I just learned about Doug McIlroy, a guy so important to the history of Unix 
that he invented, among other things, echo, diff, and pipes. (Pipes! Can you 
imagine what Unix would be like without pipes?)

Clearly someone I should have known about sooner.

Read this: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/biography (informative)
And then read this: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sinclair/doug/ (fun)