Andreas (Andy) von Bechtolsheim

One of the earliest investors in Google, Bechtolsheim is a computer hardware scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Microsystems. At Stanford University, Bechtolsheim had devised a powerful computer (which he called a workstation)...

Brendan Eich

Creator of the JavaScript scripting language, Eich is a computer programmer and chief technology officer of Mozilla Corporation. He worked with MicroUnity Systems Engineering writing microkernel and DSP code, and doing the...

Gordon Matthews

Founder of ECS Communications (later VMX), one of the first companies to pioneer the commercialization of voicemail for corporate use, Matthews was an American inventor and businessman. He also invented systems to...

Herbert Freeman

Contributor to the field of automatic label placement, computer graphics, and machine vision, Freeman published numerous works on geometric patterns from '61 and co-founded, with Azriel Rosenfeld of the University of Maryland,...

Peter James Denning

Pioneer of virtual memory systems and co-founder of CSNET, Denning is best known for discovering the locality principle and designing the working set model for program behavior. He took an early interest in...

Heinz Nixdorf

German computer entrepreneur, Nixdorf founded and led Nixdorf Computer AG. He developed and marketed low-end commercial computers mainly within Europe between 1965 and 1985. He had production facilities in Germany, Ireland, Spain,...

Samuel (Sam) Wyly

Co-founder of several computer businesses, including Datran, which began construction of a nationwide system of microwave towers to transmit data among 27 American cities, Wyly is an American entrepreneur, businessman, and philanthropist....

John (Jack) Clemens

Pioneer in the development of random access disk storage, Clemens was part of the IBM team that developed the RAMAC and is sometimes considered to be among those who "built" Silicon Valley....

Harry Max Markowitz

Co-developer of SIMSCRIPT, the first simulation programming language, Markowitz also received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990 while a professor of finance at Baruch College of the City University...

James (Jim) Nicholas Gray

Pioneer of granular database locking, two-tier transaction commit semantics, and the data cube operator for data warehousing applications, Gray transformed the field of database and transaction processing systems. Gray studied at the University...

Donald Peter Greenberg

Pioneer developer of software that influenced many architectural software (CAAD) products still in use today, Greenberg also initiated the first computer-aided architectural design studio in the United States in 1984. An internationally...

Charles Geschke

Co-founder of Adobe Systems, Geschke transformed document production and launched the desktop publishing industry. Prior to co-founding Adobe, Geschke and Warnock worked at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Geschke had started there...

Fred M. Gibbons

Co-founder and CEO of Software Publishing Corporation (SPC), best known for its pioneering Harvard Graphics business and presentation graphics program, Gibbons cofounded the Mountain View, California-based company in 1980 along with two...

Tom van Vleck

Co-author of the first email program for the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), one of the first time-sharing operating systems, van Vleck is an American computer software engineer. He worked at MIT on...

Thomas Parke Hughes

Co-founder of the Society for the History of Technology, Hughes was an American historian of technology and an emeritus Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a visiting...

Edward Hance Shortliffe

Pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine, Shortliffe is best known as the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems,...

Leonard Max Adleman

Co-inventor of the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem, Adleman is a theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California. RSA is in widespread use in...

Daniel C. Edelstein

Leading expert in copper chip wiring technologies, Edelstein served as Chief Architect and driving force behind IBM's copper chip wiring technologies, first announced in 1997. These were devised to increase the speed...

John T. Chambers

CEO of Cisco, Chambers joined the company in 1991 as senior vice president, Worldwide Sales and Operations. When he assumed the role of CEO in January 1995, the company grew from $1.2...

Jeffrey (Jeff) Preston Bezos

Founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Bezos graduated from Princeton University as a member of Tau Beta Pi and worked as a financial analyst for D. E. Shaw & Co. before founding Amazon...