Sam Ruby

Co-developer and principal maintainer of the Feed Validator — a tool used to check the validity of HTML, CSS, XML documents, and RSS feeds — Ruby has made significant contributions to web...

Paul E. Ceruzzi

Noted IT historian, author, and curator, Ceruzzi has served as Curator of Aerospace Electronics and Computing at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. He received a BA from...

Kevin OLeary

Co-developer of SoftKey International, a software publisher of software intended for home audiences, OLeary built the company from a $10,000 seed investment from his mother into a successful CD-ROM distributor. Born in Mount...

Larry Wall

Creator of Perl, Wall is one of the most influential figures in the open-source software movement. Wall studied linguistics and music at Seattle Pacific University, where he graduated in 1976. He later attended...

Bettina Speckmann

Speckmann headed the Applied Geometric Algorithms group at Eindhoven University of Technology and was a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Her research focused on computational...

David Karp

Founder of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr, Karp is an American web developer and entrepreneur. According to Forbes, his net worth exceeded $200 million, and Tumblr was valued at $800 million. On...

Paul Gardener Allen

Co-founder of Microsoft, Allen launched the company with Bill Gates in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975, and began marketing a BASIC programming language interpreter. In 1980, after promising to deliver IBM a...

Ray Harishankar

Significant contributor to IBM's leadership position in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), reusable asset-based development approaches leveraging SOA, and in the creation of highly reusable IT assets, Harishankar has served as an IBM...

Ken Howery

Co-founder of PayPal, Howery is an American investor who graduated from Stanford University in 1998 with a B.A. degree in Economics. That same year, he co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek,...

David G. Arscott

Founder board member of the IT History Society and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Arscott spent his entire professional career investing in private and public technology companies. In 1968, he joined the group...

Peter John Landin

One of the first to realize that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, Landin made contributions essential to the development of both functional programming and denotational semantics....

Elmer C. Kubie

Co-founder of Computer Usage Company (CUC), the first independent company to market computer software, Kubie helped transform how software was developed and sold. He and John W. Sheldon founded CUC (1955–1986), sometimes...

Phaedon Avouris

Innovator of the potential for carbon nanotubes to compete with the long-established silicon transistor for important information technology applications, Avouris is a Greek chemical physicist who has served as an IBM Fellow...

Margaret R. Fox

Member of the technical staff of the Electronic Computer Laboratory at the National Bureau of Standards, Fox graduated from Wisconsin State College in 1940 and joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943,...

Mark Pincus

Co-founder of Zynga, which makes online social games, Pincus also founded Freeloader, Inc., Tribe Networks, and SupportSoft. He has served as CEO of Zynga, which had 235 million monthly active users as...

Herbert Alexander Simon

One of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century, Simon was an American political scientist, economist, and psychologist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public...

Leslie John Comrie

Pioneer in mechanical computation and astronomy, Comrie was also the founder of the world's first private company for scientific computing. He was born in Pukekohe (south of Auckland), New Zealand, and attended Auckland...

David R. Millen

Director of a User Interface Design Group responsible for the user interface design of advanced business communications systems and exploratory prototype development of advanced speech applications and pen-based interfaces, Millen has also...

Shari Trewin

Developer of a keyboard configuration tool for individuals with motor impairments, Trewin is an HCI researcher at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York, whose long-standing research focus has been in...

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...