John Couch

One of the primary software architecture designers of the HP AMIGO/300 software environment — a precursor to the Xerox Alto and the Macintosh — Couch also served as Apple's first Vice President...

Stanley Gill

Co-inventor of the first computer subroutine, Gill was a British computer scientist who shared that achievement with Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler. Gill was born in Worthing, West Sussex, England, educated at...

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...

Yevgeny Valentinovich Kaspersky

Co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, producer of antivirus software and computer security products, Kaspersky is recognized as a leading figure in information security. Kaspersky graduated from the Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications and Computer Science,...

Mark Pincus

Co-founder of Zynga, which makes online social games, Pincus also founded Freeloader, Inc., Tribe Networks, and SupportSoft. He has served as CEO of Zynga, which had 235 million monthly active users as...

Lois Haibt

The only female member of the ten-person team that invented FORTRAN, Haibt is an American computer scientist perhaps most famous for her role in creating the first successful high-level programming language. She...

Wesley W. Chu

Pioneer researcher in file allocation and directory design for distributed databases, Chu's work aided the design and development of domain name servers and current cloud computing systems. He has served as a...

Linus Benedict Torvalds

Creator of the Linux kernel and key catalyst of the open source movement, Torvalds initiated one of the most influential software projects in history.

William (Bill) Reeves

Pioneer and inventor of the first Motion Blur algorithm and methods to simulate particle motion in computer graphics, Reeves is also one of the founding employees of Pixar. After obtaining a Bachelor...

Wilhelm Schickard

Inventor of many machines, including one for calculating astronomical dates and one for Hebrew grammar, Schickard was a universal scientist whose research spanned astronomy, mathematics, and surveying. He taught biblical languages such as...

Jay Wright Forrester

Founder of System Dynamics, Forrester was also a pioneer computer engineer and systems scientist whose invention of magnetic core memory transformed computing. Forrester was born on July 14, 1918, on a cattle ranch...

Ling Liu

Head of the Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab (DiSL) research group at Georgia Institute of Technology, Liu is known for producing a number of open-source software systems, including WebCQ, XWRAPElite, PeerCrawl, GTMobSIM,...

Christopher (Chris) A. Welty

One of the developers of Watson, the IBM artificially intelligent computer system that defeated the best players on the American game show Jeopardy!, Welty is an American computer scientist best known for...

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...

Ted Dabney

Co-founder of Syzygy and Atari, Dabney met Nolan Bushnell while working at Ampex, and the two jointly created Syzygy. Their first product, Computer Space, was manufactured and sold by Nutting Associates. Following...

Phil Farrand

Creator of Finale, an award-winning, high-end desktop publishing music notation software package, Farrand is an American computer programmer, consultant, webmaster, and author. He is also known for his Nitpicker's Guides, in which...

Mary Lou Soffa

Developer of software tools for debugging and testing programs to eliminate or reduce false alarms and improve operating efficiency, Soffa is an American computer scientist also noted for her research on compilers,...

Mary Allen Wilkes

Known for her work with the LINC computer, now recognized by many as the world's first personal computer, Wilkes contributed to this landmark machine as a programmer and logic designer. She later...

Richard (Dick) John Egan

Member of the team that developed the Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo spacecraft that carried astronauts to the moon, Egan was also a prominent American businessman, political fundraiser, and former US...

Mark Semenovich Pinsker

Known for his entropy theory of dynamical systems, which introduced the maximal partition with zero entropy, later known as Pinsker's partition, Pinsker studied stochastic processes under A. N. Kolmogorov in the 1950s,...