The pictures are in chronological order.

The BBN IMP Team    [website]
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Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), the Cambridge, MA team that designed and deployed the Interface Message Processors (IMP) for the ARPA Network in 1969. Pictured: Truett Thach, Bill Bartell, Dave Walden, Jim Geisman, Bob Kahn, Frank Heart, Ben Barker, Marty Thrope, Will Crowther and Severo Ornstein.

Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts    [website - email]

Engineer, director and principal architect of the ARPA network experiment. Often referred to as 'the father of the ARPANET', designed and wrote the network specification, drafted the Request For Proposals and oversaw all work on the project from 1966 to 1973. He's also considered one of the, 'Fathers of the Internet', along with Leonard Kleinrock, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn and Frank Heart.

Vinton G. Cerf    [homepage - email]

Co-designer of the Internet TCP/IP networking protocol. He's also considered one of the, 'Fathers of the Internet', along with Leonard Kleinrock, Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn and Frank Heart.

Robert E. Kahn    [email]

Co-designer of the Internet TCP/IP networking protocol. One time director of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Dr. Kahn coined the term National Information Infrastructure (NII) in the mid 1980s which later became more widely known as the Information Super Highway. He's also considered one of the, 'Fathers of the Internet', along with Leonard Kleinrock, Vinton Cerf, Lawrence Roberts and Frank Heart.

Frank Heart

Considered one of the, 'Fathers of the Internet', along with Leonard Kleinrock, Vinton Cerf, Lawrence Roberts and Robert Kahn.

Leonard Kleinrock    [homepage - email]

Considered one of the, 'Fathers of the Internet', along with Frank Heart, Vinton Cerf, Lawrence Roberts and Robert Kahn.

Robert W. Taylor

ARPAnet founder, also did important work at Digital Equipment Corp., Xerox and Compaq. As he says, "There are a lot of people who think that Al Gore or Bill Gates invented the Internet. It's all right. It doesn't bother me. I know what I did."

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider

Part of the ARPANet team, J. C. R. Licklider is largely credited as the man with the earliest vision of the internet as it is today.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie    [homepage - email]

One of the first hackers and the father of Unix, C language (and B for that matter). The driving creative force behind Bell Labs' legendary computer science operating group, Ritchie and Ken Thompson created UNIX in 1969.

Kenneth "Ken" Lane Thompson    [homepage - email]

One of the first hackers and the father of Unix. The driving creative force behind Bell Labs' legendary computer science operating group, Dennis Ritchie and Thompson created UNIX in 1969.

Linus Benedict Torvalds    [homepage - email]

Linus (Lee-nus) Torvalds -While a computer science student at the University of Helsinki he created the Linux operating system in 1991. See Linus get drunk (3,4,5).

Little Hacker

I know this picture does not belong on this list but it's one of my favorites. A picture of Celeste Torvalds, the youngest daughter of Linux creator, Linus Torvalds...she's using daddy's operating system.

Steven "Woz" Gary Wozniak    [homepage - email]

'Woz' -Started Apple Computer in 1976-launching the personal computer age. Got his start making devices for phone phreaking. Can be found here.

Michael Tiemann    [homepage - email]

Chief Technical Officer for Red Hat. He made his first major open source contribution over a decade ago by writing the GNU C++ compiler.

Scott G. McNealy

Chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems. Typical McNealy quote, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

William "Bill" Henry Gates III

Even Bill had skills (Bill is pictured lower left in picture 1).

Bill Joy

Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, he was the principal designer of Berkeley UNIX (BSD). He also developed the C Shell (csh) and Vi (bastard).

Bjarne Stroustrup    [homepage - email]

Designer and original implementor of C++ in 1983. Can be found here.

Marc Andreessen

In 1993 Marc helped develop the first Mosaic browser. Soon after, Andreessen formed Netscape Communications Corp.

Philip R. Zimmermann    [homepage - email]

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) creator. Target of a three-year criminal investigation because the government held that U.S. export restrictions for cryptographic software were violated when PGP spread all around the world following its 1991 publication as freeware. Can be found here.

Whitfield Diffie    [email]

It was in 1976 that Diffie and Stanford University electrical engineering professor Martin Hellman created public key cryptography.

Timothy J. Berners-Lee    [homepage - email]

Creator of HTML, and to any extent the World Wide Web (WWW). The man who wove the first few strands in what has grown into the World Wide Web.

Michael Leonidas Dertouzos

Computer scientist who was central in establishing the World Wide Web as an international standard.

Paul Baran

Developed the concept of packet switched networks.

Mark Abene    [email]

'Phiber Optik' -Hacker & phreaker who was a onetime member of LOD and founder of MOD. Inspired thousands of teenagers around the country to "study" the internal workings of the United States phone system.

MOD

'Masters Of Deception' -Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, Scorpion, Corrupt, The Wing, The Seeker, HAC, Red Knight and Lord Micro.

