Hasso Plattner

Founder of SAP, Plattner developed R/3, the landmark enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that became a cornerstone of modern business computing. He led SAP to become the world leader in application software,...

Francis Wilton Reichelderfer

Instrumental in bringing modern computerized technology to weather forecasting, Reichelderfer presided over a revolutionary era in the history of the National Weather Service. From 1938 to 1963, he guided the organization through...

Paul Thelen

Founder of the largest portal for downloadable games in the world, Thelen built Big Fish Games into a platform distributing in excess of 1.5 million games per day. After graduating from the University...

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...

John Perry Barlow

Co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Barlow was an American poet, essayist, cyber-libertarian political activist, and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He was a retired Wyoming cattle rancher who was associated...

Steven R. Hofstein

Co-producer of the first working MOS integrated circuit, Hofstein is a well-known scientist with over 40 patents whose inventions have been chronicled by publications that include the New York Times, Newsweek, Business...

Hugh Williams

One of the members of the IBM team that developed the plan for unbundling software from hardware in 1969, Williams is also known for solving the Archimedes Cattle Problem. In June of...

Patrick Volkerding

Founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution, Volkerding has served as Slackware's "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), and is also known informally as "The Man". He has also contributed to the...

George Robert Stibitz

Recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer for his work with Bell Labs in the 1930s and 1940s, Stibitz completed a relay-based calculator in November 1937 he dubbed...

David A. Thompson

Pioneer in the design and development of thin film magnetic head technology for use in high-density data storage, Thompson has served as Director of the Advanced Magnetic Recording Laboratory at IBM Almaden...

Robert M. Price

Leader of Control Data's early strategic expansion into international operations and marketing, Price also drove the strategic move into information and systems integration services. He graduated from Duke University in 1952, and...

Charlie Bass

Co-founder of Ungermann-Bass (UB), the first large networking company independent of any computer manufacturer, Bass helped commercialize Ethernet, oversaw a successful IPO, and then saw the company purchased by Tandem Computers. In...

Robert Stein

Producer of the first interactive computer discs for CD-ROM, Stein is considered a visionary and innovator in the world of communication and multimedia. Born and raised in New York City, Stein attended...

Stephen (Steve) Gary Wozniak

Co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc. with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne, Wozniak is an American computer engineer whose inventions and machines are credited with contributing significantly to the personal computer revolution of...

Klaus Schulten

Leader of the research group that developed NAMD and VMD—molecular dynamics and visualization software now used by many thousands of researchers worldwide—Schulten was a German American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor...

Charles F. Goldfarb

Known as the "father" of SGML and "grandfather" of HTML and the World Wide Web, Goldfarb co-invented the concept of markup languages. He was a graduate of Columbia College and held a...

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...

Albert Hosmer Bowker

Instrumental in the formation of the Stanford University Computer Science department, Bowker was an American educator who shaped academic computing at a pivotal moment. Born in Winchendon, Mass., he grew up in...

Jorma J. Rissanen

Known for inventing arithmetic coding and the minimum description length principle, Rissanen was an IBM researcher from 1960 who received his Ph.D. from the Helsinki University of Technology in 1965. After retiring...

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...