Bill Gates

The Hair: Nice fringe Bill,  and U gotta love that side-part too huh?

The Man: Love him....or not, the fact is, most of us are influenced by William-Gates-III and his company even if we dont realise it. I've been using Microsoft's operating systems since version 3.x of DOS in the mid-80's and have used pretty much all DOS/Windows versions and many of their tools, applications and games since then.

http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/default.asp

Peter Norton

The Hair: Apart from the grey-hilights in Peter's hair its not actually a bad cut.  He could really do with a colour though and for God's sake Peter are you still wearing Ties?

The Man: Peter was the geek that got me hooked as an early 20-something with too little time on his hands, access to the recently released IBM XT, a toolset and an enquiring mind.

http://www.symantec.com/corporate/norton.html

Ritchie and Thompson

The Hair: Dennis Ritchie (L) and Kenneth Thompson (R) would look quite at home at a Harley Davidson rally with all that wonderful facial hair. The caption for this image read...They set the style for software development, and software developers.

The Men: but they are right up there in the geekdom stakes as authors of the original Unix operating system. The first serious hardware I got to play with was a series of Apollo workstations that ran Unix and I still use Linux which has its roots in the same OS. Ritchie also co-authored the book "the C Programming Language" with Brian Kernighan which was one of the first textbooks I bought on programming.

Larry Wall

The Hair: Now THATs what I call a side-part.

The Man: After dabbling with Assembler, Basic, C, Lisp & Pascal for years I now get paid to write programs (instead of getting paid while I write them). The language I use is mainly Perl and Larry Wall is its father. I hope to catch him at the open-source convention in San-Diego this year.

http://www.wall.org/~larry/

Lincoln Stein

The Hair: Not sure whats happened to Lincoln's hair here, looks like he's being blasted by an enourmous hair-drier from the right side

The Man: No self-respecting web applications developer could say they haven't used Lincolns famous perl and I'd say I've typed the string 'use CGI.pm' more than any other. I've also read his useful book on Web Security.

http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/

Tim Berners-Lee

The Hair: Tim's hair seems to have a life of its own.  Perhaps he has a problem with electrostatic charging, could be his choice of trouser fabric.

The Man: Father and/or God-parent of many of the technologies that underpin the World Wide Web as we know it today. Tim was lucky enough to have been in my company recently at the WWW10 conference in Hong Kong.  Of course he wouldn't have been at all aware of my presence there. 

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Dave Winer

The Hair: I think facial hair might be the biggest concern here.  I happen to share the receeding hairline that all the gents on this page seem to have in common so I wont poke fun at that. 

The Man: Dave is a software develper and founder of the company Userland who's tools (and ideas) I've been using more and more lately. His ScriptingNews site is a great resource for tech-news.

http://dave.editthispage.com/myNameIsDaveWiner

James Clark

The Hair:  Yes .... Well ...

The Man: This über-geek has only recently joined my list of legends, however it seems he's been on everyone elses list for quite some time.  James is author of the expat parser (amongst other things) which I am using regularly these days.

http://www.jclark.com/bio.htm