Kevin Lee Poulsen    [email]

'Dark Dante' -Hacker & phreaker, now writes for Security Focus. Poulsen, a native of Pasadena, California is a former programmer, network administrator and hacker. Kevin had burrowed deep into the giant switching networks of Pacific Bell, exploring and exploiting nearly every element of its computers. His forays led to a now infamous incident with KIIS-FM in Los Angeles. In 1990 the station ran the "Win a Porsche by Friday" contest, with a $50,000 Porsche given to the 102nd caller. Kevin and his associates, stationed at their computers, seized control of the station's 25 telephone lines, blocking out all calls but their own. Then he dialed the 102nd call -- and later collected his Porsche 944. The hacker also uncovered FBI and national security wiretaps throughout California, including taps on the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles. Some of Poulsen's actions turned into the first ever espionage case against a hacker, the charges were later dropped. Kevin pled guilty to breaking into computers to get the names of undercover businesses operated by the FBI. In 1995 Poulsen was sentenced to 51 months imprisonment.

Ronald M. Austin

Kevin Poulsen's longtime friend and fellow hacker.

Mark K. Lottor    [homepage - email]

Former roommate of Kevin Poulsen, Mark was an avid cell phone enthusiast, who had a few run-ins with hacker Kevin Mitnick. Mark has also authored four RFCs (check out the RFC on SFTP, port 115). He can be found here.

Kevin David Mitnick    [website]

'Condor' -Hacker & phreaker, served 5 years. Widely considered the 'most famous hacker in history'. Broke into Digital Equipment Corp., Motorola, Nokia Mobile Phones, Fujitsu, Novell, NEC, Sun Microsystems, the University of Southern California, the Well and Colorado SuperNet, just to name a few. Also broke into computers run by Dan Farmer and Mark Lottor. Mitnick was first suspected of hacking into Tsutomu's computers in 1994 but an unknown (? Jonathan Zanderson) Israeli hacker and friend to Mitnick was later suspected. The Israeli hacker was thought to be looking for the Oki cell phone disassembler written by Shimomura and wanted by Mitnick. Can be found here.

Lewis De Payne    [website - email]

'Lew Payne' -Friend to Kevin Mitnick since the late 70s. Together they explored and manipulated the telephone network as Los Angeles' most notorious phone phreaks. Can be found here.

Tsutomu Shimomura

One of the persons that tracked down Kevin Mitnick in 1994. Tsutomu has worked for the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, FBI, Air Force and the NSA.

Neill Michael Clift    [email]

If there ever was a person that met the true definition of a White Hat Hacker, Neill Clift would be that person. Instead of making his findings of bugs (in the DEC/VMS operating system) open to the public, Neill would report (sell) them directly to DEC. Neill also had a few run-ins with hacker Kevin Mitnick. Neill currently works for Microsoft.

Susan Lynn Headley

'Susan Thunder' -One of the few female phreakers/hackers and member of the Roscoe Gang. Members included Kevin Mitnick and Lewis De Payne.

RFP

'Rain Forest Puppy' -Likes to beat up on Microsoft servers (IIS). Can be found here.

Jeff Moss    [website - email]

'Dark Tangent' -Founder of DefCon.

Chris Goggans

'Erik Bloodaxe' -Member of LOD (Legion of Doom) and onetime editor of Phrack.

Robert Tappan Morris, Jr.    [homepage - email]

Cornell University graduate student who accidentally unleashed an Internet worm in 1988. Thousands of computers were infected and subsequently crashed. Good read on the Morris Worm. Robert can be found here.

Peiter Zatko

'Dr. Mudge' -Vice President of Research and Development for @Stake.

Dildog

'Dildog' -Works for @Stake.

Chris Wysopal

'Weld Pond' -Research scientist at security services provider @Stake.

Sir Dystic

'Sir Dystic' -Author of Back Orifice.

Space Rogue

'Space Rogue' -Founder of the Hacker News Network (HNN).

Tan

'Tan' -Works for @Stake.

Joseph Grand

'Kingpin' -Works for @Stake.

Simple Nomad    [homepage - email]

'Simple Nomad' -Can be found here.

Mike Schiffman    [homepage - email]

'Route' -Onetime editor-in-chief of Phrack Magazine. Mike currently works for Cisco. Can be found here.

Bronc Buster

'Bronc Buster' -"A well-known California based hacker."

Patrick W. Gregory

'MostHated' -The co-leader of Global Hell.

Fyodor    [website - email]

'Fyodor' -Nmap author. Can be found here.

Peter Shipley    [homepage - email]

Wrote the first network scanner, NetSweep, in '88 (ISS was based on this early work) and invented Wardriving ('99). Can be found here.

Chris Lamprecht

'Minor Threat' -Author of ToneLoc, served jail time.

Eric C. Corley    [website]

'Emmanuel Goldstein' -Editor-in-chief of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and hosts a weekly radio program in New York called "Off the Hook."

Len Rose    [website]

'Terminus' & 'Terminal Technician' -Somehow got his hands on System V 3.2 AT&T Unix Source Code, login.c Can be found here.

Dennis Moran

'Coolio' -Defaced some websites including RSA Security Inc. and dare.com.

Raphael Gray

'Cureador' -Welsh hacker who pled guilty to the online theft of about 26,000 credit cards and posting them online during February of 2000.

Riley Eller

'Caezar' -Member of the Ghetto Hackers.

Jerome T. Heckenkamp

'SK8' -Allegedly hacked eBay, E*Trade, Lycos, Exodus Communications, Juniper Networks and Qualcomm using the name 'MagicFX'. Onetime Los Alamos National Laboratory employee.

