- Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft he has held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and he remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8% of the common stock. "Forbes" magazine's list of The World's Billionaires has ranked him as the richest person in the world since 1995, … - Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24 1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple and was the CEO of Pixar until its acquisition by Disney. He is currently the largest Disney shareholder and a member of Disney's Board of Directors. He is considered a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries. Jobs' history in business has contributed greatly to the mythos of the quirky, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, … - Alan Turing
This short on-line biography of Alan Turing is based on the entry I wrote for the British Dictionary of National Biography in 1995. The eight parts correspond roughly to the eight sections of my full biography Alan Turing : the enigma. There are no hyperlinks in the text. For links and for more images, go to the corresponding page of the Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook. Part 8 - Alan Turing 's Crisis - Grace Hopper
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace". - John von Neumann
John von Neumann (born Margittai Neumann János Lajos on December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary; died February 8, 1957 in Washington D.C., United States) was a Austria-Hungary-born American mathematician who made contributions to quantum physics, functional analysis, set theory, topology, economics, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics (of explosions), … - Gary Kildall
Gary Arlen Kildall (May 19, 1942 - July 11, 1994) was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur who created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc.(DRI). Kildall was one of the first people to see microprocessors as fully capable computers rather than equipment controllers and to organize a company around this concept. He also co-hosted the PBS TV show "The Computer Chronicles". - Howard Aiken
Howard Hathaway Aiken (March 8, 1900, Hoboken, New Jersey-March 14 1973, St. Louis, Missouri) was a pioneer in computing, being the primary engineer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer. He studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later obtained his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1939. During this time, he encountered differential equations that he could only solve numerically. - Steve Wozniak
Dr. Stephan Gary "Woz" Wozniak (born August 11 1950 in San Jose, California) is a U.S. computer engineer and the co-founder of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing greatly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, … - Konrad Zuse
Konrad Zuse was a German engineer and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the completion of the first functional program-controlled computer, the Z3, in 1941 (the program was stored on a tape). In 1998 the Z3 was proven to be Turing-complete. Zuse also designed the first high-level programming language, the Plankalkül, first published in 1948, although this was a theoretical contribution, … - Bob Bemer
Robert William Bemer (February 8, 1920 - June 22, 2004) was a computer scientist best known for his work at IBM during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Bemer graduated from Cranbrook School in 1936 and took an A.B. in Mathematics at Albion College in 1940. He earned a Certificate in Aeronautical Engineering at Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute in 1941. - J. Presper Eckert
John Adam Presper "Pres" Eckert Jr. (born April 9, 1919 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died June 3, 1995 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) was an American computer pioneer. With John Mauchly he invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School Lectures), founded the first commercial computer company (the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation), … - Adam Osborne
Adam Osborne (March 6, 1939 - March 18, 2003) was an American author, book and software publisher, and computer designer who founded several companies in the United States and elsewhere. Osborne's financial success legitimized, in the public mind (and more important, in the investor's mind) the image of the computer innovator as swashbuckling poet and visionary. - Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds ; born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland, is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of the Linux kernel. He now acts as the project's coordinator. Linus was inspired by Minix (an operating system developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum) to develop a capable Unix-like operating system that could be run on a PC. Linux now also runs on many other architectures. - John Mauchly
John William Mauchly (August 30 1907 - January 8 1980) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States. Together they started the first computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and pioneered fundamental computer concepts including the stored program, subroutines, … - Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815 - November 27, 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron, is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. - Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 - June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator, known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the idea of the memex-seen as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web. A leading figure in the development of the military-industrial complex and the military funding of science in the United States, … - Gordon Eubanks
Gordon Eubanks (b. November 7, 1946) is a microcomputer industry pioneer who worked with Gary Kildall in the early days of Digital Research. Eubanks attended Oklahoma State University. Dr. Kildall was his graduate thesis advisor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Eubank's 1976 master's thesis was a BASIC language compiler called BASIC-E designed for Kildall's new CP/M operating system. - Douglas Engelbart
Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of Swedish and Norwegian descent. He is best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English); as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, … - John McCarthy
