Most important person to computers.

There's so many good choices and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are always the most obvious of them. Instead, I'll choose one out of my archive of influential people. Today, the title goes to Dennis Ritchie.

Dennis Ritchie, is fairly unknown to most, however he is one of the most influential people in the entire computing industry. In the olden days, when the notion that a complex project such as a computer operating system had to be done entirely in machine native assembly, he created the holy grail of platforms. A product that was independent and free from any specific machine or hardware, an OS able to be ported and moved across different systems..

Ritchie is the inventor of the C programming language and a core developer of the Unix operating system. Unix ,or Unics, originally was written in B (contrary to what some may believe, there was no A before B), and was dependent on specific hardware configurations. C was created to free it from it's dependencies, allowing it to more affectively be placed on multiple systems with different hardware.

To make a "machine independent" OS was extremely crucial to today's computing industry and to get the personal computing industry moving

Today, C is the primary and influential language of virtually all others. Whether you use Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, Windows, C++, ObjC, Java, Javascript, and many others.. they are all derived or influenced by C.