Evan Sharp

Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Pinterest, Sharp designed the Pinterest grid for the initial product launch. Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool that skyrocketed in popularity due to its innovative concept...

Alexander Matveevich Poniatoff

Founder of AMPEX, Poniatoff established the company in 1944, using his initials, A.M.P., plus "ex" for "excellence" to create the name. The high-frequency bias technique, which made quality recording possible, was invented...

Adam Osborne

Creator of the first commercially successful portable computer, Osborne transformed personal computing in the early 1980s. Adam Osborne was born in Thailand in 1939 to British parents and spent much of his childhood...

Leon D. Harmon

Codeveloper of the Photomosaic and pioneer of computerized human-face identification, Harmon worked at Bell Labs where he pursued research in human perception, computer vision, and graphics. He started his career as a...

William (Bill) Worley Jr.

Principal creator of HP's two most important computer architectures, Worley's work includes PA-RISC (Precision Architecture—Reduced Instruction Set Computing) in the 1980s and PA-WW (Wide-Word) in the 1990s. He started programming in 1959 for...

George Ciprian Necula

Known for his influential Ph.D. thesis first describing proof-carrying code, Necula completed his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University under programming languages researcher Peter Lee. Originally from Baia Mare, Romania, he attended the...

William (Bill) David Mensch, Jr.,

A central person in the creation of the Motorola 6800 and MOS Technology 6502 families of microprocessor chips, Mensch is also recognized as the sole IC design engineer of the 6820/21 PIA,...

Gerald (Jerry) Anderson Lawson

Inventor of the video game cartridge and the Fairchild Channel F console, Lawson transformed how games were distributed and played. A lifelong engineer and tinkerer, he was born in 1940 and grew...

John Perry Barlow

Co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Barlow was an American poet, essayist, cyber-libertarian political activist, and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He was a retired Wyoming cattle rancher who was associated...

Dave Boggs

Co-inventor of Ethernet and developer of early Internet protocol prototypes, Boggs helped shape the foundations of modern computer networking. David graduated from Princeton University, and as a young graduate worked at Xerox PARC,...

Mary Kenneth Keller

The first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science in the United States, Keller was also among the first people of any gender to receive such a doctorate. Her degree was...

Kirk Paul Lafler

Author of *PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS* and a data scientist, Lafler is an educator, developer, programmer, and consultant. He teaches as a lecturer and adjunct professor at San Diego...

Watts S. Humphrey

Father of Software Quality who headed the IBM software team that introduced the first software license, Humphrey was awarded the National Medal of Technology for his contributions to software engineering. He founded...

Martin (John) M. Atalla

Co-inventor of the MOSFET and considered the "Father of the PIN," Atalla distinguished himself as an engineer, innovator, entrepreneur, and visionary in the fields of semiconductor fabrication and computer data security. Born...

John C. Klensin

Co-creator of the Network Startup Resource Center, helping dozens of countries to establish connections with the Internet, Klensin's career has included 30 years as a Principal Research Scientist at MIT, a stint...

Joshua Lederberg

American molecular biologist known for his work in genetics, artificial intelligence, and space exploration, Lederberg was just 33 years old when he won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for...

Vladimir Iosifovich Levenshtein

Best known for his contributions to error-correction theory and information theory, Levenshtein is sometimes called the father of edit distance and is known for the Levenshtein distance algorithm, which he developed in...

László Kozma

Designer of the first Hungarian digital computer, Kozma made lasting contributions to computing and electrical engineering. Due to the regulations of numerus clausus, his application to the Budapest University of Technology was rejected...

David A. Thompson

Pioneer in the design and development of thin film magnetic head technology for use in high-density data storage, Thompson has served as Director of the Advanced Magnetic Recording Laboratory at IBM Almaden...

Frederica Darema

Proposer of the Single Program, Multiple Data (SPMD) programming model, Darema introduced SPMD in 1984, establishing what has become the most common style of parallel programming. In computing, Single Program, Multiple Data...