Blaise Pascal
- Born: 19 June 1623
- Birthplace:Clermont-Ferrand, France
- Died: 19 August 1662
- Best Known As: 17th century mathematical genius
A prodigy in math, Blaise Pascal was a contemporary and rival of René Descartes. In spite of years of ill health and a short life, Pascal accomplished quite a bit: he published a significant work on the geometry of conical sections when he was only sixteen; he invented a calculating machine by the time he was nineteen; he and Pierre de Fermat founded the modern theory of probability; he described the principle that is the basis for the hydraulic press (called Pascal's Law); and he proved that there was a vacuum above the atmosphere. Pascal had a religious conversion in the 1650s and devoted himself to religion instead of science. He is famous for the philosophical theorem known as Pascal's Wager, and for the remark that history would have been different had Cleopatra's nose been differently shaped.
Charles Babbage
(born Dec. 26, 1791, London, Eng. — died Oct. 18, 1871, London) British mathematician and inventor. Educated at Cambridge University, he devoted himself from about 1812 to devising machines capable of calculating mathematical tables. His first small calculator could perform certain computations to eight decimals. In 1823 he obtained government support for the design of a projected machine with a 20-decimal capacity. In the 1830s he developed plans for the so-called Analytical Engine, capable of performing any arithmetical operation on the basis of instructions from punched cards, a memory unit in which to store numbers, sequential control, and most of the other basic elements of the present-day computer. The forerunner of the modern digital computer, the Analytical Engine was never completed. In 1991 British scientists built Difference Engine No. 2 (accurate to 31 digits) to Babbage's specifications. His other contributions included establishing the modern postal system in England, compiling the first reliable actuarial tables, and inventing the locomotive cowcatcher.
- Born: 26 December 1792
- Birthplace: Teignmouth, Devonshire, England
- Died: 18 October 1871
- Best Known As: Inventor of the Difference Engine
Charles Babbage was a 19th century mathematician and inventor whose calculating machines earned him a top spot in the history of mechanical computing. Babbage's early career was devoted to practical applied science, particularly in manufacturing. But he is most famous for his work on what he called the Difference Engine and, later, the Analytical Engine. As early as 1822 he speculated that a machine could be used to compute complex mathematical problems and calculate and correct errors in logarithm tables and astronomical charts. He obtained government grants and began work on the Difference Engine, only to decide later that it would be easier to scrap the work and start fresh on a new idea, the Analytical Engine. The British government withdrew funding in 1842 and stuck the incomplete Difference Engine in the Science Museum, where it still sits. Babbage, using his own money, spent the rest of his life working on the Analytical Engine, but never finished it. He was assisted by Lord Byron's daughter, Ada Augusta, the countess of Lovelace and an amateur mathematician. In spite of his failure to completely develop a working machine, Babbage (and Lady Lovelace) are legendary heroes in the prehistory of the computing age; he is sometimes called "the grandfather of modern computing."
Ada King countess of Lovelace
(born Dec. 10, 1815, London, Eng. — died Nov. 29, 1852, London) English mathematician. Her father was the poet Lord Byron. In 1835 she married William King, 8th Baron King; when he was created an earl in 1838, she became countess of Lovelace. Having studied with the famous mathematician-logician Augustus De Morgan, she was introduced to Charles Babbage's Difference Engine (calculator) and studied plans for his Analytical Engine (computer) as early as 1833. In 1843 she translated and annotated an article about the Analytical Engine by Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea. In correspondence with Babbage, she also described how the Analytical Engine could be "programmed" to calculate certain numbers; this work has been called the first computer program, and in consequence she has been called the first computer programmer. Ada, a computer programming language, is named for her.
Lovelace was fascinated by Charles Babbage's idea for a new mechanical calculating machine, the Difference Engine. In 1842 Luigi F. Menabrea [b. Chambéry, Savoy, France, September 4, 1809, d. St Cassin, France, May 24, 1896] summarized the concept behind Babbage's more advanced calculating machine, the Analytical Engine. Lovelace translated Menabrea's article into English and added her own notes as well as diagrams and other information. She predicted that such a machine, which Babbage never built, would have many applications beyond arithmetic calculations, from scientific research to composing music and producing graphics. She explained how the machine might be instructed to perform a series of calculations. The programming language ADA is named for her, although the countess has only a slender claim to the frequently used label of "first programmer." But she really did write a program, one for calculating Bernoulli numbers--not a mean feat.