Mafia Boy

'Mafia Boy' -Executed denial-of-service attacks (Dee-DoS) on web sites, including Yahoo, Amazon.com, ZDNet, CNN, e-Bay and Dell.com on Feb. 7, 2000. Just showing that it could be done, he pled guilty and was sentenced to eight months.

John Draper    [homepage - email]

'Cap'n Crunch' -Let people know about making free phone calls using a plastic prize whistle found in a cereal box. Cap'n Crunch helped introduced generations of hackers to the glorious world of phone phreaking. Can be found here.

Ian Goldberg

Chief Scientist, Zero-Knowledge Systems. In 1997, as a graduate student at the University of Californial at Berkeley, he cracked RSA Data Security's 40-bit crypto code in just three and a half hours using a network of 250 workstations.

Brian Martin    [website - email]

'Jericho', 'Cult Hero' -The founder of Attrition.org.

Claude Elwood Shannon

He did important work showing how logic could be applied to the design of relay circuits--in short, that the true and false of Boolean logic could be the same as the on and off of an electric switch.

Elias Levy    [email]

'aleph1' -Elias is the moderator of Bugtraq, one of the most widely read security mailing lists on the Internet. He was recently named one of The 10 Most Important People of the Decade by Network Computing.

Lance Spitzner    [website - email]

Author of many quality White Papers. Can be found here. Lance also runs the HoneyNet project.

Marcus J. Ranum    [website - email]

Author of several major Internet firewall products, including the DEC SEAL, the TIS Gauntlet, and the TIS Internet Firewall Toolkit. Can be found here.

Ken Williams

Founder of Packet Storm Security.

Mixter

'Mixter' -Authored Tribe Flood Network (TFN). The tool that was used by the Canadian hacker named 'Mafia Boy' in the Dee-Dos attacks of 2000.

David Litchfield

'Mnemonix' -Works for @Stake.

Steve Crocker

RFC's were invented by Stephen Crocker.

Jonathan Bruce Postel

Managed the Internet numbers, country codes, and other parameters that provide the basic structure that enables the Net to work (IANA & ICANN). One of the key people who helped administer the Internet from its beginning, until he passed away in 1998. A Request For Comments (RFC) without his name on it, is rare.

Richard Matthew Stallman    [website - email]

'RMS' -Created the GNU free software project. Stallman walked in off the street and got a job at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. Can be found here.

Douglas Carl Engelbart

Developed the mouse, the graphical user interface and the first working hypertext system.

Bruce Schneier    [website - email]

Cryptography expert and Counterpane's chief technology officer. Designed the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms.

Edward E. Cummings

'Bernie S.' -A hacker who was prosecuted for having items which "could be used" for illegal activity.

Jon Lech Johansen    [homepage - email]

Jon Johansen is one of the three founding members of MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering), the trio of programmers who created a huge stir in the DVD marketplace by releasing DeCSS, a program used to crack the Content Scrambling System (CSS) encryption used to protect every DVD movie on the market.

Steven M. Bellovin    [homepage -  email]

Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott conceived of the Usenet concept, and Steve Bellovin wrote the first program. Can be found here.

David G. Korn    [homepage - email]

Developed the Korn Shell (ksh), a command language that makes computers easier for programmers and nonprogrammers to use. Can be found here.

Paul Baranowski

'Drunken Master', Peekabooty's technical lead. An anonymous, peer-to-peer network, Peekabooty is meant to enable web surfers in countries with strict state-sponsored Internet censorship to have access to information. Can be found here.

David Dittrich    [homepage - email]

Dave Dittrich is a senior security engineer and consultant for the University of Washington. He was one of the first to identify distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack programs in 1999. Dee-Dos expert. Can be found here.

Richard Thieme    [website - email]

Writes some good articles on the hacking culture. Can be found here.

Jonathan James

'c0mrade'- A teen-ager who broke into a Pentagon computer system that monitors threats from nuclear weapons.

Herwart Holland-Moritz

'Wau Holland'- Legendary German hacker and co-founder of the Chaos Computer Club.

Eric Burns

'Zyklon'- Global Hell member, served 15 months.

Jarkko Oikarinen    [homepage]

Founder of Internet Relay Chat, IRC, in 1988. Can be found here.

Richard Pryce

'Datastream Cowboy' -Enjoyed penetrating .mil sites. The Times of London reported that knowing he was about to be arrested, Richard "curled up on the floor and cried."

Mathew Bevan    [website - email]

'Kuji' -Accused of breaching some sensitive computers belonging to the USAF and a commercial missile manufacturer in 1994. Can be found here.

Eric Allman    [homepage - email]

Sendmail author. Can be found here.

Dan Farmer    [website - email]

Was in charge of the technical aspects of computer and network security for Silicon Graphics, Inc., Sun Microsystems and most recently EarthLink. Co-authored SATAN (Security Administrator's Tool for Analyzing Networks) and wrote COPS (Computer Oracle and Password System). Can be found here.

Wietse Zweitze Venema    [homepage - email]

Co-authored SATAN, he also wrote TCP Wrappers (tcpd) and created the Postfix e-mail server. Can be found here.

Jon Lasser    [homepage - email]

Started the Bastille Linux project. Can be found here.

