William (Will) Ralph Wright

Creator of SimCity, one of the most influential computer games ever made, Wright is an American video game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, now part of Electronic Arts...

Butler W. Lampson

Developer of the Berkeley Timesharing System for Scientific Data Systems' SDS 940 computer, Lampson was part of Project GENIE at UC Berkeley during the 1960s, where he and Peter Deutsch created that...

Herman Hollerith

Inventor of the punched card, Hollerith was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the...

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...

Floyd (Earl) Kvamme

One of five founders of National Semiconductor in 1967, Kvamme went on to work at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and has served in science and technology policy on behalf of the...

Arthur Walter Burks

Contributor to the design of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, Burks served as a senior engineer on the project in the 1940s. Decades later, Burks and his wife Alice...

George Barnard Grant

One of the few Americans to make a significant contribution to mechanical computation prior to the end of the nineteenth century, Grant improved on the Difference Machine calculator and is recognized as...

Norman H. Nie

Co-inventor of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), Nie transformed how researchers analyze data. An American social scientist, university professor, inventor, and pioneering technology entrepreneur, he was born in St....

William Stanley Jevons

Constructed a logical machine called the Logic Piano, Jevons was a pioneering figure in both logic and economics. Jevons arrived quite early in his career at the doctrines that constituted his most...

Willem Louis van der Poel (aka William)

Designer of the ZEBRA computer, van der Poel was a pioneering Dutch computer scientist who also contributed to Algol 68 and co-built a Braille translator. In 1950 he obtained an engineering degree...

Bijan Davari

Leader of the IBM research team that produced the first generation of high-performance, low-voltage CMOS logic characterizing modern computer chips, Davari's pioneering work in miniaturization of semiconductor devices changed the world of...

John (James) Clerk Maxwell

A Scottish physicist and mathematician, he was born in Edinburgh, to John Clerk and Frances Cay. His father was a man of comfortable means, of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Midlothian, holders...

Bernard (Barney) M. Oliver

Co-developer of pulse-code modulation (PCM) and leader of the team that produced the first hand-held calculators at Hewlett-Packard, Oliver was a scientist who made contributions in many fields, including radar, television, and...

Martin Campbell-Kelly

Noted IT historian and professor of computer science, Campbell-Kelly has specialized in the history of computing at the University of Warwick. Campbell-Kelly has served as a full professor in the Department of Computer...

Claudio Ciborra

Known for his innovative thinking about information systems and his recognition of the relevance of transaction cost theory, Ciborra inspired researchers and thinkers around the world. He recognized the importance of tinkering,...

Mateo Valero Cortés

Creator and Director of the European Center for Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA), Valero Cortés is a Spanish computer architect born in Alfamén, Aragon, Spain. He has served as the Director of the...

Jack P. Ruina

Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) from 1961 to 1963, during which the idea of an information processing program was initiated, Ruina held a position that proved foundational to what...

Meir (Manny) Lehman

Recognizer of the software evolution phenomenon and author of the eponymous Lehman's laws of software evolution, Lehman made foundational contributions to understanding how software changes over time. He served as a Professor...

Joseph (J. J.) John Thomson

Discoverer of the electron and isotopes, and inventor of the mass spectrometer, Thomson was a British physicist and Nobel laureate born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England. His early education took place in...

William Bradford Shockley

Co-inventor of the transistor, Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain for this achievement. Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the...