Michael L. Hackworth

Co-founder of Cirrus Logic, Inc., a fabless semiconductor supplier specializing in analog, mixed-signal, and audio DSP integrated circuits (ICs), Hackworth served as its Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO. Born in San...

Ruchi Sanghvi

The first female engineer hired by Facebook, Sanghvi later founded her own company, Cove, in 2011, alongside two co-founders. Dropbox acquired Cove in 2012, and Sanghvi joined Dropbox as VP of Operations,...

Steven (Steve) Gibson

Creator of one of the first adware removal programs, OptOut, Gibson is an American software engineer and security researcher. Born in Dayton, Ohio, he began working on computers as a teenager, and...

Marc Canter

Founder of the company that became Macromedia, Canter has also served as CEO of Broadband Mechanics, which produced People Aggregator, a social networking tool with source available (but not under an open...

Nick D'Aloisio

Designer of Summly — a program aimed to solve perceived problems with the way news articles are presented on smartphones — D'Aloisio is a British-Australian entrepreneur, computer programmer, and designer who created...

Nicholas Negroponte

Pioneer in human-computer interaction research, Negroponte joined the faculty of MIT in 1966. For several years thereafter, he divided his teaching time between MIT and several visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan, and...

David F. Marquardt

Co-founder of August Capital in 1995, Marquardt has served on more than 25 boards of directors during his venture capital career, including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), Seagate, Adaptec, and Grand...

Jeffery D. Stein

Jeffery D. Stein has spent six decades building technology businesses. A serial entrepreneur since 1960, he founded and led On-Line Business Systems, Inc. of San Francisco, a pioneer in online real-time transaction...

Jim Knopf (aka Button)

Considered by many to be one of the "fathers" of shareware (so named by fellow software veteran Peter Norton), Knopf worked as an IBM software engineer in Seattle, Washington, where he wrote...

Joseph (Josh) A. Fisher

Creator of VLIW architectures, which allow programs to explicitly specify instructions to be executed in parallel for higher performance, Fisher is an American computer scientist also noted for his work on compiling...

Ding-Yuan (DY) Yang

Led Winbond Electronics Corporation to emerge as one of the Asian IC industry's top innovators into the mid-1990s, Yang has been a central figure in Taiwan's semiconductor development. One of the founding...

Gary Mokotoff

Pioneer of the computer software industry for the IBM 1401, Mokotoff is the co-creator of the 1401 Autocoder and sole author of SPS1 and SPS2. He joined IBM in 1959. From 1959 to...

Samuel (Sam) Wyly

Co-founder of several computer businesses, including Datran, which began construction of a nationwide system of microwave towers to transmit data among 27 American cities, Wyly is an American entrepreneur, businessman, and philanthropist....

Paul Vincent Galvin

Co-founder of Motorola, Galvin helped establish one of the world's leading telecommunications companies. Founded as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation on September 25, 1928, Motorola became a leader in communications equipment. Galvin was born...

Dave Hitz

Co-founder of NetApp, a worldwide major supplier of network-based storage systems for the computer industry, Hitz helped establish the company in 1992 along with James Lau and Michael Malcolm. The company began...

Ken Orr

Leading researcher in the development of automated tools for business requirements, database design, and advanced client/server prototyping, Orr is an internationally recognized expert on business process reengineering, technology transfer, software engineering, data...

William (Will) Ralph Wright

Creator of SimCity, one of the most influential computer games ever made, Wright is an American video game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, now part of Electronic Arts...

Gerald D. Cohen

CEO and founder of Information Builders, Cohen started an early enterprise database software company.

Douglas B. Lenat

Prominent in artificial intelligence and machine learning research, Lenat was best known for the Cyc project, an attempt to build the basis of a general artificial intelligence by manually representing knowledge in...

Steve Chen

Principal designer of the Cray X-MP and Cray Y-MP multiprocessor supercomputers, Chen is a computer engineering pioneer. He has served as founder and CEO of Galactic Computing, a developer of supercomputing blade...