John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts, sometimes known affectionately as Uncle John McCarthy), is a prominent computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence. - Gordon Bell
C. Gordon Bell (born August 19, 1934) is a computer engineer and manager, an early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) who designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engineering and oversaw the development of the VAX. - Clive Sinclair
Sir Clive Marles Sinclair is a well-known British entrepreneur and inventor of the world's first 'slim-line' electronic pocket calculator in 1972 (Sinclair Executive) and the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, amongst many other things. The ZX80 was the UK's first mass market home computer to be sold for under £100. Sinclair was fascinated by electronics and miniaturization from his teenage years. - Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 - November 17, 1929) was an American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards in order to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. - Paul Allen
Paul Gardner Allen (born January 21, 1953 in Seattle, Washington) is an American entrepreneur. With Bill Gates, he formed Microsoft. Allen regularly appears on lists of the richest people in the world; as of 2007 "Forbes" ranks him the fifth richest American, worth an estimated $18.0 billion. He is the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc. (his private asset management company)and chairman of Charter Communications. - John Vincent Atanasoff
John Vincent Atanasoff (October 4,1903 - June 15,1995) was an American physicist of Bulgarian descent. The 1973 decision of the patent suit "Honeywell v. Sperry Rand" named him the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer, a special-purpose machine that has come to be called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. - An Wang
Dr. An Wang (February 7, 1920 - March 24, 1990) was a Chinese American computer engineer and inventor, and co-founder of computer company Wang Laboratories. - Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 - October 5, 1996) was a U.S. electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who founded the company Cray Research. Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device to convert punched paper tape into Morse code signals out of Erector Set components. - Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus E. Wirth (b. February 15, 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages. - Bill Joy
Bill Joy served as Sun's Chief Scientist until 2003, and is now a partner with venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. - George Boole
George Boole, (November 2, 1815 - December 8, 1864) was a British mathematician and philosopher. As the inventor of Boolean algebra, the basis of all modern computer arithmetic, Boole is regarded in hindsight as one of the founders of the field of computer science, although computers did not exist in his day. (See "Legacy" below.) - Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 - February 24, 2001), an American electrical engineer and mathematician, has been called "the father of information theory", and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory. - John Backus
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it. The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN. - Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky is here critical of many current researchers in artificial intelligence researchers who he feels have gotten bogged down in theories of machine learning. He sees this as a crisis point in a time of an aging population that he feels will need help in performing many tasks. "We have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, but we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case." - Gordon Moore
Gordon Earle Moore (b. January 3, 1929 in San Francisco, California) is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's Law (published in an article 19 April 1965 in "Electronics Magazine"). Moore was born in San Francisco, California. He received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1954. - Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie is currently the head of Lucent Technologies' System Software Research Department. - Dan Bricklin
Daniel S. Bricklin (born 16 July 1951) is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, and Trellix Corporation, which is currently owned by Web.com. Bricklin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, where he attended Akiba Hebrew Academy during his High School years. - Vint Cerf
Vinton Gray Cerf (born June 23, 1943) (last name pronounced just like the English word "surf") is an American computer scientist who is commonly referred to as one of the "founding fathers of the Internet" for his key technical and managerial role, together with Bob Kahn, in the creation of the Internet and the TCP/IP protocols which it uses. He was also a co-founder (in 1992) of the Internet Society (ISOC), … - Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 - February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science and a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. With almost a thousand, often very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century. - Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is credited with first use of the words "hypermedia", "transclusion", "virtuality", "intertwingularity" and "teledildonics". The main thrust of his work has been to make computers easily accessible to ordinary people. - Donald Knuth
Don's father was a Lutheran school teacher and church organist. Don studied piano, and for a brief time organ, through high school. Later as a faculty member of Caltech, he was called upon to be a long-term substitute organist at Faith Lutheran Church in Pasadena, California. He became a member of the American Guild of Organists in 1965, and saw his first Abbott and Sieker organ at that time. - Robert Noyce
Robert Noyce, Ph.D. (December 12, 1927 - June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968. He is also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip although Kilby's invention was 6 months earlier. Noyce was born in Burlington, Iowa.
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