For that mother-of-all honorifics?father of the Internet?most sources name (all jokes about Al Gore aside) Vinton Cerf, now senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology for WorldCom, though a minority holds out for the late Jonathan Postel, who was director of The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

Besides the Internet, the computer and IT world has many other remarkable progeny, of course. Necessity may have been the mother of all these inventions, but who were the fathers? We’ve listed some of the most significant of these offspring and the men generally recognized as their progenitors. There are, as in the biological world, some cases of disputed paternity, and?in an odd twist to this metaphor?some cases of undisputed, multiple fathers.

FATHER OF THE PDA
Jeff Hawkins produced the first handheld while at GriD in the late 1980s.
Now chief product officer at Handspring and founder of Palm Computing.

FATHER OF ETHERNET
Bob Metcalfe, while at Xerox PARC.
He’s founder of 3Com, former publisher of CIO sister publication InfoWorld, rare livestock breeder and now partner at Waltham, Mass.-based Polaris Ventures.

Fathers of the computer
John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995)
Iowa State University professor, chief of the Acoustics Division at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, founder of Ordnance Engineering Corp. in 1952.

Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

Cambridge University mathematics professor and polymath known for his contributions to the basic design of the computer in his Analytical Engine, never built in his lifetime.

FATHER OF THE BROWSER
Marc Andreesson developed the Mosaic Web browser in 1993 while at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Now chairman and cofounder of Loudcloud, former chief technology officer of America Online, founder of Netscape.

FATHER OF THE MICROCHIP
Jack Kilby, with Robert Noyce, developed the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in 1958.

Retired, Nobel Prize winner for physics in 2000 for the integrated circuit.

FATHERS OF THE MICROCOMPUTER, OR PERSONAL COMPUTER
Alan Kay developed now-familiar graphical interfaces and a precursor to the laptop while at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
Vice president and Disney fellow, Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development.

AndrŽ Thi Truong at his company R2E in 1973, created the microcomputer Micral.
President of Advanced PC Technologies in France.

Ed Roberts owned MITS, the company that developed and sold the Altair 8800 kit computer in 1975.
Now a medical doctor.

FATHERS OF THE MICROPROCESSOR
Federico Faggin, Marcian Hoff and Stan Mazor of Intel, and Masatoshi Shima of Busicom designed the 4004, the world’s first commercial microprocessor, released in 1971.

Federico Faggin Cofounder and chairman of the board, Synaptics.

Marcian "Ted" Hoff Chief technologist at Teklicon, a litigation consultancy in San Jose, Calif.