Dorr Eugene Felt

Inventor of the Comptometer, the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator, Felt built his first prototype during the US Thanksgiving holidays of 1884. Because of his limited amount of money, he used...

Vern Paxson

Author of the flex lexical analyzer and the Bro intrusion detection system, Paxson has served as Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also worked as...

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...

Izrael Abraham Staffel

Inventor of a calculating machine able to add, subtract, divide, multiply, and obtain a square root, Staffel was a Polish inventor, watchmaker, mechanic, and designer of calculating machines, born in 1814 in...

Gianello Toriano (aka Giovan)

Inventor of the Cristalino astronomical clock and a remarkably lifelike mandolin-playing lady automaton, Toriano was an Italo-Spanish inventor, clockmaker, engineer and mathematician born in Cremona, in northern Italy around 1500. His skill...

Louis N. Ridenour

Co-patentee of an early hybrid optical-magnetic information storage system, Ridenour also served as Vice President of Lockheed and as an advisor to President Eisenhower. In 1941 he became the assistant director of...

Vincent (Yu-Cheng) Hsu

Lead developer of the DS8000, which launched in 2005 and remains a key part of IBM's storage portfolio, Hsu has served as an IBM Fellow and IBM's Chief Technology Officer for Disk...

Ahti Heinla

Co-developer of Skype, Heinla is an Estonian programmer and entrepreneur who served as Lead Architect on the project alongside Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn. They had also originally developed Kazaa, which started...

Wen-mei Hwu

Noted for his work in CPU microarchitecture and compiler optimization, Hwu completed his Ph.D. research at the University of California, Berkeley under Yale Patt. Their CPU microarchitecture projects, HPS and HPSm, were...

Daniel Singer Bricklin

Co-creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers, Bricklin co-founded Software Arts, Inc. with Frankston in 1979 and began selling VisiCalc that same year. He was given a Grace...

Barry Leiba

Developer of Ultimail, an early integrated multimedia e-mail system created with his team at IBM Research, Leiba is a computer scientist and software researcher. His work focused for many years on electronic...

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...

Robert Morris

Contributor to early versions of UNIX, Morris developed the math library, the program crypt, and the password encryption scheme used for user authentication. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and received a...

Andrew Hinchley

Recognized as one of the 25 founders of the Internet, Hinchley was formally honored at a ceremony at Stanford University. He has worked on the sharing and exchange of clinical information in...

Robert (Bob) R. Maxfield

Co-founder of ROLM Corporation, Maxfield served as its Executive Vice-President and Director. ROLM (named after the initials of the last names of its founders) was co-founded with three other Rice graduates —...

Estil Hoversten

Co-conceiver of the Internet Stream Protocol (ST), a connection-oriented complement to IPv4 notable for introducing the concepts of packetized voice, Hoversten has served as Senior Vice President of Hughes Network Systems, LLC...

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...

Dave Winer

Pioneer in the development of weblogs, RSS, and web content management, Winer has been a leading web writer and innovator since the early days of the internet. In 1979, Winer worked for Personal...

Lotfi Askar Zadeh

Best known for his theory of fuzzy logic, Zadeh proposed using a membership function (with a range covering the interval [0,1]) operating on the domain of all possible values. He proposed new...

Neil James Alexander Sloane

Contributor to the fields of combinatorics, error-correction coding, and sphere packing, Sloane's research has ranged far and wide, including coding theory, sphere packing, lattices and quadratic forms, packing lines, and planes, spherical...