1947–1997 · engineer at Xerox PARC, DEC, Silicon Graphics and Netscape
Phil Karlton (1947–1997) spent his career on infrastructure other people built on: he was a principal contributor to the X11 sample server that commercial X implementations were based on, and at Netscape he worked on SSL — the encryption that became HTTPS. His own home page there listed his title as ‘Principal Curmudgeon’, which tells you roughly everything about the register the quotation is in. He and his wife Jan were killed in a car accident in Italy on 20 June 1997; he was fifty. He is now known to millions of programmers who could not name a single thing he built.