Arnold Reitsakas

Responsible for the computer age in Estonia, Reitsakas started as a resident of Tallinn in 1952. He graduated from the 10th School of the Leningrad Institute of Communications in 1957. Reitsakas was...

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...

Francis (Frank) E. Hamilton

Responsible for the primary organization, design, and construction of the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Mark I) and the IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), Hamilton was a pivotal figure in early computing....

William Harvey Inmon

Recognized by many as the father of the data warehouse, Inmon wrote the first book, held the first conference (with Arnie Barnett), wrote the first column in a magazine, and was the...

Joseph Henry

Inventor of the electromagnetic relay that formed the basis of the electrical telegraph, Henry was also the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a founding member of the National Institute for...

Victor Mayer Amédée Mannheim

Inventor of the modern slide rule, Mannheim standardized the design that remained in common use until pocket calculators took over. After graduating from the École d'Application in Metz, Mannheim became an officer of...

Jean Armour Polly

Inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2019, Jean Armour Polly was a librarian and author best known for her early book series on safe Internet use, "Surfing the Internet."

Walden (Wally) C. Rhines

Supervisor of the development of Texas Instruments' first speech synthesis devices, used in the iconic "Speak & Spell" toy, Rhines is also co-inventor of the GaN blue-violet light emitting diode, now important...

Morgan Sparks

Co-inventor of the microwatt bipolar junction transistor, Sparks helped create a semiconductor device that led to personal computers, cell phones, and DVD players. He was born in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and grew...

Andrew James Viterbi

Inventor of the Viterbi algorithm, used for decoding convolutionally encoded data and still widely used in cellular phones for error correcting codes, as well as for speech recognition, DNA analysis, and many...

Max Palevsky

Founder of Scientific Data Systems, Palevsky was a computer technology pioneer whose company became one of the most successful computer companies of the 1960s. Max Palevsky was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1924....

Charles F. Goldfarb

Known as the "father" of SGML and "grandfather" of HTML and the World Wide Web, Goldfarb co-invented the concept of markup languages. He was a graduate of Columbia College and held a...

Wolfgang Roesner

Architect of the verification tools and methodologies used across all IBM systems, Roesner is a senior technical staff member in IBM's verification tools development group in Austin, Texas. His accomplishments in the...

Isaac L Auerbach

Founder of Auerbach Associates and publisher of the influential Auerbach Reports on computer issues, Auerbach was a leading figure in the information processing industry. Isaac Auerbach earned a BS at Drexel University in...

Gideon Gartner

Founder of Gartner Group (now Gartner, Inc.), Gartner built one of the most influential IT research and advisory firms in the world. IT "advisory" firms are distinct from consultancies, in that they provide...

Paul (Rusty) Russell

Writer of the packet filtering systems ipchains and netfilter/iptables in the Linux operating system kernel, Russell is an Australian free software programmer and advocate also known for his work on the Linux...

Francine Berman

A pioneer in grid computing, Berman is one of the two founding Principal Investigators of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project. She also directed the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI),...

Neal Town Stephenson

Writer of the non-fiction essay "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" — examining the histories of and relationships between DOS, Windows, Linux, and BeOS — Stephenson is an American author known...

William Seward Burroughs

Inventor of the adding machine, Burroughs was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. An American inventor, born in Rochester, New York, the son of a mechanic, he worked with...

Jim Barton

Inventor of the modern digital video recorder, which allows consumers to view television programming on their own schedules, Barton co-founded TiVo Inc. and set the technical vision for the company. Barton has served...