David (Dave) J. Farber

Co-designer of the first electronic switching system (ESS-1) and the SNOBOL programming languages, Farber made major contributions to programming languages and computer networking. Farber held the position of Distinguished Career Professor of...

Ole-Johan Dahl

One of the fathers of object-oriented programming and Simula, Dahl produced the initial ideas for object-oriented (OO) programming in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center (NR) as part of the Simula...

Nicholas Negroponte

Pioneer in human-computer interaction research, Negroponte joined the faculty of MIT in 1966. For several years thereafter, he divided his teaching time between MIT and several visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan, and...

Edward Fredkin

A pioneer of reversible computing and cellular automata, Fredkin was also an early pioneer of digital physics, later using the term digital philosophy (DP) to describe his work. While Konrad Zuse's book,...

Steven (Steve) Gibson

Creator of one of the first adware removal programs, OptOut, Gibson is an American software engineer and security researcher. Born in Dayton, Ohio, he began working on computers as a teenager, and...

Ravi Arimilli

Chief Architect largely responsible for the development of the IBM POWER5, Arimilli has been named an IBM Fellow, the company's highest technical honor, in May 2001. One of the most prolific inventors...

Peter Elias

Known for introducing convolutional codes and establishing the binary erasure channel, Elias also contributed fundamental new concepts and techniques to source coding. His widely cited 1975 paper introduced universal representations of the...

Meir (Manny) Lehman

Recognizer of the software evolution phenomenon and author of the eponymous Lehman's laws of software evolution, Lehman made foundational contributions to understanding how software changes over time. He served as a Professor...

John Buxton

Pioneer of computer simulation, Buxton gained world renown for his fundamental scientific contributions to computer simulation, programming language design, and software implementation technology. He was founding professor of computer science at both...

Mark Semenovich Pinsker

Known for his entropy theory of dynamical systems, which introduced the maximal partition with zero entropy, later known as Pinsker's partition, Pinsker studied stochastic processes under A. N. Kolmogorov in the 1950s,...

Percy Edwin Ludgate

Designer of an Analytical Engine, Ludgate helped advance calculators by expanding Charles Babbage's design for the first programmable computer. An Irish accountant working alone in Dublin, he was unaware of Charles Babbage's...

Kun-Yao (K.Y.) Lee

Founder of BenQ Corporation, the No. 2 manufacturer of flat-panel computer displays, Lee is also recognized for growing the company to 40 times its former size and building BenQ products into a...

Samuel (Sam) H. Altman

President of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI, Altman is an American entrepreneur, programmer, and blogger.

Norman Macrae

Foreseer of the spread of the internet and biographer of Johnny Von Neumann, Macrae was considered by some to have been one of the world's best forecasters when it came to economics...

James T. Russell

Inventor of the concept of optical digital recording and playback, Russell joined the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of Battelle Memorial Institute in Richland in 1965. There, that same year, he developed the...

Edward S. Davidson

Designer and implementer of an eight-node symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) system whose architecture is used by most multiprocessor systems today, Davidson pioneered pipelining techniques for improving processor throughput in both hardware and software,...

Clair D. Lake

Co-inventor of IBM's MARK I and co-developer of the first Type 1 Total Printing and Listing Tabulator, Lake was a prolific IBM inventor. In May 1939 he was assigned to serve as...

Roger Sippl

Co-developer of the relational database Informix (INFORMation on unIX) and co-founder of Relational Database Systems (RDS), Sippl earned a B.S. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. He and...

Jerome (Jerry) Howard Saltzer

Contributor to the End-to-end principle in systems design — one of the important underlying principles governing the operation of the Internet — Saltzer is a computer scientist who made many notable contributions....

Lee E. McMahon

Contributor to early versions of the Unix operating system, including the sed stream editor, McMahon worked for Bell Labs from 1963 until 1989. McMahon was a computer scientist who graduated from St. Louis...