Donald D. Chamberlin

One of the principal designers of the original SQL language specification, Chamberlin also made significant contributions to the development of XQuery. Donald D. Chamberlin was born in San Jose, in the USA. After...

Scott Cook

Founder of Intuit, Cook launched the financial software company in 1983; it today offers software and online products to help individuals and small companies manage their finances. He started his career at Procter...

Eric S. Raymond

Programmer and public figurehead for the open source movement, Raymond has maintained projects including the fetchmail mail retrieval agent and gpsd. Other contributions include Emacs editing modes and portions of libraries like...

Konrad Zuse

German engineer who, completely independently of British and American computing efforts, built the Z3 (1941), the first working program-controlled general-purpose digital computer. The Z3, destroyed in the bombing of Berlin, never got...

Harlan E. Anderson

Co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which at one time was the second largest computer company in the world, Anderson built a career spanning research, industry leadership, and philanthropy. Other notable entities...

Hugh McGregor Ross

One of the principal architects of the Universal Character Set ISO/IEC 10646, Ross was an early pioneer in the history of British computing. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, he worked for Ferranti from...

Michael (Mike) J. Karels

Key contributor to the history of BSD UNIX, Karels was an American software engineer who graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology. He went on...

Giovanni Caselli

Inventor of the pantelegraph (a.k.a. Universal Telegraph or "all-purpose telegraph"), the predecessor of the modern fax machine, Caselli put the world's first practical operating facsimile machine ("fax") system into use. Pantèlègraph is...

Tim Paterson

Author of MS-DOS, Paterson is a software developer whose work shaped the foundation of personal computing. In 1978 he designed a schematic of Microsoft's Z-80 SoftCard, which had a Z80 CPU and ran...

Lawrence (Larry) H. Landweber

Creator of THEORYNET, an electronic mail system serving over 100 researchers in computer science, Landweber is also best known for founding the Computer Science Network (CSNET) project in 1979, which later developed...

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...

Peter John Landin

One of the first to realize that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, Landin made contributions essential to the development of both functional programming and denotational semantics....

Michael R Williams

A pioneer in the history of computing who is — unusually — a computer scientist himself, Williams has published books and articles, taught, curated museum exhibits, and promoted professional activity in the...

Michael Franz

Pioneer in mobile code and dynamic compilation, Franz led the Secure Systems and Languages Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine — one of the top research teams on dynamic compilation, virtual...

Paul Coteus

One of the chief engineers behind BlueGene/L, which rocked the world of supercomputing when it was introduced in 2004 and quickly earned the title "fastest computer in the world," Coteus led the...

Subramanian (Subu) Iyer

Pioneer in the development and implementation of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) technology used in IBM systems ranging from high-end servers to BlueGene supercomputers to game chips, Iyer has served as IBM Fellow and...

Henry (Hank) Wallman

Co-builder of the Electronic Differential Analyser, an early example of an analog computer, Wallman also performed pioneering research in biomedical engineering combining video displays with X-ray imaging. An American mathematician known for...

Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes

His experiments with electric oscillations contributed much to the development of wireless telegraphy. Bjerknes was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who did much to found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He...

Alexey Andreevich Lyapunov

One of the founders of cybernetics and a computer pioneer in Russia, Lyapunov made foundational contributions to the development of computing and cybernetics in the Soviet Union. In 1928, Lyapunov enrolled in Moscow...

Henryk Zygalski

Designer of the "perforated sheets," also known as "Zygalski sheets," a manual device for finding Enigma settings, Zygalski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who worked at breaking German Enigma ciphers before...