Justin Tanner Petersen

'Agent Steal' & 'Eric Heinz' -Hate him or like him, he served over 2 years in prison for hacking.

Edward W. Felten    [homepage - email]

A Princeton University team cracks SDMI music encryption scheme(s), after SDMI offers a challenge. Professor Felten decided to publish a paper on their findings. Legal threat made by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Felten decided not to offer his teams findings. Buh-bye free speech. Can be found here.

Randal Lee Schwartz    [homepage - email]

Gifted programmer, who has contributed to the Perl community. Was found guilty under an Oregon computer crime law, and sentenced. Essentially for running Crack (password cracker program), as a system administrator at Intel. Can be found here.

Randy Bush    [homepage - email]

Randy was an early FIDOnet pioneer and co-chair of the IETF. Can be found here.

Aviel D. Rubin    [website - email]

Senior Technical Staff Member at AT&T Labs, Research in the secure systems research department. Helped reveal weaknesses in the underlying cipher that provides security for the 802.11 wireless LAN protocol. Can be found here.

Ray Tomlinson    [homepage - email]

Inventor of e-mail.

Jon "Maddog" Hall    [email]

The legendary executive director of Linux International was directly responsible for the port of Linux to the Alpha processor. Jon has been a very vocal advocate of Linux and had been in the UNIX group for sixteen years as an engineer.

Dmitry Sklyarov

Russian programmer who was arrested in 2001 by the FBI, at DefCon 9, for giving away software that removes the restrictions on encrypted Adobe Acrobat files.

Adrian Lamo    [homepage]

A talented, young Grey Hat. Has found holes in Microsoft, Excite@Home, Yahoo, MCI WorldCom, Bank of America, Citicorp, Pfizer Chase Mellon, Daimler Chrysler, FOX TV, H&R Block, and General Electric networks. In 2000 he also found a way to break into AOL Instant Messenger accounts. In 2002, he hacked his way into the NY Times corporate intranet database. Can be found here.

Marc Maiffret    [website - email]

'Chameleon' -An engineer at eEye, or as he likes to tell it "chief hacking officer". Marc and eEye have been credited with finding numerous vulnerabilities in WinNT and Windows XP.

Larry Wall    [homepage - email]

Perl creator.

Miguel de Icaza    [homepage - email]

Co-founder of Ximian (Helix) GNOME. Can be found here.

Nat Friedman    [website - email]

Co-founder of Ximian (Helix) GNOME.

James A.Gosling    [homepage - email]

Java inventor. James Gosling also invented NeWS, the networked PostScript-based window system used by Sun for years. He also wrote the first Unix version of EMACS (Gosling Emacs which became Unipress Emacs).

Alec Muffett    [homepage - email]

Crack author (password cracker). Can be found here.

Matt Blaze    [website - email]

Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Research Scientist at AT&T. Discovered a serious flaw in the U.S. Government's "Clipper" encryption system and co-designed swIPe, the predecessor of IPSEC. Can be found here.

Bill Cheswick    [homepage - email]

AT&T firewall guru.

Vladimir Levin

In 1994 Vladimir, a 23-year-old, led a Russian hacker group in the first publicly revealed international bank robbery over a network. Stealing around 10 million dollars from Citibank, which claims to have recovered all but $400,000 of the money. Levin was later caught and sentenced to 3 years in prison.

John S. Flowers    [homepage - email]

'Locke' -Former phreaker, John was also on the first team to ever win Capture the Flag at Defcon. Can be found here.

Dug Song    [email]

All around cool security expert. A contributing member of the OpenSSH project.

Michael Buen & Onel de Guzman

Both are suspected of writing the 'I Love You' virus.

David L. Smith

Melissa virus author. The virus was released on March 26, 1999. Causing an estimated 80 million dollars in damages. In 2002 Smith was sentenced to 20 months in prison.

Rishi Khan

Khan was instrumental in the investigation leading to the arrest of David L. Smith, who authored the Melissa virus.

Ehud Tenebaum

'Analyzer' -In 1998, this Israeli teen was responsible for hacking dozens of unclassified Pentagon systems in what was "the most organized and systematic attack to date" on US military systems. The attacks exploited a well-known vulnerability in the Solaris operating system for which a patch had been available for months.

Chen Ing-Hou

Chen Ing-Hou, the creator of the CIH virus, that takes his initials. This was the first known virus to target the flash BIOS.

Gary Kildall

Created CP/M, the first operating system to see popular use. He also helped form the Home Brew Computer Club.

Grace Murray Hopper

Grace developed the Flowmatic computer language for the UNIVAC 1. Flowmatic was the foundation from which COBOL was developed (1959). She was an explorer at the dawn of the digital age, a visionary programmer at a time when the world of computer science was overwhelmingly male. Was also named a rear admiral, the first female rear admiral in the U. S. Navy.

Martin E. Hellman    [homepage]

Together with Whitfield Diffie invented public-key cryptography in 1976. One of the results is the so called Diffie-Hellman algoritm for key exchange.

Robert "Bob" M. Metcalfe    [email]

The inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com Corporation.

Marty Roesch    [website - email]

The author of Snort, an open source lightweight network intrusion detection system. Can be found here.

Casper Dik

Works for Sun Microsystems in the Network Security Group. He's also maintainer of the Solaris 2.x FAQ.