Herman Hollerith
(born Feb. 29, 1860, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S. — died Nov. 17, 1929, Washington, D.C.) U.S. inventor. He attended Columbia University's School of Mines and later assisted in the 1880 U.S. census. By the time of the 1890 census, he had invented machines to record statistics by electrically reading and sorting punched cards, and the census results were consequently obtained in one-third the time required in 1880. In 1896 he founded the Tabulating Machine Co., which later became IBM Corp.Hollerith's electromechanical sensing and punching devices were forerunners of the input/output units of later computers.
He was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of the company that became IBM.
Hollerith punched card
Personal life
Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, where he spent his early childhood. He entered the City College of New York in 1875 and graduated from the Columbia University School of Mines with an "Engineer of Mines" degree in 1879. In 1880 he listed himself as a mining engineer while living in Manhattan, and completed his Ph.D. in 1890 at Columbia University. Despite his time in New York City, Herman Hollerith lived most of his life in Buffalo.
John Vincent Atanasoff
(born Oct. 4, 1903, Hamilton, N.Y., U.S. — died June 15, 1995, Frederick, Md.) U.S. physicist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. With Clifford Berry, he developed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (1937 – 42), a machine capable of solving differential equations using binary arithmetic. In 1941 he joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory; he participated in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll (1946). In 1952 he established the Ordnance Engineering Co., which he later sold to Aerojet Engineering Corp. In 1973, after a judge voided a patent owned by Sperry Rand Corp. on ENIAC, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was credited as the first electronic digital computer
1997 replica of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer at Durham Center, Iowa State University
George Robert Stibitz
(April 20, 1904 – January 31, 1995) is internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was a Bell Labs researcher known for his 1930s and 1940s work on the realization ofBoolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element.
Born in York, Pennsylvania, he received his bachelor's degreefrom Denison University in Granville, Ohio, his master's degree from Union College in 1927, and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics in 1930 from Cornell University.
In 1940 he and Samuel Williams, a colleague at Bell Labs, built the Complex Number Calculator, considered a forerunner of the digital computer. He accomplished the first remote computer operation by inputting problems via a teleprinter, and he pioneered computer applications in biomedical areas, such as the movement of oxygen in the lungs, brain cell structure, diffusion of nutrients and drugs in the body, and capillary transport. The holder of 38 patents, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 1983.
Richard Wesley Hamming
(Chicago, February 11, 1915 –Monterey, California, January 7, 1998) was an Americanmathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window (described in Section 5.8 of his book Digital Filters), Hamming numbers, Sphere-packing (orhamming bound) and the Hamming distance.
He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1937, a master's degree from theUniversity of Nebraska in 1939, and finally a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1942. He was a professor at theUniversity of Louisville during World War II, and left to work on theManhattan Project in 1945, programming one of the earliest electronic digital computers to calculate the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists. The objective of the program was to discover if the detonation of anatomic bomb would ignite theatmosphere. The result of the computation was that this would not occur, and so the United Statesused the bomb, first in a test inNew Mexico, and then twice againstJapan.
Later, from 1946 to 1976, he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he collaborated with Claude E. Shannon. During this period, he was an Adjunct Professor at the City College of New York, School of Engineering. On July 23, 1976 he moved to the Naval Postgraduate School, where he worked as an Adjunct Professor until 1997, when he became Professor Emeritus.
He was a founder and president of the Association for Computing Machinery. His philosophy on scientific computing appears as preface to his 1962 book on numerical methods:
Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart
(born January 30, 1925) is an American inventor and early computer pioneer.
