So, Jeff Atwood - master of the Stack Overflow.com trilogy - over at the wonderful CodingHorror blog made this post and I - like most of the commenter’s it startled - have an issue with the harsh judgement on anyone not able to name the list of legends he provides. I guess it goes without saying I didn't know a single name in the list. But I got over that aspect and looked into the gents, and gal, named and I discovered something. I found a property which almost all the list shared and it made me quite blue.
My 'sister in law'* is presently mired in the final legs of her PhD and often I find her surrounded in photo copied articles and highlighter pens, or books fatter than my head and winding in Lockets for sustenance because there's no time for Pot Noodles**. On one such occasion I felt brave enough to thumb through one of her books and it subject was that of racial prejudice in the media. The three paragraphs I read described the crime it is, in the western world, that, when describing persons, the race is assumed to be white unless otherwise stated. It's outrageous, of course, and I think it is also symptomatic of an issue on the web which Jeff's post fell foul of.
So the megaton coders mentioned in Jeff's list are all related because they are (mostly) fellow Americans. His post is galvanised in the WWW prejudice which assumes every online sole is American. My list, for coders in England, would be Matthew Smith, Tommy Flowers, Ron Gilbert, Tim Berners-Lee, Charles Babbage, Clive Sinclair et al. So I would conclude: if your candidate cannot discuss any of the coders Jeff lists, then what you're interviewing is probably not American.
*Not technically true. I'm not actually married but the lady is my gee friend's sister.
**She hates Pot Noodles.***
***I don't. I love them.