The first computer bug was a moth
On 9 September 1947 a team working on the Harvard Mark II traced a fault to a moth caught in relay number 70. They removed it, taped it into the logbook and wrote: first actual case of bug being found. The page survives, moth included, at the Smithsonian.
Grace HOPPER was on that team, and the joke in the note — actual — tells you engineers were already calling faults bugs. Her real contribution was larger and less charming: she argued that programs should be written in something close to English and compiled into machine code, at a time when the accepted view was that computers could only take numbers. She was told it could not be done, built a compiler anyway, and the language that followed from that work ran the world's banking for decades.
The two most important things here were given away
Tim BERNERS-Lee wrote the web at the European particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, and in 1993 the lab put the whole thing into the public domain — no patent, no licence fee, no permission needed. Anybody could build a browser or a server. It is close to impossible to imagine the web having spread as it did on any other terms, and he has said plainly that it would not have.
Linus TORVALDS did something similar with Linux in 1991, posting it as a hobby project and licensing it so that anyone could use and modify it provided they passed on the same freedom. Linux now runs most of the internet's servers, almost every Android phone and all of the world's fastest supercomputers. Both men are comfortable rather than billionaires, which is the trade they chose.
About those garages
The garage is the industry's founding image and it is not fabricated — HEWLETT and PACKARD really did start in one in Palo Alto in 1939, and JOBS and WOZNIAK really did assemble early Apple boards in a family garage. The details underneath are less romantic and more interesting.
HP's first product was an audio oscillator, and its first big customer was Disney, which bought eight to work on the sound for Fantasia. Wozniak designed the Apple I essentially alone while employed full-time at Hewlett-Packard, and offered it to them first; they turned it down. Almost every garage story turns out to involve an existing job, a wealthier backer, or a large customer arriving early — which is the part to remember before anyone quits anything.
A grid of people who are mostly still alive
That is what separates this list from the scientists and inventors. GATES, MUSK, BEZOS, PAGE, BRIN, ZUCKERBERG, DELL, DORSEY, PICHAI, SANDBERG, COOK, ELLISON, HASTINGS and Jimmy WALES are contemporaries, several of them contested figures, and the verdict on what they built is not in yet.
Vint CERF is the quieter name and arguably the most consequential: he co-designed the protocols that let separate networks talk to each other, which is the internet itself rather than any company on top of it. A list like this is a snapshot of one moment. Half of it will look odd in fifty years, and working out which half is the interesting part.