Raymond (Ray) John Noorda

Founder and former CEO of Novell, Noorda was a U.S. computer businessman who served in that role between 1982 and 1994. He also served as chairman of Novell until he was replaced...

Cleve Barry Moler

Inventor of MATLAB, a numerical computing package, Moler is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of...

Niels Ivar Bech

Leader of the group that formed Regnecentralen, the first Danish computer company, Bech shaped the course of Danish computing history. He led a group that started as an advisory board formed by...

William Seward Burroughs

Inventor of the adding machine, Burroughs was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. An American inventor, born in Rochester, New York, the son of a mechanic, he worked with...

James Verlin Kimsey

Co-founder of America Online (AOL), Kimsey served as the company's first chairman and CEO until 1995. Although Kimsey is best known for having helped to create AOL, he also spearheaded many other...

Harry Lewis Nelson

Co-discoverer of the 27th Mersenne prime in 1979, which was at that time the largest known prime number, Nelson is also recognized as one of the world's foremost experts in writing optimized...

Rudolf Hell

Inventor of the Hellschreiber, an early forerunner to the fax machine, Hell was a German engineer born in Eggmühl, Germany, who studied electrical engineering in Munich from 1919 to 1923. While there...

Dave Winer

Pioneer in the development of weblogs, RSS, and web content management, Winer has been a leading web writer and innovator since the early days of the internet. In 1979, Winer worked for Personal...

Lawrence (Larry) A. Rowe

Founding director of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC), Rowe is a computer scientist who served as a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley from...

Kenneth Ross

Kenneth Ross wrote his first program on an IBM 1401 in 1962 and played Spacewar! on the PDP-1 as a student at MIT, where he earned his B.S. He later received his...

Mary Lou Jepsen

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of One Laptop per Child, Jepsen helped shape one of the most recognized nonprofit computing initiatives of its era. She also served as Chief Architect of that...

Gary Kildall

Creator of CP/M, the first disk-based OS for microcomputers, Kildall built a precursor to MS-DOS. CP/M became a fertile ground for the development of application software for microcomputers that became precursors to...

Thomas Siebel

Founder of Siebel Systems and pioneer of customer relationship management (CRM), Siebel revolutionized sales by developing software to automate sales and customer service activities. He graduated from the University of Illinois at...

Norman H. Nie

Co-inventor of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), Nie transformed how researchers analyze data. An American social scientist, university professor, inventor, and pioneering technology entrepreneur, he was born in St....

James (Jim) A. Brown

Inventor of the APL2 program product, Brown is one of the computing world's leading authorities on array technology. He spent nearly 30 years at the center of IBM's array technology efforts, serving...

Gabe Logan Newell

Producer of the first three releases of Windows, Newell later founded Valve, producing one of the best-selling PC games ever, Half-Life.

Andrei Petrovich Ershov

Pioneer of Soviet computer science, Ershov was responsible for the languages ALPHA and Rapira, AIST-0 the first Soviet time-sharing system, the electronic publishing system RUBIN, and MRAMOR, a multiprocessing workstation. He was...

Angel Angelov

Founder of the Institute of Engineering Cybernetics and Robotics in Bulgaria, Angelov is recognized for pioneering computer science applications to particle accelerators and broader industrial control systems. Microprocessor-based control and pattern recognition...

Edward Albert Feigenbaum

Known as the "father of expert systems," Feigenbaum is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence. Feigenbaum completed his undergraduate degree, and a Ph.D., at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now...

Walter (Jerry) Jeremiah Sanders III

Co-founder and long-time CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Sanders helped establish one of America's most prominent semiconductor manufacturers.