[tgflynn]

Not to diminish the achievements of these people but I suspect being in the right place and time has a lot to do with it. I suspect that for each of the names you cited there are a thousand others who were equally as technically skilled but who you've never heard of.

Wozniak, as I understand it, is best known for creating elegant and highly optimized designs for the Apple I and II circuitry. That may be a rare skill, but I don't think it's nearly as rare as the vast gulf in fame between him and the typical EE would lead one to believe. He became famous because he used those skills in the exact time and place where they mattered most, creating one of the first usable computers that was affordable for the middle class.

Torvalds didn't create Linux ex-nihilo. There was at the time an extensive literature on the design of Unix/Posix systems on which he could lean, as well as the example of Minix, which as I recall, is largely what inspired him to create his own clone of the Unix kernel. The reasons it became as successful as it did are numerous. Part of it has to do with that work being done at the time the Internet was enlarging the number of people who could access and contribute to open source projects. It also coincided with the GNU project being at a stage where it had already developed many of the user space tools for a fully open source Unix-like system but was having trouble getting a kernel off the ground. Note also that a key ingredient of his success beyond his technical competence was his ability to shepherd a world wide group of open source collaborators, keeping them all moving in the same general direction.

I don't know as much about Jeff Dean's history but I do know from experience that there's a lot more to being successful in a corporate context than just technical competence, or even, I suspect, genius. It's rare that one person can create an entire system on their own (though it does happen that one person's work can establish a framework for future contributions) and moving beyond the work of one individual requires a whole additional set of skills.