Top 10 Great Britons in IT history

Never let it be said that we don't listen to our readers. A previous Top 10 list attracted the comment that we were being too US-centric in our lists, and to make up for it here's a list of the Top 10 British people in the history of IT.

It's a diverse bunch of people. Britain has a long history of inventors and was in the vanguard of computer development, particularly in its early stages. Many people here have long since turned to dust, but half of those listed are still alive and I've got commode-hugging drunk with two of them over the years.

Shaun was a little apprehensive when we first came up with the idea for the list, since as the Brit on the team I might be picking some obscure people. As it was, he picked out some I'd never heard of, and has been doing some research ever since. Besides, many of these people are giants in their field and are internationally famous.

So here it is, our list of the best, although we're willing to debate the choices. As ever, your comments are appreciated, especially yours Torben Mogensen.

Honourable Mention: Sir Alan Sugar
Iain Thomson: Alan Sugar, or 'Siralan' as he is now known, may be the British face of The Apprentice these days, but in the 1980s he played a pivotal role in the development of home and small business computing in Europe.

After modestly shortening his company's name from Alan Michael Sugar Trading to Amstrad, Sugar decided to get into the computing boom by buying up cheap components in the Far East and turning them into home computers, of a sort. The high point of this was the Amstrad PCW.

In computing terms the computer looked a dead loss. It used non-standard 3in floppy drives, had an ugly monitor with a couple of disk drives built into the side, had just 512KB of RAM and a lousy keyboard. You got an operating system, a word processing package called Locoscript (which drove you mad) and a noisy dot-matrix printer. But it had one killer selling point.

The PCW went on sale in 1985 for £399 plus tax. If you wanted to buy an IBM PC back then it would have cost around £2,500, and the applications much more. So with the PCW a huge number of businesses and home users were suddenly able to get their hands on a computer at a price that suited. Sugar sold millions of them.

Many have lasted a surprisingly long time. Even now I still see them around, usually in the offices of very small companies, or very old ones. There's even one buried under a statue of Alan Turing in Manchester as a tribute to his role in computing history.

Shaun Nichols: Low-end computers are a very tricky business to be in. With the razor-thin profit margins and constant fluctuation of prices, companies have very little room for error, and much rests on being able to get into the right place at the right time.

Sugar did this extremely well as he was able to spot a UK market that was ready for widespread adoption at the right price, and devised a system with which he could meet that price. The sale of an Amstrad most certainly didn't generate the profits that the sale of an IBM PC or Apple II system did, but the company was able to move enough of them to do very well for itself.

In terms of the impact on the PC retail industry and the way systems were built and sold, Sugar's model ranks right up there with Dell's direct model and Apple's minimalist system design.

Honourable Mention: Graham Cluley
Iain Thomson: If you read IT security stories in the UK computing press with any regularity, you'll have heard of Graham Cluley, senior security consultant at Sophos.

When Shaun and I were putting the list together over lunch, Cluley's name came up and we both paused for thought. Cluley's a bit of a guilty secret among the UK tech press - he's a source on everyone's mobile because he knows his stuff and gives very good quote. At one point he was the most quoted company spokesperson in the whole UK press.

Part of this is down to his employer. Sophos is the largest private company in the IT security market, and has carved out a very successful business niche with very good software. The founders and owners still work there, albeit in a reduced capacity these days. It values its independence and its staff do likewise. This allows Cluley the freedom to be blunter than normal.

But the main reason you'll see him in the press so much is that he has a great turn of phrase, holds nothing sacred and can explain complex problems simply. When you spend days talking to bland spokespeople so highly media trained that they won't even laugh in case it deviates from the corporate script, it's a delight to chat to someone who knows a lot about computer security and says what he likes.

Shaun Nichols: OK, so maybe it's a bit of a reach, but Graham Cluley is without doubt the most visible face in UK cyber security right now.

Cluley also takes great pains to stay on top of the security world and blogs religiously about the latest goings-on. As such, he is a favourite of tech journos around the world. When a new issue breaks or a trend emerges, he is there to provide insight and clearly explain just what this means to end users and admins.

It may seem like a little thing, but such an attitude and approach is rare in these days when proof-of-concept and vulnerability disclosures dominate the headlines, and the actual risk and impact often goes unnoticed.

10. David Jones
Shaun Nichols: Thers's a pretty good chance that most people have never heard of Scottish developer David Jones, but just about everyone is familiar with his work on some of the most popular and controversial games ever.

