I apologize for the incivility, it was uncalled for. By successful I mean people who are really good at programming. The overall point I was trying to make was that good programmers are drawn to the machine at young age, out of love not out of the desire to make money. So, no, I do not think men started to be drawn into the field when they " started to notice that you could hit the jackpot and become a billionaire,". There is a certain kind of mind that is drawn to tinkering with computers and typically, but not always, that mind lives in a male body.