Johan Helsingius

Operated the world's most popular anonymous remailer, called penet.fi. Was raided by the Finnish police in 1995 after the Church of Scientology complained that a penet.fi customer was posting the "church's" secrets on the Net. Helsingius closed the remailer after a Finnish court ruled he must reveal the customer's real e-mail address.

Jonathan Littman

Author of 'The Fugitive Game' and 'The Watchmen'.

John Markoff

Author of 'Cyberpunks' and 'Takedown'.

Corey A. Lindsly

'Mark Tabas' -Ex-LOD (Legion of Doom) member, Lindsly was the major ringleader in a computer hacker organization, known as the "Phone Masters", whose ultimate goal was to own the telecommunications infrastructure from coast-to-coast. The group penetrated the systems of AT&T, British Telecom., GTE, MCI WorldCom, Sprint, Southwestern Bell and systems owned by state and federal governmental agencies, to include the Nation Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer. They broke into credit-reporting databases belonging to Equifax Inc. and TRW Inc. They entered Nexis/Lexis databases and systems of Dun & Bradstreet. They had access to portions of the national power grid, air-traffic-control systems and had hacked their way into a digital cache of unpublished phone numbers at the White House. A federal court granted the FBI permission to use the first ever "data tap" to monitor the hackers' activities. In 1999 Lindsly was sentenced in federal court to forty-one months imprisonment.

Julio Cesar Ardita

'El Griton' -A 21 year old Argentinean who was sentenced to a three-year probation in 1997 for hacking into computer systems belonging to Harvard, NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center.

Shawn Fanning

Authored Napster, the first program that popularized Peer-to-Peer file sharing (P2P).

Gerrie Mansur

One of the leaders of Dutch hacking group Hit2000, he had access to Nasdaq.com, CBS.MarketWatch.com, BigCharts.com, and FTMarketWatch.com in Oct. of 2000.

David Filo and Chih-Yuan "Jerry" Yang

Founders of the search engine Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle). They were working on their doctorates, at Stanford, in the Computer Systems Laboratory in 1994 when they began compiling a guide to World Wide Web sites that they found interesting. Yahoo made both David and Jerry billionaires before they were 30, it was later reported in 2002 that they had lost their billionaire status, with Filo losing a reported $10.31 billion during the tech slump.

Tom Jennings    [homepage - email]

Founder of FidoNet. Can be found here.

Robert Tappan Morris, Sr.

Chief Scientist of the National Security Agency. Legendary for security breaches at Bell Labs before joining NSA. Now retired. He invented a trap-door encryption algorithm which was used for encrypting passwords stored in the /etc/password file of Unix computers.

Richard Phillips Feynman

Worked on the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Cracked security left and right. Won the Nobel prize for physics in 1965. Mentor of Tsutomu Shimomura.

Ted Holm Nelson

Inventor of hypertext. Author of Computer Lib / Dream Machines, a hand-written 1970's self-published classic, that self-taught thousands of people about the promise of small computers, in an era when most computers lived in big glassed-in air-conditioned rooms. Visionary whose vision, Xanadu Hypertext Publishing System, exceeded his grasp. Mentor of Tsutomu Shimomura at Princeton.

John Gilmore    [homepage - email]

EFF co-founder John Gilmore has been thinking about computers, writing software and standing up for freedom for 20 years.

Nicolas Fischbach    [homepage - email]

'Nico' -Works as a Senior IP and Security Engineer at COLT Telecom AG. Can be found here.

Esther Dyson    [homepage - email]

Served a two-year-term as founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international agency charged with setting policy for the Internet's core infrastructure (technical standards and the Domain Name System) independent of government control. Can be found here.

Theo de Raadt    [homepage - email]

Theo de Raadt is the founder of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects. He was also one of the 4 people who started the NetBSD project. Can be found here.

Marc Ewing

Co-founder of Red Hat linux, which was named after his grandfather's favorite old red Cornell lacrosse team cap. Ewing used to wear the cap between classes while a student in Carnegie Mellon's computer science program.

Robert F. Young

Co-founder and Chairman of Red Hat linux.

Matthias Ettrich    [homepage - email]

Ettrich created the popular KDE windowing environment for Linux. He founded the mailing list and project team that has coded the K Desktop Environment (KDE), and has done much of the programming himself. Can be found here.

Guido van Rossum    [homepage - email]

Author of the Python programming language. Companies currently using Python include Intel, Disney, Yahoo!, Industrial Light & Magic, Red Hat, NASA, Lawrence Livermore Labs, Origin Systems, Boeing, and many more. Can be found here.

Bruce Evans

Legendary Minix hacker. Also the author of the Minix-386 patches and the 16-bit assembler that is still used to assemble the Linux 16-bit startup code.

Eric Steven Raymond    [homepage - email]

Eric is an Open Source evangelist. He has written many lines of code for open source projects (including fetchmail) and maintains 'The New Hackers Dictionary'. Eric authored the 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar', an industry shaking essay which prompted Netscape executives to release their source code. In 1998 Eric posted the notorious Halloween documents that were leaked from Microsoft. Can be found here.

Georgi Guninski    [website - email]

Georgi is a security researcher from Bulgaria who has discovered over 50 Internet Explorer bugs. Can be found here.

