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Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell top the list of the industry’s most influential IT personalities’ over the past 25 years. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975, was the favorite with 84 per cent of the 473 IT industry professionals polled in the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) survey. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976, was placed second on the list of most influential IT person. Jobs was selected by 73 percent of voters. Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell, came third with 53 per cent of pollsters.

For the fourth place there was a tie between Linus Torvalds, who as a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, wrote the original code for the operating system known as Linux and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who, as Stanford University Ph.D. students, founded Google in.

The other five IT industry personalities whoo rounded of the top ten list are:

• John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems (44 percent)
• Larry Ellison, CEO and member of the board of directors of Oracle (36 percent)
• Vinton Cerf, widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet" and the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet (35 percent)
• Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft (35 percent)
• Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay since 1998 (30 percent)

Voters also selected products, applications, and technologies that they believed to be among the top ten most influential in the IT industry over past 25 years. Curiously no open source app made it to the list.

• 66 percent chose Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE)
• 56 percent chose Microsoft Word
• 50 percent selected Microsoft Windows95
• 49 percent selected both Microsoft Excel and Apple iPod

The tech devices most people believed they would most rely on 25 years from now, include:

• Personal Digital Assitant (PDA)
• Mobile phone
• A yet to be developed device
• Laptop
• Desktop computer