William Harvey Inmon

Recognized by many as the father of the data warehouse, Inmon wrote the first book, held the first conference (with Arnie Barnett), wrote the first column in a magazine, and was the...

Jack Tramiel

Founder of Commodore International, Tramiel was a businessman best known for manufacturing the Commodore PET, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore Amiga, and other Commodore models of home computers. Born into a Jewish...

Arthur (Dick) Kittredge Watson

President of IBM World Trade Corporation, Watson guided the expansion of the international business and later served as United States Ambassador to France. His father, Thomas J. Watson, was President of International...

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier

Best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations, Fourier left an unfinished work on determinate equations which was edited by Claude-Louis...

Milo S. Medin

Helping to deliver the first large-scale residential broadband access service in partnership with major cable operators, Medin has been part of the Internet development community for more than 25 years. He has...

John Landry

Builder of world-class software companies, Landry has spent nearly 30 years helping people connect with one another. He has served as Managing Director of Lead Dog Ventures, a business accelerator providing emerging...

Christopher Latham Sholes

Inventor of the QWERTY keyboard and one of the first practical typewriters, Sholes transformed written communication. Born in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, he moved to nearby Danville as a teenager, where he worked as...

Bijan Davari

Leader of the IBM research team that produced the first generation of high-performance, low-voltage CMOS logic characterizing modern computer chips, Davari's pioneering work in miniaturization of semiconductor devices changed the world of...

Nikolay Brusentsov

Co-creator of Setun, the only modern electronic ternary computer, Brusentsov built the machine in the late 1950s at Moscow State University in the Soviet Union. It had notable advantages over the binary...

Alexander Graham Bell

Inventor of the first practical telephone, Bell was also an eminent scientist, engineer, and innovator whose later work made groundbreaking contributions to optical telecommunications, hydrofoils, and aeronautics. Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had...

Thomas J. Misa

Noted IT historian and director of the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI), Misa specializes in the interactions of technology and modern culture. His undergraduate degree was from M.I.T. (1981) and his Ph.D. from...

Neal Town Stephenson

Writer of the non-fiction essay "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" — examining the histories of and relationships between DOS, Windows, Linux, and BeOS — Stephenson is an American author known...

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...

John Adam Presper Eckert, Jr.

Co-inventor of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, Eckert was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly, he presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School...

Charles Leonard Hamblin

Inventor of Reverse Polish Notation and the stack in computing, Hamblin was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer. He served as a professor of philosophy at the Technical University of New...

Peter Andreas Grunberg

Peter Andreas Grunberg discovered the Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) effect, which is the basis of all modern magnetic read/write heads. He received the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for this groundbreaking contribution.

Michael (Mike) A. McNeilly

Holder of the first patent for infrared deposition of silicon and other materials — a breakthrough that revolutionized deposition quality and produced slip-free, dislocation-free epi — McNeilly is a Silicon Valley pioneer...

Dorcas Muthoni

Founder of OPENWORLD LTD at the age of 24, Muthoni was a Kenyan entrepreneur and computer scientist who established the software consulting company to advance technology's role in African society. Through her...

Jay N. Goldberg

Purchaser of Money Management Systems, Inc. (MMS) in 1986, Goldberg acquired the firm — which sold software and services to banks and broker-dealers for securities trading activities — from Ziff-Davis, later selling...

Guido van Rossum

Creator of the Python programming language, van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), meaning that he oversees the...