Leonard Bosack

Pioneer of commercialization of routing technology and co-founder of Cisco Systems, Bosack received the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2009 for pioneering and advancing the commercialization of routing technology and the profound changes...

Alan F. Shugart

A pioneer in managing programs and companies in the disk drive industry, Shugart made lasting contributions to the field over several decades. Al Shugart started at IBM in 1951 and over 18 years...

George Winthrop Fairchild

Chairman of IBM from its founding through 1924, Fairchild was a pivotal figure in the early history of the company. Primarily self-educated, he rose to prominence through his own effort and enterprise....

David G. Arscott

Founder board member of the IT History Society and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Arscott spent his entire professional career investing in private and public technology companies. In 1968, he joined the group...

Eugene (Gene) L. Delves

Co-founder of the organization known today as Accenture, Delves was one of five men whose 1954 efforts marked the first successful installation and use of a computer in the industry. In 1954,...

Patrick Joseph McGovern

Founder of Computerworld and the International Data Group (IDG), McGovern built one of the world's largest technology media companies, with subsidiaries in technology publishing, research, event management, and venture capital. McGovern was born...

Stephen Wolfram

Chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine, Wolfram is a British scientist whose parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, to England in 1933. He was...

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli

Co-founder of Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys—the two largest companies in Electronic Design Automation (EDA)—Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is a world-renowned authority on integrated circuit and system design who has been instrumental in bringing EDA...

Aaron Hillel Swartz

Co-developer of RSS, Creative Commons, web.py, and Reddit, Swartz was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer, and Internet activist. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Susan and Robert...

Jaan Tallinn

Co-developer of Skype and FastTrack/Kazaa, Tallinn holds the world's record for the largest number of software downloads at almost 500 million. An Estonian programmer, he is widely celebrated for writing the peer-to-peer...

Robert (Bob) Nimrod Miner

Architect of Oracle's relational database management system and co-founder of Oracle Corporation, Miner led product design and development from 1977 until 1992. In December 1992, he left that role and spun off...

Fernanda Bertini Viégas

Co-creator of Many Eyes, the ground-breaking open public data visualization and analysis platform, Viégas is a Brazilian-born scientist and computational designer whose work focuses on the social, collaborative, and artistic aspects of...

Charles Eric Leiserson

Inventor of the fat-tree interconnection network, a hardware-universal interconnection network used in many supercomputers, Leiserson is also a pioneer developer of VLSI theory. He designed the fat-tree for the Connection Machine CM5,...

Philip (Phil) R. Zimmermann, Jr.

The creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the most widely used email encryption software in the world, Zimmermann is also known for his work in VoIP encryption protocols, notably ZRTP and Zfone....

Cuthbert Corwin Hurd

Pioneer of IBM's development of general-purpose computers, Hurd made contributions that helped transform scientific computing. In 1947 Hurd worked for Union Carbide as a mathematician at the United States Atomic Energy Commission facility...

Aaron Marcus

Pioneer in computer-based design, Marcus founded Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A) in 1982, one of the first independent, computer-based design firms in the world. An American user-interface and information-visualization designer, as well...

Pierre Morad Omidyar

Founder and chairman of eBay, Omidyar is a French-born Armenian-Iranian entrepreneur, philanthropist, and economist. Omidyar and his wife Pam are well-known philanthropists who founded Omidyar Network in 2004 in order to expand...

James Henry Wakelin, Jr.

Involved with B.F. Goodrich's first use of modern computers, Wakelin was a United States physicist, oceanographer, and businessman who served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Research and Development) from 1959 to...

Edward Fredkin

A pioneer of reversible computing and cellular automata, Fredkin was also an early pioneer of digital physics, later using the term digital philosophy (DP) to describe his work. While Konrad Zuse's book,...

John Blankenbaker

Designer and inventor of the Kenbak-1, considered by the Computer History Museum and the American Computer Museum to be the world's first "personal computer," Blankenbaker founded Kenbak Corporation in 1970, and the...