Sony has been in hot water ever since computer programmer Mark Russinovich first found the contentious XCP software on his computer, prompting damaging publicity, suspension of the software, and recalls.

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The first victim, in 1998, was a computer programmer in Shanghai called Lin Hai.

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In 1993 a programmer in Finland invented one of the first anonymous remailers, letting a user obfuscate the source of messages he posted to a forum.

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The former programmer created TweetDeck in 2008 when he first joined Twitter and was irked to find that tweets from his friends were getting drowned out by more frequent tweeters like TechCrunch and Robert Scoble.

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In 1965, a programmer at Applied Digital Research (ADR), named Marty Goetz, filed the first software patent.

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So, with no experience or training as a programmer, he taught himself BASIC and wrote PC-Talk, which was the first (and for a long time the best) communications program for the PC.

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He established his first studio Adventures Unlimited Software, Inc. in 1983, where he acted as the lead designer and programmer of several fantasy role-playing computer games.

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Mr. Iwata, an unassuming 51-year-old former programmer, joined Nintendo in 2000 and took the helm in 2002 as the company's first president unrelated to its founding family.

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