Thomas Eugene Kurtz

Co-developer of the BASIC programming language, Kurtz transformed computing education for generations of users. In 1951, Dr. Kurtz's first experience with computing came at the Summer Session of the Institute for Numerical Analysis...

John Impagliazzo

Noted IT historian, author, and Professor Emeritus of computing sciences at Hofstra University, Impagliazzo has supported educational computing activities for decades. His accomplishments include contributing to model computing and engineering curricula, publishing...

Robert (Bob) E. Lorenzini

Co-designer and developer of a crystal growing furnace, Lorenzini joined Rheem Semiconductor in 1960, the first spin-off from Fairchild Semiconductor, where he was involved in the design and development of that furnace....

Joseph Weizenbaum

Creator of ELIZA, the pioneering natural language processing program that prompted his growing skepticism about artificial intelligence, Weizenbaum died March 5, 2008 in Berlin. He was 85. Joseph Weizenbaum was born on January...

George W. Platzman

One of the founders of modern meteorology, Platzman helped formulate the first weather forecast by computer, carried out in 1950 on the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). He pioneered the field...

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...

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...

Tim Paterson

Author of MS-DOS, Paterson is a software developer whose work shaped the foundation of personal computing. In 1978 he designed a schematic of Microsoft's Z-80 SoftCard, which had a Z80 CPU and ran...

Donald Valentine

Referred to as the "grandfather of Silicon Valley venture capital," Valentine was an American venture capitalist who concentrated mainly on technology companies in the United States. Valentine grew up in the Bronx,...

Ruchi Sanghvi

The first female engineer hired by Facebook, Sanghvi later founded her own company, Cove, in 2011, alongside two co-founders. Dropbox acquired Cove in 2012, and Sanghvi joined Dropbox as VP of Operations,...

Timothy (Tim) John Berners-Lee

Creator of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee is a British engineer and computer scientist who made the first proposal for it in March 1989. On 25 December 1990, with the help of...

William Wang

Founder and CEO of Vizio, Inc., Wang was born and raised in Taiwan, moved to Hawaii, United States at the age of 13 and then to California at the age of 14....

Kenneth Eugene Iverson

Developer of the APL programming language in 1962, Iverson was a Canadian computer scientist noted for his contributions to mathematical notation and programming language theory. He was honored with the Turing Award...

Icer Addis

Author of the NESticle, Genecyst, and Callus emulators, Addis is considered a legendary figure in the emulation scene. He co-founded Bloodlust Software with his friend Ethan Petty. Working independently under the Bloodlust...

Luba Cherbakov

Co-inventor and chief evangelist behind Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA), the industry's first SOA modeling method, Cherbakov is also a 2012 IBM Fellow — the 13th woman (and among only seventeen women)...

Charles Eric Leiserson

Inventor of the fat-tree interconnection network, a hardware-universal interconnection network used in many supercomputers, Leiserson is also a pioneer developer of VLSI theory. He designed the fat-tree for the Connection Machine CM5,...

André Trương Trọng Thi

Considered to be the "father of the personal computer," Trương Trọng Thi created the Micral microcomputer in 1973—two years before the debut of the famed Altair—based on an Intel 8008 processor, the...

Eric S. Raymond

Programmer and public figurehead for the open source movement, Raymond has maintained projects including the fetchmail mail retrieval agent and gpsd. Other contributions include Emacs editing modes and portions of libraries like...

John McCarthy

Inventor of the Lisp programming language, McCarthy was also responsible for coining the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. An American computer scientist and cognitive scientist,...

William H. Davidow

Computer industry executive, author, and venture capitalist, Davidow has been active in high-technology for more than 30 years. He has continued as an active advisor to MDV. Davidow is the author of...