 | John McCarthy (1927-2011) - The inventor of LISP programming language, father of AI and functional programming and time sharing systems. |
 | Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011) - The inventor of the C programming language and Unix operating system which bring us the portability and allow a higher level of application development. The famous Linux and Mac OSX are both Unix variants which inheriting its reliability. |
 | Steve Jobs (1955-2011) - revolutionized several industries - personal computers, movies, musics and phones, brought us several fancy products including iPod, iPhone and iPad, not to mention Apple II which started the era of PC. |
In addition to the proximity of their dates of death, they have something in common. All of them are pioneers and visionaries. They all love simplicity and elegance.
LISP has only just a handful of constructs (atoms, lists, variables, constants and functions) and made a program itself as a data structure that can be manipulated by the program itself. It also pioneered the concept of garbage collection common to all modern programming languages.
C allows us to write efficient programs yet ignoring the underlying hardware architecture (to certain extend). It is used everywhere from your video recorders to supercomputers. It is now the second most popular programming language just behind Java (which itself heavily borrowed from C syntax)
Apple I is the first commericalized personal computer though may limited to electronic hobbyists. Apple II is a well received personal computer that once made Apple a fast growing company in the time, not to mention iPhone and iPad which change the games in phones and mobile computing.
