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.