In my mind, that spans decades, some perhaps fairly recent. I am over 4 decades old, so I can do that.

Here's an incomplete list in no particular order of some that immediately come to mind:

Brian Kernigan

Dennis Ritchie

Rob Pike

Steve Wozniak

RMS

Dave Cutler

Nolan Bushnell (Atari)

Jay Miner (Amiga)

Linus Torvalds

Burrell Smith (Apple)

Bill Atkinson (Apple)

Bud Tribble (Apple)

Avie Tevanian (Apple/NeXT)

Larry Wall (Perl)

Anders Hejlsberg (C#/Borland Pascal)

and even Jeff Raskin (Wikipedia him) and Charles Petzold for his early Windows API work. And DHH, even though he's a kid.

Those are the ones that are particularly notable to me personally.

Read the first Programmers at Work book. It doesn't cover huge technical details, but those are the old masters. I read it every 5-10 yrs or so.

Coders at Work is pretty fun too.

Dan Ingalls (implemented smalltalk)

Jim Gray (transaction)

Chris Date (SQL, QUEL)

Gregor Kiczales (CLOS, Aspect-oriented programming)

Ivan Sutherland (Sketchpad)

Leslie Lamport (LateX, Paxos, much work on distributed computing)

Butler Lampson (Laser printing, Ethernet, Bravo: first WYSIWYG word processor)

1. Mel

2. A blackjack program

3. http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html

Get "Masters of Doom" for a good read about some old masters.

Richard Stallman