Harry M. Yudenfriend

Developer of a roadmap enabling consistent data growth, performance improvements, enhanced resilience, continuous availability, increased scale, and improved efficiency at IBM, Yudenfriend was named an IBM Fellow in 2008 and has served...

Jon (Mad Dog) Hall

During his time with Digital Equipment Corporation that he initially became interested in Linux, and was instrumental in obtaining equipment and resources for Linus Torvalds to accomplish his first port, to Digital's...

Donald Lester Bitzer

Co-inventor of the Plasma Display and sometimes called the "father of PLATO" (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), the first generalized computer-assisted instruction system, Bitzer was an American electrical engineer and computer...

Marian Croak

Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022 for her work with voice over IP (VoIP), Croak is an African American engineer whose VoIP-related inventions have shaped modern communications. During...

Julius Blank

Co-developer of an inexpensive method for manufacturing silicon chips, building them from scratch beginning with the machinery for growing silicon crystals, Blank was a semiconductor pioneer and a member of the so-called...

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...

John Adrian Shepherd-Barron

Pioneer in the development of the cash machine (ATM), Shepherd-Barron joined De La Rue Instruments in the 1960s and in 1965 came up with the concept of a self-service machine that would...

Charles Galton Darwin

Known for assisting Henry Moseley on X-ray diffraction, Darwin was an English physicist and the grandson of Charles Darwin who also served as Director of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) during the...

Alfred Zalmon Spector

Responsible for IBM software product families such as CICS, WebSphere, and MQSeries, Spector is an American computer scientist and research manager. Spector received his Bachelor of Arts degree in applied Mathematics from Harvard...

Georg (Per) Pehr Scheutz

Co-developer of the Scheutzian calculation engine, which produced the first tables calculated and printed by machinery, Scheutz was a 19th-century Swedish lawyer, translator, and inventor. He studied law at Lund University, graduating...

Jack St. Clair Kilby

Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 2000 for his invention of the integrated circuit, Kilby was also the inventor of the handheld calculator and thermal printer.

Trevor Pearcey

Creator of CSIRAC, one of the first stored program electronic computers in the world, Pearcey was an outstanding Australian ICT Pioneer. Most notably, he led the project team that built one of the...

Peter A. Cunningham

Founder of INPUT, the leading provider of government market intelligence, Cunningham has also served as a founder and board member of the IT History Society. As Chairman of INPUT's board of directors, Peter...

Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Among those who designed a calculator, da Vinci stands as one of history's most remarkable minds — an Italian polymath regarded as the epitome of the "Renaissance Man", displaying skills in numerous...

Ronald Linn Rivest

One of the inventors of the RSA algorithm (along with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman), Rivest has made ingenious contributions to making public-key cryptography useful in practice. He also invented the symmetric...

Lynda Weinman

Founder of lynda.com, a pioneering online software training website, Weinman built the platform with her husband, Bruce Heavin, before LinkedIn acquired it in April 2015 for $1.5 billion. A self-taught computer specialist, Weinman...

Victor M. Glushkov

Founding father of information technology in the Soviet Union and one of the founders of Cybernetics, Glushkov made significant contributions to the theory of automata. Victor was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russian SFSR, in...

Raymond (Ray) Kurzweil

Inventor and developer of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text-To-Speech Synthesis, Speech Recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments, Kurzweil is an American author, inventor, and futurist. He grew up in the New York...

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...

Peter Andreas Thiel

Co-founder of PayPal, Thiel is a German-born American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin, and later, Elon Musk, and has served as its CEO. He...