Other Unsung hero of technology?

Then while we're on the subject of bread, Squidward Tentacles or some guy in Tentacle Acres who made the bread:

 

@kidmod

squidward didn't invent canned bread, it's a product he was able to buy when he moved to tentacle acres

 

Hence:

 

naw that bread was imported from rock bottom

 

While I agree partly with Richard's ideals, his fanaticism for software freedom sometimes goes over the top.

I want the freedom to have free software, but I also want the freedom to be able to choose Proprietary binary blob graphics drivers for instance, because now and for the forseeable future, gaming GPU makers will not open-source their drivers.

 

Dennis Ritchie author of C and Unix.

Died just after Steve Jobs and not one news outfit apart from the tech ones reported on it.

Guy did more for Computing than Jobs could have ever hoped to achieve.

Boils my blood thinking about it.

 

SEGA are worth a mention for the Saturn/Dreamcast. Both ahead of their time and failed for various reasons, leading to their exit from the hardware market.

Virtua fighter/racing are also worth a mention, if any of you played them in the arcades (remember those?)

Not up there with the likes of Richard Stallman and Dennis Ritchie obviously.

 

I would daresay IBM, they innovated on a rather ludicrous level with hardware and software. Hell they had some of the best keyboards.

I want to say 3DFX if only because they made the first proper multi-GPU setup. ARM definitively deserves a mention because of the massive traction they have now.

And although this is a rather strange one, I'll mention NEC and Fujitsu in unsung heroes. They pioneered some of the best flat panel display technologies and computing technologies that were actually rather widely used in the past. Now they're kind of obscure though.

 

Not a single person, but I'd put forward NASA. During the early years of the space race, they ordered computer parts, especially the newly designed integrated circuits in massive quantities - millions of ICs at a time. This bulk purchasing of what was, at the time, a brand new technology undoubtedly helped to steamroller the adoption of ICs in computing - perhaps without which we wouldn't have such powerful devices today.

More info here: Radio 4 - For All Mankind