Re: Apple
Does it matter who they are? I didn't go into engineering as a career in order to become famous - as a stereotypical introvert engineer, the idea of becoming a recognisable face whilst out and about would fill me with dread. And I suspect the same is true for many of my engineering brethren.
What matters are the products we create - the average person in the street might not know who designed the C64 or Atari 2600, or even a whole bunch of other more recent products that are even more widely known (e.g. whichever mobile phone they own and interact with every day), but they *do* know about the products themselves. And in the case of things like the Apple II, the C64 etc, they've become icons of the early home computing scene, known and beloved around the world, and still with active user communities.
To have been responsible for something like that, now *that's* the sort of payback an engineer might quite like to receive for their career efforts, even whilst remaining solidly anonymous.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