Jones started in the late 1980s as a co-founder of DMA, the Scotland-based company that scored an early hit with Lemmings. The light-hearted puzzle game was one of the first to really hit it big with the newly emerging crowd of 'casual' video game players.

It was their later work that would really put Jones and his company on the map, however. In 1997 DMA released a 2D action game in which the user played the role of a car-stealing, ultra violent anti-hero. That game was, you guessed it, Grand Theft Auto.

Several releases and a few more business wheelings and dealings later, DMA morphed into video gaming giant Rock Star North. Jones left the company in the late 1990s amidst the business dealings, but his work spawned a gaming icon. Grand Theft Auto has become one of the most controversial and popular franchises of all time.

Iain Thomson: We thought at the start of this list process that Shaun would be at a disadvantage, but he brought this name up right away and I'd never heard of the bloke, despite being hooked on some of his games.

Lemmings was one of those simple games that led to lost weekends and occasionally sucked up more office time than should be the case. Getting the little devils to safety (and occasionally blowing them up for fun) consumed many an evening in my youth and the Grand Theft series have redefined a whole computer game genre, as well as sucking up considerable amounts of play time.

Jones's big step was to integrate great gameplay with a dark, mordant and very British sense of humour. It takes a certain kind of mind to even think of a game where you can sleep with the participants, then rob and kill them, and where low pixel lemmings clutched their heads and cried "Oh no!" when you set them to blow up.

Moralists may deplore the perceived evil of these games but they can't ignore the fact that they are incredibly popular. This isn't because secretly all Grand Theft Auto players are homicidal manics who want to destroy civilisation, but because it's fun to occasionally let off steam with some mindless entertainment. Games don't kill people, people do.

9. Sean Maloney
Iain Thomson: Sean Maloney is the co-general manager of Intel and currently front runner to take the top job when chief executive Paul Otellini retires.

Born to Irish parents in south east London, Maloney has worked for Intel since 1982 and was spotted by former Intel legend Andy Grove, who made him his technical assistant. He's spent the past few years in California after stints in Asia and Europe and as a result his accent can swerve 4,000 miles in an instant.

He's got as far as he has because he knows his stuff, is fascinated by computers and is a genuinely likeable and enthusiastic person. That said, there's a fair few of such people at Intel, and Maloney has also proved adept at navigating the voracious shark pool of internal company politics to get to his current position.

Maloney is more management oriented than highly technical and that used to be a handicap at Intel. But since Otellini showed that you didn't have to have a PhD to lead the chip giant, Maloney looks set to move up the list if we revisit it in later years.

Shaun Nichols: It is interesting to see the change of corporate climate that has taken place in Silicon Valley recently.

First there was the decline in IPOs that changed the way investments were approached, then there was the growth of acquisitions, which changed the way larger companies expanded and evolved their operations, and now we're seeing changes at the very top of companies.

Whereas the chief executive position used to belong to the engineers and developers who created the first products and rode meteoric growth to an executive spot, the economic realities have led companies to oust the visionary founder types and move towards more seasoned business minds.

First you had Otellini at Intel, then there was Mark Hurd with HP, then Carol Bartz at Yahoo. If Maloney moves into the top spot at some point, it will be a strong indication of the way in which the corporate end of the tech sector is evolving.

8. Ada Lovelace
Shaun Nichols: Not a stranger to our top ten lists, Ada Lovelace has more than earned her place in this particular round-up.

Back when Charles Babbage was tinkering with the idea for something called the 'Difference Engine', wealthy socialite and mathematician Ada Lovelace was looking at ways to manipulate the machine to perform complex calculations in short periods of time.

In other words, Ada Lovelace was the first person to dabble in computer programming, and she did it decades before anyone else even began to consider the idea.

I know we harp on about this every time Lovelace comes up in a list, but it really is a shame that more students are not taught about her. If the contributions of women such as Lovelace and Grace Hopper were better known, it is likely that we would have many more bright young women entering the computer science and engineering worlds.

Iain Thomson: Lovelace should be taught in class not only for her programming achievements but because she proved a very important point: given equal education women and men are as good as each other.

Lovelace was doubly fortunate in that she was not only born to a wealthy family but a highly unusual one where the female members were educated. Serious academics of the time warned against women becoming over educated, some claiming that women's education led to senility.

