Maybe rockstars isn't the best term, legendary is better [1].
John Carmack (Doom), Dave Cutler (Windows NT), Jeff Dean (Google's competitive advantage) [2], Bill Joy (Unix, vi), Peter Norvig, Larry Wall (Perl), Steve Wozniak (Apple II), Jamie Zawinski (Netscape), and many more who I may have missed...
All of these programmers/engineers are legendary. For example, Steve Wozniak - read how he hacked a floppy disk and color into the early Apple computers [3].
John Carmack (Doom), Dave Cutler (Windows NT), Jeff Dean (Google's competitive advantage) [2], Bill Joy (Unix, vi), Peter Norvig, Larry Wall (Perl), Steve Wozniak (Apple II), Jamie Zawinski (Netscape), and many more who I may have missed...
All of these programmers/engineers are legendary. For example, Steve Wozniak - read how he hacked a floppy disk and color into the early Apple computers [3].
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017939
[2] http://research.google.com/people/jeff/ Not just Jeff, also Sanjay Ghemway: http://research.google.com/pubs/SanjayGhemawat.html
Craig Silverstein: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~csilvers/
[3] http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html