Bruce Perens    [website - email]

Respected Open Source advocate. Can be found here.

Alan Cox

Cox is Linux hacker number two. Next to Linux founder Linus Torvalds, he is the guy with the most responsibility for kernel development. He's famous for turning around dozens of kernel patches and questions every single day.

Karl Werner Lothar Koch

'Hagbard Celine' -A young, talented, German hacker that mysteriously died in 1989 at the age of 23. In 1998 a film titled '23' was released which depicts the life of Karl and his friends. Picture 4 shows a true phreaker/hacker in action. A site dedicated to his memory can be found here.

Boris Floricic

'Tron' -German hacker and member of the CCC (Chaos Computer Club). In 1998 Boris was found dead in a Neukoelln, Berlin park. Ruled a suicide, he was found hanged with a belt. A site dedicated to his memory can be found here.

Ian Murphy

'Captain Zap' was the first hacker to be tried and convicted as a felon. Murphy broke into AT&T's computers in 1981 and changed the internal clocks that metered billing rates. People were getting late-night discount rates when they called at midday.

Eric O. Jenott

Eric Jenott, a Fort Bragg, NC paratrooper is accused of hacking U.S. Army systems and furnishing passwords to a citizen of communist China. Eric's attorney says the Fort Bragg soldier is just a computer hacker who tested the strength of a supposedly impenetrable computer system, found a weakness and then told his superiors about it. Eric was later cleared of the spy charges, but found guilty of damaging government property and computer fraud.

Loyd Blankenship

'The Mentor' -LOD (Legion of Doom) member and author of the famous treatise, The Conscience of a Hacker, that comes to be known as the Hacker's Manifesto.

Paul Mockapetris

Internet pioneer and former Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Chair, Paul was the principle architect of the Domain Name System (DNS). He wrote the first DNS implementation while working at the University of Southern California.

Steven G. Steinberg    [website - email]

'Frank Drake' -Legion of Doom member. Can be found here.

Randy Tischler

'Taran King' -Phrack editor and creator.

Craig Neidorf

'Knight Lightning' -Phrack editor and co-creator. In 1988 Craig is raided by the federal authorities and indicted for publishing the E911 document (describes how the 911 emergency phone system works). The indictment said the "computerized text file" was worth $79,449, and a BellSouth security official testified at trial it was worth $24,639. The trial began on July 23, 1990 but the proceedings unexpectedly ended when the government asked the court to dismiss all the charges when it was discovered that the public could call a toll-free number and purchase the same E911 document for less than $20.

Donald Ervin Knuth    [homepage - email]

One of the founding fathers of computer science and the author of the TeX typesetting system as well as 'The Art of Computer Programming' and a number of deep, insightful papers and books.

Samir Rana

'Torner' -21 year-old London hacker and suspected member of the infamous hacking group Fluffy Bunny.

Scott E. Fahlman    [homepage - email]

On Sep. 19, 1982 computer scientist Scott Fahlman types the first online smiley. :-) Scott can be found here.

Andrew "Andy" Stuart Tanenbaum    [homepage - email - book]

Wrote the free Unix clone called Minix. Andrew also authored the popular book, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, which has become the Bible to the few that have written operating systems.

Brian W. Kernighan

Co-inventor of C programming language, with Dennis Ritchie, and one of the foreground figures in ancient Unix history. Also played a large role in AWK.

Patrick J. Volkerding    [website - email]

Slackware by Patrick Volkerding becomes the first commercial standalone distribution of Linux in 1993.

Paul G. Allen

Allen co-founded Microsoft Corporation with Bill Gates in 1975 and served as the company's executive vice president of research and new product development, the company's senior technology post, until 1983. Paul currently owns the Portland Trailblazers and Seattle Seahawks.

Steven Paul Jobs

Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976. Steve is also CEO of Pixar, the computer animation studios.

Marcian "Ted" Edward Hoff, Jr.

In 1968, Hoff joined Intel Corporation as one of its first employees. Hoff is credited as one of the first people to recognize how to make a single-chip CPU possible. He designed that architecture and so invented the first microprocessor, the chip that is essentially the "brains" in all of today's computers. Because of this, the Economist has called him "one of the seven most influential scientists since World War II."

Seymour Roger Cray

Widely considered to be the father of supercomputing, Seymour Cray was known for his passion for technological creativity and his constant search for new ideas. Cray founded Cray Research in 1972, and his name is still synonymous with the development of high speed computing.

Rafael Nu?z

'RaFa' -A senior security consultant with Scientech in Caracas, Venezuela and one time member of the notorious hacker group, 'World of Hell'. Rafael was written about in the book, "The Hacker Diaries" by Dan Verton.

Eugene Kashpureff

For eight days in July, 1997, a computer-security expert named Eugene Kashpureff pulled off one of the highest-profile hacks of this decade; he stole www.internic.net. More precisely, he redirected traffic from that website to his own, which lived at www.alternic.net.

Marcelo Tosatti

This 18-year-old from Brazil was picked as the new maintainer of the Linux 2.4 kernel. Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox seem to have chosen Marcelo because of his experience in kernel programming, his ability to communicate with all developers and his larger-than-life dose of common sense.

