Top 10 beards in tech

Some of the most important men in the history of computing have not only made huge contributions to the world, but did so while wearing magnificent beards. Here are our top 10 bearded tech geniuses.

10. Marc Benioff

Benioff is the chairman of Salesforce.com, a cloud-computing company promising ‘no hardware, no software, no headaches’. Salesforce offers cloud-based applications for sales and CRM services – Benioff’s mission to bring about ‘The end of software’ has led to him being valued at $2.1 billion by Forbes.

His beard is a half-way house between the neatly clipped version espoused by Vint Cerf and Larry Ellison and the mess of Richard Stallman and Jeff Minter. It’s more like two month’s lack of shaving topped up with an occasional neck trim.

That much Brylcreem and that little shaving. It’s just scruffy, frankly

9. Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak, known as ‘Woz’ or ‘The Other Steve’, co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and designed the Apple I and II computers. The man is a genius, but didn’t appear as interested in the business side of things as Jobs, and only ever wanted to be an engineer at Apple.

While Steve Jobs’ beard has come and gone over the years, Wozniak has maintained a permanent luxuriant growth. His round face and glasses make him look like a benevolent bearded Penfold. While Jobs is more of a divisive figure, you can’t help but like Woz. And his beard.

No pictures exist where Woz isn’t smiling. He’s adorable

8. Richard Stallman

Stallman is a passionate advocate of ‘free as in freedom’ software. He started the GNU project, in which manifesto he laid out four basic freedoms that he considered necessary for software development: the freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to study how the program works and change it if you wish, the freedom to distribute copies of the original software and any modified versions you have made.

Without Stallman there would probably have been no open source movement. His beard is as long and tangled as the arguments surrounding the GNU/Linux naming controversy.

I call upon the open source movement to decompile and improve Richard’s beard

7. Jeff Minter

Any computer enthusiast over the age of 30 will have heard of Jeff Minter. As the founder of Llamasoft and developer of Llamatron, Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time, he introduced a whole generation of Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST owners to the joys of ruminant-based shoot-em-ups.

Jeff’s beard is scraggly and unkempt – it’s not quite up there with Richard Stallman’s, but he makes up for this with his chained-to-a-radiator-for-20-years hair. It’s hard to know where the beard ends and the hair begins.

Minter’s online handle is ‘Yak’, for obvious reasons

6. Jon “maddog” Hall

Jon Hall is the executive director of Linux International, which describes itself as a “world-wide non-profit association of end users who are dedicated to furthering the acceptance and use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)”. He is so dedicated to the cause that he reportedly has ‘UNIX’ as his car’s number plate.

His beard is a classic 1970’s academic’s, which he has kept on far beyond the death of disco. It’s neatly trimmed enough to give him a kindly, avuncular air, which is at odds with his nickname – apparently stemming from the volcanic temper he had as a younger man.

Maddog likes to bring a touch of gangsta to Linux conventions

5. Walt Mossberg

Walt Mossberg is a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His reviews are known to make or break a product, and he is reportedly paid almost a million dollars a year.

There are some who argue that he is biased towards Apple products and that his tech coverage lacks depth. His beard, though, is beautiful. A finely-tapered grey goatee, trimmed into the shape of a Star Trek door, with just a touch of length to add a vaguely oriental look.

A thousand tech manufacturers’ dreams are made and broken on the words that spout from that beard

4. Sir Clive Sinclair

Sir Clive Sinclair is now clean-shaven – maybe he felt a beard made him look too old for his 33-year-old ex-lapdancer wife. The old smoothie.

However, in his inventor heyday Clive packed not only a beard, but the best kind of beard – a ginger one. Bringing home computers to the masses, letting a generation of schoolchildren get hooked on Treasure Island Dizzy and then attempting to reinvent personal transport with the C5 – all of these were the adventures of a genius with an understated, very British beard and huge aviators.

Thanks for the offer of a free C-5, but I think I’ll stick with the bike

3. Vint Cerf

Without Vinton Cerf, known as ‘Vint’, there would very likely be no internet. He was instrumental in developing the TCP/IP network protocol while at DARPA, and went on to become the chairman of ICANN, which oversees the allocation of IP addresses and top-level domain names.

Cerf has an excellent beard and always wears an incredibly sharp suit. He looks rather like the Holy Grail-guarding knight at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The IPX standard? You chose… poorly

2. Jon Postel

Jon Postel is another computer scientist who was instrumental in setting up the standards upon which the internet is built. While at DARPA, he wrote many of the proposal documents (RFCs) describing various internet standards. He also oversaw IANA, which, as part of ICANN, is responsible for allocating IP addresses globally.

Postel is unfortunately no longer with us, having died in 1998. Until the end he had a magnificent, long, tangled grey beard and equally long hair, making him the D&D-playing compsci hippy to Vint Cerf’s smooth chairman of the board.

Postel, in 1994, laying down the standard for bushy face hair

1. Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison is the co-founder and chief executive of the mammoth Oracle business software company. He is worth $40 billion, has the eighth-largest yacht in the world, a collection of supercars and lives in a huge estate in California inspired by feudal Japanese architecture.

He lives like Tony Stark, and in many photos he looks like Robert Downey Junior’s Stark. He even had a cameo in Iron Man 2. His strangely youthful looks for a 67-year-old and terrifyingly neat beard make him look like an evil mastermind – in stark contrast to the ageing hippies of Stallman and Maddog Hall.

Larry was pleased with second place in the General Zod lookalike competition