Kilby invented his integrated circuit in the summer of 1958 while the rest of the staff at Texas Instruments were on holiday. The rookie engineer used a single block of germanium to build all of the necessary components for an electronic circuit, eliminating the need to solder thousands of components to a single board when building computing circuits.

Some six months later Intel's Robert Noyce, unaware of Kilby's work, constructed a circuit from a single block of silicon. Noyce's methods later became the first microprocessor and enabled computing as we know it. Both men deservedly earned Nobel prizes for their work.

Iain Thomson: This was a tough call. There was some discussion about replacing Kilby and Noyce with Gordon Moore but in the end Shaun won out. Moore may have been an engineering genius, but these two were the spark that set off the revolution.

Without Kilby and Noyce computers might still be the size of rooms, with huge oil filled cooling baffles and highly fragile mechanics. Arthur C Clarke once noted that the microprocessor significantly slowed manned space flight, since before the microprocessor many more astronauts would have been needed in orbit to man a spacecraft's computer systems.

As a brilliant young mathematician Turing foresaw that the time had come for mechanical computers, and was key to their design and philosophy. He developed the code-breaking Bombe from its Polish original, and was an important player in bringing together the team behind Colossus, arguably the world's first programmable computer.

Turing was also key in the development of the idea of artificial intelligence. The Turing Test, whereby a computer must convince a remote human operator that it is human, is still one of the standards of artificial intelligence today.

Turing may have had much more to offer the world but after being outed and then persecuted for his homosexuality he committed suicide in 1954. Had he lived the computer could have been completely different today.

Shaun Nichols: When you consider how many thousands of great minds and millions of hours have gone into developing the technologies we have today, visionaries like Turing simply become giants.

This wasn't a typical story of two graduate students in a comfortable garage somewhere in Northern California. Turing was able to construct machines that were beyond anything ever seen while under the threat of Nazi invasion.

As Iain pointed out, it's a terrible shame that such a brilliant mind was taken from the industry so early.