Assuming the point is that we focus too much on big personality rather than actual contribution, this is something that bugs me and I think about often. Ken Thompson is still around. So is Bjarne Stroustrup. Linus Torvalds is still heading the linux project. We need to celebrate these people. There are a ton of them and even as an enthusiast, I don't know who they all are and I'm ashamed. Most regular people haven't even heard these names and probably don't care to. Hell Stallman probably deserves a nobel prize for GNU.
Every industry has those people, though. With seven billion people in the world, there are going to be a lot of incredibly amazing people that we will never hear of, just because the bandwidth it would take to even hear their names (much less really understand their contributions) is just far too great.
Even though there are millions of outstanding contributors to our societies and technologies whose names I will never know, I am grateful for them.
