Ivan Plander

Developer of the analog computer around 1958, Plander is a Slovak computer scientist who received his Ph.D. at the Technical University in Prague and his Habilitation (Dr.Sc.) in Computer Science at the...

Laurence (Larry) Spitters

Co-founder of Memorex, the first company to manufacture chromium dioxide cassettes in substantial volume, Spitters is an American industrialist in the field of magnetic recording media. He received a B.A. from Western...

Michael Leonidas Dertouzos

Instrumental in defining the World Wide Web Consortium and bringing it to MIT, Dertouzos served as a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer...

Jonathan J. Rubinstein

Instrumental in the development of the iPod, Rubinstein is an American computer scientist and electrical engineer who played a central role in creating the portable music and video device first sold by...

Jaron Zepel Lanier

Pioneer of virtual reality, Lanier led the team in the late 1980s that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head-mounted displays. In mid-1997, he became a founding member of...

Theodor (Ted) Holm Nelson

Inventor of hypertext and hypermedia, Nelson coined both terms in 1963 and published them in 1965. An American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology, he is also credited with the first...

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...

Andrew Mason

Developer of Groupon, a website that sells deals to local businesses, Mason grew up in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, and graduated from Mt. Lebanon High School in 1999. He...

James Henry Rand, Jr.

Founder and President of Remington Rand, Rand built what became the largest business machine manufacturing plant in the world and showed remarkable foresight in purchasing the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1950, whose...

James (Jimmy) Treybig

Founder of Tandem Computers, a pioneering Silicon Valley manufacturer of fault-tolerant computer systems, Treybig built a company that served the growing number of transaction processing customers who used them for ATMs, banks,...

Burton (Burt) Grad

Founder of the Software History Center, Grad has been working on computer software since 1954, when he wrote the first production and inventory control programs for the General Electric Company's installation of...

Peter Andreas Thiel

Co-founder of PayPal, Thiel is a German-born American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin, and later, Elon Musk, and has served as its CEO. He...

Fei-Fei Li

Best known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s, Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford University whose research spans artificial intelligence,...

Anne-Marie Kermarrec

Founder of Mediego, a startup focused on real-time online content personalization, Kermarrec was a French computer scientist and professor at EPFL in Switzerland. There she headed the Scalable Computing Systems Laboratory in...

Stephen (Steve) Gary Wozniak

Co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc. with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne, Wozniak is an American computer engineer whose inventions and machines are credited with contributing significantly to the personal computer revolution of...

Dave Smith

Known as the "Father of MIDI" for his role in developing the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, Smith pioneered many groundbreaking technologies in music. He was also responsible for the Prophet 5, the...

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet

Considered one of the fathers of information science, Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer, and peace activist whose writings have sometimes been called prescient of the current World Wide Web. He...

Nils John Nilsson

One of the founding researchers in the discipline of Artificial Intelligence, Nilsson was particularly famous for his contributions to search, planning, knowledge representation, and robotics. He was the first Kumagai Professor of...

Fred M. Gibbons

Co-founder and CEO of Software Publishing Corporation (SPC), best known for its pioneering Harvard Graphics business and presentation graphics program, Gibbons cofounded the Mountain View, California-based company in 1980 along with two...

David (Kitping) K. Lam

Co-inventor of a plasma-produced solid lubricant patented under the title "Fluorine Plasma Synthesis for Carbon Monofluoride," Lam is also the founder of Lam Research Corporation. He has served as Chairman of Multibeam...