I am reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell on the circumstances of successful careers. The book argues that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy and more succesful computer pioneers were born between 1950-1955, and did absolve around 10000 hours of practice before microcomputers became widely available in the 1970s and their fairy tale success story begins. As we are in the age of web 2.0 with new forms of databases and persuasive access to information, who are in your opinion the most succesful computer programmers or scientists of our times, when were they born and to which technologies they had access?