Frances (Betty) Elizabeth Holberton

One of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, Holberton made foundational contributions to the history of computing. During World War II, while the men were fighting,...

Horst Feistel

Initiator of research that culminated in the development of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), Feistel was a German-born cryptographer who worked on the design of ciphers at IBM. Born in Berlin, Germany,...

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet

Considered one of the fathers of information science, Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer, and peace activist whose writings have sometimes been called prescient of the current World Wide Web. He...

Richard Matthew Stallman

Founder of the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, Stallman also launched the free software movement and was the main author of the GNU General Public License for open...

Richard Wesley Hamming

Known for his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes, Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. Hamming's contributions...

Ruzena Bajcsy

Founding director of the University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, Bajcsy is an American engineer and computer scientist specializing in robotics. She also served as head of...

John Henry Patterson

Founder of the National Cash Register Company, Patterson was also famous for hiring and later firing Thomas Watson Sr., who went on to become General Manager, then President, of CTR — later...

Boris Artashesovich Babayan

Creator of early Soviet supercomputers, Babayan is notable as a pioneering figure in Soviet computing history. Babayan later pursued a career with Intel.

Danese Cooper

Known as the "Open Source Diva" for her work in the Open Source movement, Cooper has held many prominent leadership roles within the computer science sector. Cooper managed teams at Symantec and...

Gene Myron Amdahl

Team leader in building IBM mainframes and founder of Amdahl Corporation, Amdahl was chiefly known for his work on mainframe computers at IBM and later his own companies. He was perhaps best...

Gary Harpst

Co-founder of Solomon Software and designer of its pioneering accounting products, Harpst grew up in Findlay, Ohio and graduated from Ohio State University with B.A. and M.B.A. degrees in Business and Computer...

Ron Johnson

Pioneer of the Apple Retail Stores and the Genius Bar, Johnson is an American businessman who served as Senior Vice President of Retail Operations at Apple Inc. from January 2000 to November...

Leo F. Slattery

Designer of memory capacity for mainframe computers, Slattery was one of the earliest members of Control Data Corporation (CDC). Born and raised in St. Paul, MN, he graduated from Cretin High School in...

James W. Cortada

Noted IT historian and author, Cortada is also the founder and a board member of the IT History Society. Cortada joined IBM in 1974 as a salesman, and held a variety of sales...

Martin Richards

Creator of the BCPL programming language, Richards is a computer scientist whose work has had lasting influence on modern programming. In 1959 he came to Cambridge to read Mathematics, followed by the...

Meg Whitman

Longtime chief executive of eBay and Hewlett Packard, Whitman held senior business leadership positions at some of the most prominent companies in American technology and media, including The Walt Disney Company and...

William (Bill) Henry Gates

Founder of Microsoft, Gates is an American business magnate and philanthropist who co-founded the software company with Paul Allen. Gates has been consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people and was the...

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...

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...

Jacob Ziv

Co-developer of the LZ77 lossless data compression algorithm, Ziv made foundational contributions to information theory. From 1955 to 1959, he was a Senior Research Engineer in the Scientific Department Israel Ministry of Defense,...