Heinrich Rohrer

Co-designer of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), Rohrer shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerd Binnig for this invention; the other half of the Prize was awarded to...

David Neil Laurence Levy

Developer of the Chess module for the TI-99/4A Home Computer Project in collaboration with Texas Instruments, Levy is a Scottish International Master of chess, a businessman noted for his involvement with computer...

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,...

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...

Yevgeny Valentinovich Kaspersky

Co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, producer of antivirus software and computer security products, Kaspersky is recognized as a leading figure in information security. Kaspersky graduated from the Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications and Computer Science,...

John William Mauchly

Co-inventor of ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, Mauchly worked alongside J. Presper Eckert to design EDVAC, BINAC, and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States....

Feng-hsiung Hsu

Architect and principal designer of IBM Deep Blue, the chess machine that defeated the World Chess Champion in 1997, Hsu is a computer scientist and author of Behind Deep Blue: Building the...

Martin A. Goetz

Software pioneer and holder of the first software patent, Goetz played a foundational role in defining software as a standalone commercial product. In the early 1960s, the status of software as a standalone...

Larry R. Harris

Internationally recognized as an expert on database systems and computerized natural language, Harris founded EasyAsk as Linguistic Technology Corporation (LTC) in 1994 and authored its EasyAsk and English Wizard products. As Vice...

W. Bruce Croft

A leading contributor to research in information retrieval and the theoretical development and practical use of Bayesian inference networks and language modelling for retrieval, Croft has served as a distinguished Professor in...

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...

Joseph (Joe) A. Piscopo

Founder of Pansophic Systems in 1969, Piscopo built the Lisle, Illinois software firm into a major enterprise before retiring as its Chairman and C.E.O. in 1987 after 18 years. Previously, he had...

Grady Booch

Developer of the Unified Modeling Language, Booch got his first programming experience on a Fortran IV while in high school. Graduating from military academy in 1977, he worked as a software project...

Alan Gara

Technical leader for three generations of IBM Blue Gene supercomputers, Gara's Blue Gene/L system held the #1 position on the Top500 list for five consecutive dates. He has served as an IBM...

Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum

Author of MINIX, a clone of UNIX for the IBM PC, Tanenbaum wrote the operating system in 1987 to help students and others learn how an operating system worked. In the early 1990s,...

Gerard (Gerhard) Anton Salton

Developer of the now widely used Vector Space Model for Information Retrieval, Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time. Born in Nuremberg,...

William Seward Burroughs

Inventor of the adding machine, Burroughs was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. An American inventor, born in Rochester, New York, the son of a mechanic, he worked with...

Rudolf Bayer

Inventor of B-Trees and UB-Trees, Bayer is one of the most influential figures in the history of data structures and database systems. Rudolf Bayer was born in 1939 in Landshut, Germany. He...

Wei Yen

Major contributor to the Cydra-5 mini-supercomputer, Yen is a software developer and entrepreneur who has been involved with several companies, including as chairman and founder of AiLive. He and his brother David...

Francis Wilton Reichelderfer

Instrumental in bringing modern computerized technology to weather forecasting, Reichelderfer presided over a revolutionary era in the history of the National Weather Service. From 1938 to 1963, he guided the organization through...