Curated playlist
American computer programmers
- Elon MuskIn 2001, Elon Musk traveled to Moscow twice to buy missiles, hoping to launch a plant greenhouse to Mars.
- Mark ZuckerbergIn January 2024, Mark Zuckerberg turned to families of harmed children at a Senate hearing and apologized.
- Bill GatesBill Gates and Paul Allen wrote software for a computer they did not have. Their Altair demo worked the first time.
- Sergey BrinSergey Brin, co-founder of Google, helped build a search tool that grew faster than its makers expected. His partner Larry Page later recalled the moment the project began to feel real: "Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day. And we…
- Nick SzaboIn 1998, Nick Szabo designed a digital currency called bit gold. It was never built but is called a Bitcoin precursor.
- Satya NadellaOn the 4th of February 2014, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella would become its chief executive. He was the third person to hold that job, following Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. The choice put a Hyderabad-born engineer at the head of…
- Marc AndreessenMarc Andreessen was earning $6.85 an hour as a programmer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications when he helped build the tool that made the internet feel like a place. He was born in 1971, and he is now an American…
- Sam AltmanSam Altman was fired as OpenAI's CEO in November 2023. Most of the staff threatened to quit, and he returned.
- Jeff BezosJeff Bezos read a single statistic in the spring of 1994. Web usage, it said, was growing at 2,300 percent a year. Within months he had walked away from a senior job on Wall Street to sell books over the internet. He warned many of his…
- Donald KnuthDonald Knuth, an American computer scientist born in 1938, pays $2.56 to anyone who finds a mistake in one of his books. The number is deliberate. As he explains it, 256 pennies make one hexadecimal dollar. A smaller reward of $0.32 goes…
- Grace HopperGrace Hopper hung a clock on her office wall that ran counterclockwise. She wanted code in plain English.
- Steve WozniakSteve Wozniak, nicknamed Woz, built his first computer in June 1971. A newspaper reporter destroyed it by stepping on the power supply cable. He had built the machine with his friend Bill Fernandez as a self-taught engineering project. It…