For every world-famous name with a world famous fortune, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael

Dell, there are hundreds of other individuals who have moved the IT industry and its technology inexorably forward. Fame and fortune has rarely been their immediate spur. A passion for changing the world through technology is the hallmark of the IT Greats. Sometimes they have changed technology, sometimes they have transformed the way technology is marketed or radically altered the way IT is perceived by society. Some have been involved in great leaps forward, some have made incremental changes that have stood the test of time.

Steve Jobs: innovator who enjoyed a second bite of the apple Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple Computer, topped the Computer Weekly 40th anniversary poll due to the devoted following he has generated through his pioneering work in personal computing and product design. Jobs was born in 1955 in San Francisco, and during his high school years he showed his early enthusiasm for computing by attending afterschool lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He met fellow Apple founder Steve Wozniak during a summer job at HP.

Tim Berners-Lee: father of the web and champion of IT freedom Dotcoms, bloggers and Google all have one man to thank for their place in the 21st century world. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee made the imaginative leap to combine the internet with the hypertext concept, and the worldwide web was born. Born in 1955 in London, Berners-Lees parents were both mathematicians who were employed together on the team that built the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers.

Bill Gates: mixing maths and money to build microsoft As joint founder of the worlds biggest software company, Microsoft, Bill Gatess approach to technology and business was instrumental in making technology available to the masses. Gates was born in Seattle, Washington in 1955 to a wealthy family: his father was a prominent lawyer and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and The United Way. At school Gates excelled in mathematics and the sciences and by the age of 13 he was deeply engrossed in software programming.

Of your choice of the most influential people in IT, James Gosling is the true geek. Unlike Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, neither of whom finished college, Gosling completed a PhD in computer science and contributed to software innovation at a technical level. Born in 1955 near Calgary, Canada, Gosling is best known as the father of the Java programming language, the first programme language designed with the internet in mind and which could adapt to highly distributed applications. Gosling received a BSc in computer science from the University of Calgary in 1977, and while working towards his doctorate he created the original version of the Emacs text editor for Unix (Gosmacs). He also built a multi-processor version of Unix, as well as several compilers and mail systems before starting work in the industry.

As the creator of the Linux operating system, Linus Torvalds has been a driving force behind the whole open source movement, which represents not only an ever increasing challenge to proprietary software, but is also the inspiration for the industry to move to open standards. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the Linux kernel.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, an initiative to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software. Stallman has written several popular tools, created the GNU licence and campaigns against software patents.

2001: A Space Odyssey writer Arthur C Clarke has consistently been ahead of his time in predicting how technology will change the world. Most notably, in 1945 he suggested that geostationary satellites would make ideal telecoms relays.

Ted Codd created 12 rules on which every relational database is built - an essential ingredient for building business computer systems.

Steve Shirley was an early champion of women in IT. She founded the company now known as Xansa, pioneered new work practices and in doing so created new opportunities for women in technology.

With Brent Hoberman, Martha Lane Fox created Lastminute.com in 1998, and as "the face" of Lastminute raised the profile of e-commerce ever higher in the public consciousness.