Programmers Who Defined The Technology Industry: Where Are They Now?
Some early programmer names are familiar to even the most novice of software developers. You may never have seen a line of code written by Bill Gates, or written any application in BASIC (much less for the Altair).
Context & Ripple Effects
This retrospective arrives at an odd moment for its subject matter: the programmers it canonizes are mostly done writing code, and the biggest name among them, Bill Gates, spent 2010 re-entering public life through channels far removed from software — his career-retrospective treatment in PC World two years earlier framed him as history, while his own 2010 activity made him current again.
The piece also lands inside a running developer-culture argument about what programming heritage means. Jeff Atwood's 'Giving Up on Microsoft' essay in 2007 captured a generation of developers openly breaking with the company Gates built, while the debate over whether journalists should learn to program showed the field still arguing about who counts as a coder at all.
First-order effects
- For Gates personally, the retrospective coincides with a confirmed 2010 publicity arc that has nothing to do with code — joining Twitter in January 2010, ridiculing Apple's iPad in February, paying tribute to MITS founder Ed Roberts in April, and advocating online classes for students by mid-October — so 'where he is now' is a foundation-and-commentary figure, not a chairman shipping product.
- The Altair BASIC origin story gets re-anchored as the field's canonical starting point for a general audience, reinforcing Gates and Paul Allen's confirmed status as the reference point for early personal-computing history.
Second-order effects
- Retrospectives of this kind feed directly back into the loyalty question Atwood raised in 2007: when the founder is recast as a philanthropist and critic-of-the-day (Chrome OS, the iPad), developers reassessing Microsoft inherit a softer founding myth even as the company itself fades from their essays.
- Tributes to figures like Ed Roberts pull the hobbyist-hardware era — Altair, MITS — back into commercial relevance as licensing, emulation, and collector markets revisit early machines.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, industry history compresses into a short list of named founders whose post-code careers (philanthropy, investing, commentary) become the lens through which newcomers learn computing's origins — a canon maintained by media retrospectives rather than by the surviving code itself.
The trend: Tech-media memory work is shifting from documenting active builders to curating founder legacies, turning early programmers into the industry's shared origin mythology.