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...

Philip S. Yu

Holder of over 300 U.S. patents in data mining, database systems, Internet applications and technologies, Yu is recognized as an IBM Master Inventor and one of the most prolific inventors in computing....

Owen R. Mock

One of the programmers who developed the PACT series of compilers for the IBM 701 and helped install the first operating system ever in operation, Mock pioneered computer operating systems in the...

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz

The first to satisfactorily demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic waves, Hertz clarified and expanded the electromagnetic theory of light that had been put forth by Maxwell. He was born in Hamburg, Germany,...

Kenneth Ross

Founder of Ross Systems and serial technology CEO, Ross has worked with more than 25 companies as a company founder, board member, venture capitalist, and consultant. He founded and served as CEO...

Evelyn Boyd Granville

Part of the IBM team responsible for formulating orbit computations and computer procedures for NASA's Projects Vanguard and Mercury, Granville was also one of the first African-American women to receive a Ph.D....

Stephen (Steve) Walker

Member of the team that developed ARPAnet, the breakthrough packet switching system that evolved into the Internet, Walker is an American engineer who is nationally recognized for his pioneering work on the...

Kenneth Harry Olsen

Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Olsen co-founded the company in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson and venture capital provided by Georges Doriot's American Research and Development Corporation. He was born in...

Alan Cooper

Inventor of Visual Basic, Cooper is sometimes called "the father of Visual Basic," although much of the work on Visual Basic was done by Microsoft's internal development group. Cooper was the leading...

David Hilbert

One of the founders of proof theory and mathematical logic, Hilbert's work laid the basis for recursion theory and later theoretical computer science. He was recognized as one of the most influential...

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...

Arnold T. Nordsieck

Builder of the "differential analyzer"—an analog computer capable of solving complex equations and drawing curves—Nordsieck constructed the device in the 1950s out of $700-worth of war surplus materials. Clones subsequently became the...

Jerry M. Woodall

Inventor of the first commercially viable heterojunction material GaAlAs for red LEDs used in automobile brake lights, traffic lights, CD and DVD players, TV remote controls, and computer networks, Woodall is an...

Stephen Wolfram

Chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine, Wolfram is a British scientist whose parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, to England in 1933. He was...

Charles Sanders Peirce

As early as 1886, Peirce saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, the same idea that was used decades later to produce digital computers. An American philosopher,...

Charles P. Thacker

Pioneer in computer design and realization of the Alto, one of the first modern personal computers, Thacker received his B.S. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 and then...

Susan Estrada

Founder of CERFnet, one of the original regional IP networks, Estrada is recognized as an Internet pioneer and named a "thinking nerd" by colleagues, with a deep interest in emerging broadband technologies...

Helmut Theodor Schreyer

Co-developer of the Z3, one of the first computers, Schreyer also developed an electrical circuit to convert decimal to binary numbers. He was a German inventor and the son of the minister...

John Maurice McClean Pinkerton

Co-designer of England's first business computer, the LEO computer, Pinkerton was a pioneering British computer designer who worked alongside David Caminer to produce the machine for J. Lyons and Co in 1951....

Jean Calvignac

Leader of the team responsible for the architecture of IBM network processors, Calvignac is a 1997 IBM Fellow. Network processors are an integrated circuit which has a feature set specifically targeted at...