Marc Andreessen

Founder of Netscape and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He also chaired Opsware, a software company he originally founded as...

Annie Easley

A significant contributor to the early development of NASA's rocket technologies, Easley spent decades as a NASA engineer whose work in programming, energy-conversion, and shuttle launches helped address the agency's need for...

Kathleen Booth (née Britten)

Credited with writing the first assembly language and the design of the assembler and autocode (ARC and APE(X)C) for the Birkbeck College computers, Booth made foundational contributions to computer programming. Born in...

Steve (Slug) Russell

Chief developer of Spacewar!, one of the earliest videogames, Russell is an American video game designer, programmer, and computer scientist. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, his family later moved to a small farm...

Dawson Engler

Co-founder of the Exokernel Operating System Project and co-developer of KLEE, Engler has served as an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from...

Eugene (Spaf) Howard Spafford

Co-developer of a number of "firsts" in computer security, Spafford is a leading computer security expert and historically significant Internet figure, renowned for first analyzing the Morris Worm and his prominent role...

Richard E. Crandall

Developer of the irrational base discrete weighted transform, an important method of finding very large primes, Crandall made significant contributions to computational number theory. He served, at various times, as Chief Scientist...

Gerard J. Holzmann

Developer of the SPIN model checker, Holzmann is a Dutch-born American computer scientist and researcher known for his work at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey and at NASA. SPIN (short...

Peter Norton

Creator of Norton Utilities, Norton is recognized as a pioneer in DOS-based utilities software. Before discovering microcomputers, Norton spent a dozen years working on mainframes and minicomputers for companies including Boeing and Jet...

John David McAfee

Writer of the first commercial anti-virus software in 1987, McAfee founded McAfee Associates to sell his creation. McAfee became the company's most vocal critic in later years, urging consumers to uninstall the company's...

Michael Mascagni

One of the first to use random number-based algorithms on the massively parallel Connection Machine at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC, Mascagni's family moved from Bologna, Italy to Lake Forest,...

Joseph Weizenbaum

Creator of ELIZA, the pioneering natural language processing program that prompted his growing skepticism about artificial intelligence, Weizenbaum died March 5, 2008 in Berlin. He was 85. Joseph Weizenbaum was born on January...

Charles Antony Richard Hoare

Developer of Quicksort, one of the world's most widely used sorting algorithms, Hoare also developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) to specify the...

Dorcas Muthoni

Founder of OPENWORLD LTD at the age of 24, Muthoni was a Kenyan entrepreneur and computer scientist who established the software consulting company to advance technology's role in African society. Through her...

Daniel Teichroew

Pioneer of the ISDOS Project, Teichroew led a pioneering team which attempted to design and implement the Problem Statement Language (PSL) and Problem Statement Analyser (PSA) as a way of automating the...

Paul Gardener Allen

Co-founder of Microsoft, Allen launched the company with Bill Gates in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975, and began marketing a BASIC programming language interpreter. In 1980, after promising to deliver IBM a...

Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale

Developer of the "migratable objects" parallel programming model and its implementation in the Charm++ parallel programming system, Kale has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at...

Dilma M. Da Silva

Leader of the architecture and implementation of file system support on the IBM K42 research operating system, Da Silva has been a Research Staff Member of Advanced Operating Systems at IBM T.J....

Elizabeth (Liz) L. Burd

Leader of Durham's Technology Enhanced Learning research group, a group of 20 research staff and students, Burd has also served as director of the UK's Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning—Active...

Joyce K. Reynolds

Co-developer of protocols underlying the Internet, Reynolds was most notably the author or co-author of the RFCs introducing and specifying the Telnet protocol. She was active in the development of the protocols underlying...