Paul "Rusty" Russell    [homepage - email]

"Rusty" Russell authored the current packet-filtering portion of the Linux kernel, the "IP firewall chains," its ipchains rule-specifier as well as several fixes to the GNU g++ compiler.

Ejovi Nuwere    [website - email]

Wrote the memoir Hacker Cracker: A Journey from the Mean Streets of Brooklyn to the Frontiers of Cyberspace.

Vasiliy Gorshkov

Vasiliy, age 27, of Chelyabinsk, Russia, sentenced 36 months in prison for his convictions on 20 counts of conspiracy, various computer crimes, and fraud committed against Speakeasy Network of Seattle, Washington; Nara Bank of Los Angeles, California; Central National Bank of Waco, Texas; and the online credit card payment company PayPal of Palo Alto, California.

William "Bill" Landreth    [book]

'the Cracker' -A bad picture of Bill but cool none the less. Bill was a member of the Inner Circle, an exclusive cracking club of the early 1980's. He began cracking when he was fouteen and retired at the ripe old age of 18 when FBI agents busted him and the Inner Circle in 1983. By then they had broken into computer systems of banks, newspapers, schools, the phone company, and credit card bureaus. The Inner Circle was indicted for computer fraud after they were caught tapping into the GTE Telemail Computer Network in Vienna, Virginia. Landreth was convicted and received three years probation. He now has a job in computer security.

Peter Jay Salzman    [homepage - email]

'Thomas Covenant' -Ex-LOD (Legion of Doom) member, Peter created a non-existant central office in New York City to get nearly a million dollars worth of Bell system tech journals and Bell operating procedures. He also used the virtual central office to get accounts into just about every switch, LMOS, COSMOS system in New York telephone. Peter was finally arrested for hacking in 1988 and sentenced to 6 months incarceration, $10,000 restitution, $2,000 fine, 3 years probation and no use of a computer for 5 years. Can be found here.

Ronald L. Rivest    [homepage - email]

Founder of RSA Data Security (he's the R in RSA). Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, and algorithms. Rivest helped invent the RSA public-key cryptosystem. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and has published numerous papers in these areas.

Adi Shamir

Founder of RSA Data Security (he's the S in RSA). Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer. He was one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm.

Leonard M. Adleman    [homepage - email]

Founder of RSA Data Security (he's the A in RSA). Adleman is known for being the inventor of the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem in 1977, and of DNA computing. RSA is now ubiquitous in security applications, including digital signatures. The latter may very well herald the future of computing.

John Warner Backus

Invented FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), the world's first higher-level computer language. The FORTRAN language contained a compiler, or translator, that made computers much easier to use. The compiler converted binary machine language (strings of ones and zeros) into words, resulting in a computer language that was so easy to understand that nonspecialists could learn it and use it.

Brian Behlendorf    [homepage - email]

Started the most popular web server project, Apache. Apache 1.0 was released on December 1, 1995.

Theodore Y. Ts'o    [homepage - email]

Theodore Ts'o has been C/Unix developer since 1987, and has been a Linux kernel developer since September 1991. He led the development of Kerberos V5 at MIT for seven years, and is the primary author and maintainer of the ext2/ext3 filesystem utilities.

Cyrus West Field

Cyrus West Field was an American businessman who was chiefly responsible for laying the first submarine telegraph cable between America and Europe. In 1854 Field proposed the construction of a 2,000-mile-long underwater telegraph line between Newfoundland and Ireland. In 1858 Field successfully established telegraphic communication between the two, but the line went dead after a month. A commercially viable cable was finally laid in 1866.

Andrew S. Grove

Grove is the Chairman of the Board of Intel Corporation, as well as a former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) who participated in the founding of the company.

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage was an English mathematician and inventor credited with conceiving the first automatic digital computer, a forerunner of the modern computer.

Donald L. Pipkin    [book - book]

An Information Security Architect at Hewlett-Packard. Has been with HP eighteen years; most of that time has been spent in the area of information security. Author of Halting the Hacker: A Practical Guide to Computer Security and Information Security: Protecting the Global Enterprise.

M. Douglas McIlroy    [homepage - email]

Head of the research department at Bell Labs when UNIX was born. Invented Pipes and Filters for UNIX.
cat * | grep "alice" | grep -v "wonderland" | wc -l

Stephen C. Tweedie

Stephen has been a Linux kernel hacker since early 1993, when he started helping with ext2 development and he has worked on various parts of the kernel since, especially on filesystems and the VM. He wrote and maintains the ext3 journaled filesystem. Currently works for Red Hat.

Paul Vixie

Paul Vixie has been contributing to Internet protocols and UNIX systems as a protocol designer and software architect since 1980. Early in his career, he developed and introduced sends, proxynet, rtty, cron and other lesser-known tools. Today, Paul is considered the primary modern author and technical architect of BINDv8 the Berkeley Internet Name Domain Version 8. He formed the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) in 1994.

Rob Pike    [homepage - email]

Canadian who was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories. In 1981 he wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix systems, and has since written ten more. With Bart Locanthi he designed the Blit terminal; with Brian Kernighan he authored the books, The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. Currently works for Google.

Tim O'Reilly    [homepage - email]

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., the publisher whose books are considered the definitive works on Open Source technologies such as Perl, Linux, Apache, and the Internet infrastructure. Tim convened the first "Open Source Summit" to bring together the leaders of major Open Source communities, and has been active in promoting the Open Source movement through writing, speaking, and conferences.

