Richard D. Greenblatt

Co-founder of the hacker community and the main implementer of Maclisp on the PDP-6, Greenblatt is also known for writing Mac Hack, the first computer program to play tournament-level chess and the...

Karen Spärck Jones

Pioneer of inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting in information retrieval, Spärck Jones introduced a concept now used in most search engines today. A British computer scientist, she was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England...

Anders Hejlsberg

Co-designer of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and C#, Hejlsberg is a Danish software engineer who has shaped several of the most widely used programming languages and development tools in the history of commercial...

Donald Michie

Developer of the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (MENACE), one of the first programs capable of learning to play a perfect game of Tic-Tac-Toe, Michie was a British researcher in artificial...

Watts S. Humphrey

Father of Software Quality who headed the IBM software team that introduced the first software license, Humphrey was awarded the National Medal of Technology for his contributions to software engineering. He founded...

David Lorge Parnas

Originator of the concept of information hiding in modular programming, Parnas is a Canadian early pioneer of software engineering whose work became a foundational element of object-oriented programming. He has also been...

Frances Spence (née Bilas)

One of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer, Spence was born Frances Bilas in Philadelphia in 1922. She attended Temple University but then was awarded a scholarship to Chestnut Hill College,...

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...

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...

Seymour Ivan Rubinstein

Director of the development of WordStar — the first truly successful commercial program for the personal computer — Rubinstein gave the general population reasonably priced access to word processing for the first...

Cornelis (Kees) H.A. Koster

Creator of the original Compiler Description Language, Koster was also one of the editors of the original Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68. He was a professor in the Department of Informatics...

Gary Durbin

Founder of a company in 1970 that introduced Secure, an early software security product, Durbin is a software pioneer and entrepreneur with over thirty-five years of experience. He began his career specializing...

Kevin Bowyer

Developer who has made advances in numerous areas of computer vision, pattern recognition, data mining, and biometrics — including iris recognition and face recognition — Bowyer has served as the Schubmehl-Prein Professor...

Mary Coombs

Recognized as the first female commercial programmer, Coombs was employed in 1952 as the first woman to work as a programmer on the LEO computers. A British computer programmer and schoolteacher, her...

Dan Fylstra

Founding Associate Editor of BYTE Magazine and co-developer and marketer of VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program, Fylstra has been a pioneer of the computer industry since the 1970s. In 1978 he co-founded...

Jan Camenisch

Co-inventor of Identity Mixer, a unique cryptographic protocol suite for privacy-preserving authentication and transfer of certified attributes, Camenisch is a leading scientist in the area of privacy and cryptography. He has served...

Roy Nutt

A major contributor in the creation of IBM's FORTRAN, the first high-level scientific and engineering programming language, Nutt was also an American businessman and computer pioneer who co-founded Computer Sciences Corporation. He...

Glenford (Glen) Myers

Leader of the team that developed the advanced computer system "SWARD" (Software Oriented Architecture), built and successfully operated in 1980, Myers is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and author. He founded two...

Ivar Hjalmar Jacobson

Known as a major contributor to UML, Objectory, RUP, and aspect-oriented development, Jacobson has shaped modern software engineering practice. After university, he started working at Ericsson until April 1987, when he started...

Brian Randell

Developer of a compiler for the English Electric KDF9, an early stack machine, Randell is a British computer scientist and Emeritus Professor at the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, U.K. He...