John R. Levine
(He gets to go first because this web page is hosted on his computer.
So there.)
John R. Levine was a member
of a computer club in high school -- before high school students, or
even high schools, had computers. He met Theodor H. Nelson, author of
Computer Lib and inventor of hypertext, who reminded us that computers
should not be taken seriously and that everyone can and should
understand and use computers.
John wrote his first program on an IBM
1130 (a computer roughly as powerful as your typical modern digital
wristwatch, only harder to use) in 1967. He became an official system
administrator of a networked computer at Yale in 1975. He started
working part-time, for a computer company, of course, in 1977, and has
been in and out of the computer and network biz ever since. He got his
company put on Usenet early enough that it appears in
a 1982 Byte magazine article, which included a map of Usenet
sites.
He used to spend most of his time writing software, but now he
mostly writes books (including
UNIX For Dummies and
The Internet for Dummies)
because it's more fun and he can
do so at home in the tiny village of Trumansburg, N.Y.
He also does some lecturing and consulting, and is the municipal
water and sewer commisioner.
("Mess with me, pal, and you'll never flush again.")
B.A. and a Ph.D in Computer Science from Yale University, but please
don't hold that against him.