Marshall Kirk McKusick    [website - email]

Copyright holder of the BSD Daemon image. Kirk also writes books and articles, consults, and teaches classes on Unix- and BSD-related subjects. While at the University of California at Berkeley, he implemented the 4.2BSD fast file system, and was the Research Computer Scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. Can be found here.

Tom Paquin

Tom first joined IBM Research to work on a project involving parallel processors, but ended up doing a bitmapped graphics accelerator (AMD 29116-based) for the then-new PC. Later he worked joined Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) in May 1989, where he had the unlucky task of integrating the GL and X. He then joined Jim Clark and Marc Andreesson at Netscape in April 1994. He was the very first engineering manager, guiding his team through the 1.0 and 2.0 releases of Mozilla.

Scott O. Bradner

Scott has been involved in the design, operation, and use of data networks at Harvard University since the early days of the ARPAnet. He was involved in the design of the Harvard High-Speed Data Network (HSDN), the Longwood Medical Area network (LMAnet), and NEARNET. He was founding chair of the technical committees of LMAnet, NEARNET, and CoREN.

Andrew K. Morton

An English-born Aussie, Andrew Morton has worked on a wide range of kernel components, including ext3 on 2.4 and the low-latency patch. Andrew Morton will be the maintainer for the Linux 2.6 kernel and he recently joined The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) along with Linus Torvalds.

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Dutch computer pioneer. Among his contributions to computer science are the shortest path-algorithm, also known as Dijkstra's algorithm. He received the Turing Award in 1972.

David S. Miller    [email]

When Alan Cox gets a patch for Linux's TCP/IP code, he forwards it to David Miller. As well as being the arbiter of this important piece of networking code, Miller headed up the UltraPenguin (also called SparcLinux and UltraLinux, at different times) project to port Linux to Sparc CPUs, wrote a well-known document on the kernel's page-flush mechanism, introduced "fuzzy hashing" for certain memory accesses, and has done several other deep kernel fixes. Works for Red Hat.

Larry W. McVoy

Larry came from SUN Microsystems, is author of the sourceware document and founder of a startup called BitMover Inc. Bitmover's main product "BitKeeper Source Management software" is mainly written for Linus Torvalds after the "Linus doesn't scale" and VGER issue back in 1998.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Google founders. 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. From this Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California in 1998.

Robert Malda    [website - email]

In 1997 Rob started Slashdot, a must-read web site for anyone trying to read the collective pulse of the tech industry.

Ward Christensen and Randy Suess

Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, creators of the first Dial-Up CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System) in 1978.

Donald Watts Davies

Donald Davies and his colleagues at the UK National Physical Laboratories independently discovered the idea of packet switching, and later developed a smaller scale packet-switched version of the ARPANET.

Alexey V. Ivanov

Ivanov, age 23, of Chelyabinsk, Russia, sentenced 48 months in prison for numerous charges of conspiracy, various computer crimes, and fraud committed against Speakeasy Network of Seattle, Washington; Nara Bank of Los Angeles, California; Central National Bank of Waco, Texas; and the online credit card payment company PayPal of Palo Alto, California.

Kenneth H. Olsen

Olsen developed the first successful minicomputer and is best known for inventing "Magnetic Core Memory". He is the co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation where they developed the MicroVAX which placed a minicomputer structure on a single microchip.

Tatu Ylonen    [email]

In 1995, Ylonen invented Secure Shell (SSH) for remote logins.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto    [email]

The creator of the Ruby programming language. Matz is also known as one of the open source evangelists in Japan.

John George Kemeny

Kemeny invented, along with Thomas Kurtz, the BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) computer programming language, one of the most commonly used computer programming languages, in 1964 at Dartmouth College. Kemeny also worked on the Manhattan Project (1945) and afterwards (1948-49) as Albert Einstein's assistant.

Thomas Eugene Kurtz

Kurtz invented, along with John Kemeny, the BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) computer programming language, one of the most commonly used computer programming languages, in 1964 at Dartmouth College.

David J. Bradley

IBM engineer, Bradley is the man who gave the world the "three-finger salute." He's responsible for the Ctrl-Alt-Delete combination that every Windows user has come to know and hate. However it's actually a case of good intensions gone bad through over-use by Microsoft. Bradley intended it as a tool for developers who would need to reboot their machines regularly, never to be seen by the average user. Microsoft turned it into the ubiquitous multi-trick pony it is today.

Michael Bruce Sterling    [book - email]

His 1992 book The Hacker Crackdown is non-fiction, describing the law enforcement and computer-crime activities that led to the start of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990. Bruce is widely considered to be one of the original founders of the early 1980s creators of the pessimistic and dystopian cyberpunk genre of science fiction.

Robert "Bob" William Bemer

Programmer Bob Bemer is often called the father of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) for his role in creating and standardizing the ASCII character set. The ASCII set consists of 128 characters that incorporate the upper- and lowercase alphabet, the numberals from 0 to 9, punctuation marks, and special characters (such as the backslash [/]) used in programming and on the keyboard. This set is standardized for use in computing, with each of the characters being assigned a specific number from 0 to 127.