For women of Lovelace's class the only education most of them received was basic reading and writing skills, a bit of history and maybe a foreign language. They were expected to look pretty, breed sons and shut up.

Lovelace showed that, given the right education, women could advance just as well as men and, in her case, further. This led the establishment to treat her with suspicion, and her skills and behaviour, which would have been accepted in any man, were subject to malicious gossip about loose living and drug addiction. Rather than settling down to domestic servitude she broke barriers in science and beyond.

Her contribution to the early history of computing should be recognised, but so too is her proof that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was right: well-behaved women seldom make history.

7. Sir Arthur C Clarke
Iain Thomson: Arthur C Clarke may be best remembered as a gifted novelist, but he had an important role in the world of IT thanks to a small paper he wrote for the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) in 1945.

His idea was simple. He worked out that an artificial satellite, if placed 36,000km above the planet, would be geostationary i.e. it would rotate over the same point on the earth. A network of these satellites could be created which would be able to broadcast information around the world almost instantaneously.

It was a revolutionary idea, all the more so given that, despite its grand sounding name, the BIS was little more than a club for inspired space enthusiasts to develop ideas for projects Britain couldn't afford.

Large parts of the country were smoking holes in the ground and food was scarce, so trips to the Moon were right out. Nevertheless, the article was published in Wireless World and caught the imagination of governments and businesses.

In less than 20 years the first satellite was orbiting in the Clarke Orbit, as it is now officially known, and there are now 300 in place relaying everything from vital data to mind-numbing soaps.

Oddly enough, Clarke once said that he rued the day the transistor was invented. Transistors allowed satellites to be automated, whereas vacuum tubes needed humans to maintain them, necessitating the building of space stations. The transistor set back man's exploration into space years, he said. Nevertheless Clarke recognised the value of it and was a passionate advocate for satellite communications until his death.

Clarke may also have popularised another great technical invention that will change the life of future generations. He popularised the concept of a Space Elevator built from the ground to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, which vastly reduces the cost of getting into space. It is widely seen as the only long-term way of establishing a future outside of Planet Earth.

Shaun Nichols: If you want to get some idea of what technology may look like in the coming decades, cracking open a contemporary work of science fiction is as good a way as any to peer into the future.

Whether they're merely accurate predictions or self-fulfilling prophecies, the ideas of authors such as Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov are manifesting themselves in various ways as the technologies of today and the near future.

Clarke's foreshadowing of what is now known as the GPS and satellite broadcast system is eerily accurate. Moreover, the space elevator idea that once seemed so far-fetched is perhaps edging closer to reality, as research on the design for a system and the elements to make it feasible are currently receiving millions of dollars in research grants and prizes.

6. Dr Alan Solomon
Shaun Nichols: In 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered that a certain type of fungus could actually kill off germs and infections in the human body. The result was penicillin and it's the reason many of us aren't ravaged by diseases or dying from infection today.

In 1988, Dr Alan Solomon discovered that a collection of simple programs and scripts could automatically detect and kill off computer viruses. The result was Dr Solomon's antivirus and it's the reason many of our computers aren't ravaged by malware today.

When he originally developed his toolkit in the early days of home computing, Solomon no doubt failed to grasp its impact. He was just tired of having to go around and fix friends' computers in person. But that collection of programs signalled the birth of what is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Without it, we all very well could be wading through countless pop-ups, crashes and slowdowns today.

Iain Thomson: For years Dr Solly's was the gold standard of computer security. If it couldn't fix our infection you might as well junk the computer.

But he's this high up on the list for another reason as well. Dr Solomon drove the idea that the nascent computer security software sector should adopt some highly unusual practices, most notably the sharing of data.

Even today anti-virus technicians around the world share data about new malware. The first person to find a piece of code got naming rights and then told everyone else in the community so that all security suites could protect against it. It's highly illogical behaviour but it means much better computer security for the rest of us.

It still goes on today. When Microsoft started to move into the security field with its OneCare product there was considerable concern in the community that it wouldn't take part in a system like this, but thankfully Redmond saw sense and carried on the practice.

5. Sir Clive Sinclair
Iain Thomson: Teenagers are renowned for spending their adolescence hunched over in their bedrooms, but in 1980s Britain many were more wholesomely hunched over one of Clive Sinclair's creations.

The Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum computers were the first genuinely cheap home PCs in the UK, and possibly the world. The ZX80 cost £79.99 in 1980 if you were prepared to assemble it yourself, but it was a working computer that you could program. A year later he improved the hardware with the ZX81 and cut the price to under £50, setting a business model that the industry still follows.

Sinclair became a national figure and a much loved and derided one. He has the look of the oddball inventor about him, which is handy because that's exactly what he is. He made a fortune inventing a cheap calculator at a time when they cost a fortune and did the same with the home computer, before losing a large chunk of his funds on an electric car, the infamous C5.

On a personal note the ZX81 was the first computer I spent any time on and I still have it, although its RAM pack has long since died. I'm still tempted to see if it'll work, and occasionally tell incredulous younger people (yes I'm looking at you Shaun) of the days when real men loaded software using an audio cassette and deft manipulation of the tone control button.

Shaun Nichols: What's this 'audio cassette' you speak of, Iain? Is it some sort of precursor to the telegraph which you used to communicate with neighbouring villages as a child?

A couple of weeks ago we took some flack for not including Sinclair on our list of technology also-rans, and I must admit that we made a mistake in overlooking the company.

While they had their quirks and limitations, Sinclair machines were far better than many of the discount computer offerings of the time, membrane keyboards and all.

The company also helped to play a vital role in shaping the development of the country's tech sector. At a time when their counterparts in the US and Japan were busy mashing away at console controllers and buying pre-fabricated game cartridges, many young people in the UK were learning how to write and load up games on their own. As a result, the UK was able to develop a disproportionately high number of programmers compared to many other countries.

4. Charles Babbage
Shaun Nichols: Imagine what would happen if computer scientists in 2091 were to examine the plans and design of the PDP 11 computer. They would no doubt have a chuckle at its simplicity, inefficiency and limited capability.

Keep that in mind, because in 1991, some 200 years after the death of Charles Babbage, computer scientists recreated his Difference Engine after two years of painstaking work and found that it actually outperformed many of the handheld calculators we use today.

To say that Babbage was beyond his time was an understatement. He was the combination of visionary and engineering genius that comes along maybe once every few generations. In the days long before vacuum tubes, transistors and integrated circuits, Babbage constructed a mechanical machine capable of performing complex mathematical tasks. It was, more or less, the first computer.

Unfortunately, Babbage's designs did not receive the attention they deserved until decades later, when electronic computing finally emerged and its scope was realised. As an homage to Babbage, a few of his creations have been reconstructed, including copies of the Difference Engine in the London Science Museum and the Computing History Museum in Silicon Valley.

Iain Thomson: The electron hadn't even been discovered when Babbage first got his idea for a computer, so he worked with the tools that he had and built machines of wonder, the very first computers - although the Antikythera mechanism may have beaten him to it.

That he managed to do it at all was impressive, but also heart-rending that the job was never completed and followed through. In the novel The Difference Engine Bruce Sterling and William Gibson raised some very interesting alternative history models. In one Earth, steampunk may be the n orm.

The concept of using machines for calculation is almost as old as mankind. The abacus is found in many cultures and is still in widespread use, but what Babbage saw was that you could take these early machines and industrialise the method of counting.

This was hardly surprising, as Britain was then leading the world in the Industrial Revolution. If Babbage's work had been taken forward, the computing world would be unrecognisable today.

3. Tommy Flowers
Iain Thomson: I've got a soft spot for Tommy Flowers, who is one of the most unsung geniuses behind the computer revolution.

When the Second World War broke out Flowers was working at the Post Office on the then revolutionary idea of building telephone switching stations using electronics. He was recruited to the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park to build the first computers. Flowers was arguably the first British hardware engineer, and possibly the first the world has ever known.

At Bletchley he built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer. Now you might think that, with the war on, this would have been easy. But Flowers couldn't get the Bletchley management to invest in Colossus so he built it anyway, funding construction himself. Colossus and its successors were essential in cracking the Axis codes.

After the war Flowers, like the other heroes of Bletchley, was treated poorly. A grateful nation awarded him a meaningless title and the sum of £1,000, less than he'd spent building Colossus in the first place.

To cap it all he then had to destroy eight of remaining computers, with the last two going to the government codebreaking team at GCHQ where they worked until 1960. The recreation of Colossus was only made possible because Flowers disobeyed orders and saved some parts and plans.

His role in the early days of computing was hushed up and it wasn't until the 1970s that the tale of those early days of computing was released. The sole public recognition of Flowers is a small London street named 'Flowers Close' in his honour.

Shaun Nichols: The heroes of Bletchley Park dominate the top of this list, and rightfully so. The work they did helped to shape the development of the entire planet in the latter half of the 20th century, and only recently have they been rightfully recognised and applauded for it.

It's amazing to think about the circumstances in which the bedrock for the IT world was laid. Working long hours under cramped conditions, the scientists at Bletchley Park also operated with the knowledge that failure could well result in the loss of millions of lives and possibly even the eventual downfall of their country.

Even under those conditions, Flowers and his team made strides in science and electronics that nobody would have dreamed of only a few years earlier. And after the war their work has resulted in the complete transformation of the way we look at business, recreation and communications.

2. Alan Turing
Shaun Nichols: The life story of Alan Turing is truly one of the most inspiring and tragic of the 20th century. To this day it elicits a mixture of pride and regret among the technology community. Few people have contributed so much to society and been treated so harshly in return.

Working under immense pressure and exhausting conditions at Bletchley Park's Hut 8 facility, Turing and his team worked night and day to break the German Enigma code cipher. Doing so helped the Allies gain the upper hand in the war, and is likely to have saved tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives.

After the war, Turing continued his work in the field and helped to develop what would be known as the first computer capable of executing stored programs.

Tragically, Turning was later prosecuted as a homosexual and eventually committed suicide. What is perhaps even more tragic, is that it took 55 years before the government finally recognised how shameful the treatment of Turing was and issue an official apology to the man.

Iain Thomson: The British apology, and the news that surviving members of Bletchley will be recognised was too little too late for many of the veterans who worked there. I've got my doubts about the sincerity of the gesture, especially considering Bletchley's current money troubles.

Turing was one of those rare geniuses who could seemingly master anything. While he's best known in the computing sphere he also did advanced work in physics, chemistry and biology. But computing was his focus for many years and it's fair to say that he was a lynch-pin in the development of the modern computer and the software needed to run it.

He was years ahead of his time, writing a computer chess program that lacked a computer powerful enough to run it. He ran it anyway in 1952 by playing the role of the computer and reportedly beat a human opponent. His ideas are still affecting research into artificial intelligence (AI) today, and his idea of training computers rather than trying to program a fully functional AI system shows promise.

That it took so long for Turing's work to be recognised says a lot about Cold War paranoia and social attitudes, but now his country of birth has finally recognised what a great talent we lost.

1. Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Shaun Nichols: Seeing as how we wouldn't be able to write this article, nor would you be able to read it, had it not been for Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the top spot here was a no-brainer.

Berners-Lee was working as a programmer at CERN when he embarked on a project to standardise the transmission and storage of data between networked systems. What he eventually came up with was a system known as the Hypertext Transport Protocol, better known as HTTP. This deservedly earned Berners-Lee a slew of awards and proper recognition as the father of the World Wide Web.

But the man wasn't without his errors. Most notably, Berners-Lee was critical of the idea of adding images to the web's text content. He even went as far as to express his displeasure with the idea to the young punk behind the project, one Marc Andreessen. Fortunately, Sir Tim lost out and the creation of the web browser went forward.

Berners-Lee also confessed to another gaffe earlier this year when he admitted that the // characters in the URL were unnecessary and had likely wasted a good amount of ink and energy.

Still, that whole creating the web thing kind of trumps those other mistakes, don't you think?

Iain Thomson: I always get angry when we get letters complaining that the Large Hadron Collider and CERN are a waste of money. The irony of people complaining online when a CERN employee literally gave away the World Wide Web seems to escape them. There's a reason why you let geeks do pure research: it allows them to develop all sorts of accidental spin-offs.

We forget how many vital inventions were discovered by accident. The electron was discovered 20 years before it was ever used, x-rays and penicillin were both accidental discoveries and the web definitely was.

Berners-Lee was simply trying to develop a system for sharing information between CERN researchers. So he built a system to link documents over the internet communications system and share them with anyone else.

"I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and - ta-da! - the World Wide Web, " as he said.

CERN then promptly gave away all the underlying technology behind the TCP/IP protocol and the modern internet was born. Everything you see and do online is down to this man.

Even though Berners-Lee received no direct compensation for giving away the most important invention of his generation, he's done all right since then as the prizes and plaudits have rolled in. He continues to w ork in the field and is a strong proponent of net neutrality and data privacy.