He invented hypertext, the multiwindow display, the mouse, and groupware. His demonstration of these capabilities in San Francisco in 1968 started the process of development that led to the MicrosoftWindows operating system. Engelbart's group at SRI was one of the original four members of the ARPANET, precursor of the Internet. After his retirement, he led the Bootstrap Institute, researching ways to support cooperative work by computers. In 1997 he received the Turing Award.
He is best known for inventing the computer mouse, as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs; and as a committed and vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems.
His lab at SRI was responsible for more breakthrough innovation than possibly any other lab before or since. Engelbart had embedded in his lab a set of organizing principles, which he termed his "bootstrapping strategy", which he specifically designed to bootstrap and accelerate the rate of innovation achievable.
John McCarthy
(born September 4, 1927, in Boston,Massachusetts), is an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and is the inventor of the Lisp programming language. He also developed ideas about the processing characteristics of trees (as used in computing), as distinct from nets. He is a recipient of the Kyoto Prize (1988), and the National Medal of Science (1990).
Seymour Roger Cray
(September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was an U.S. electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded the company Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel Birnbaum, then CTO of HP, said of him:
“ It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them.
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He worked in the 1950s on the UNIVAC I, a landmark first-generation digital computer, and he led the design of the world's first transistor-based computer (the CDC 1604). In 1972 he founded Cray Research, Inc., and there built the fastest and most powerful supercomputers in the world, using his innovative multiprocessing design. The Cray-2 (1985) could perform 1.2 billion calculations per second, an incredible pace in its day.
Charles Bachman
was born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1924, while his father, Charlie Bachman, was the head football coach at Kansas State College. Bachman attended high school in East Lansing, Michigan before joining the U.S. Army Anti-Aircraft Artillery Corps during World War II. During the war, he spent two years in the Southwest Pacific Theater, March 1944 through February 1946 in New Guinea, Australia and the Philippine Islands. Here he was first exposed to and used fire control computers for aiming 90 mm guns. After his discharge from the military, he attendedMichigan State College and graduated in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering (Tau Beta Phi). In 1950 he graduated with a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. At the same time he had attended Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and completed three quarters of the requirements for an MBA.[1]
Bachman spent his entire career as practising software engineer rather than in academia. Initially starting work in 1950 at Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan, he rose to the position of Data Processing manager before leaving in 1960 to join General Electric, where he developed theIntegrated Data Store (IDS), one of the first database management systems. Working in conjunction with Weyerhaeuser Lumber, he developed the first multiprogramming access to the IDS database. Later at GE he developed the "dataBasic" product that offered database support to the Basic Language timesharing users. Later in his career, he joined a smaller firm, Cullinane Information Systems (later called Cullinet), which offered a version of IDS that was called IDMSand supported the IBM mainframes.
He received the ACM Turing Award in 1973 for "his outstanding contributions to database technology". He was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1977 for his pioneering work in database systems. He is listed in the Database Hall of Fame.
Bachman papers[2] from 1951 to 2007 are collected at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. This collection contains detailed archival material describing database software development. Includes documentation on Dow Chemical (1951-1960), General Electric (1960-1970), Honeywell Information Systems (1970-1981), Cullinane Database Systems/Cullinet (1972-1986), Bachman Information Systems, Inc. (1982-1996) as well as several professional organizations.
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie 
Dennis Ritchie (right)
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie
(born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on C and otherprogramming languages, and on operating systemssuch as Multics and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated fromHarvard University with degrees in physics andapplied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center.
Ivan Edward Sutherland
(born 1938 in Hastings,Nebraska) is an American computer scientist andInternet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.
From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Henri Gouraud who devised theGouraud shading technique, and Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods.
In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague David Evans. The company has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe (John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).
From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's Computer Science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs.
Dr. Sutherland is currently a Fellow and Vice President emeritus at Sun Microsystems and is a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley (Fall 2005 - Spring 2008). Currently, Dr. Sutherland is also leading the research in Asynchronous Systems atPortland State University and has founded Asynchronous Research Center (ARC) at Portland State University.
Edward Albert Feigenbaum
(born January 20, 1936; Weehawken, New Jersey) is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence. He is often called the "father of expert systems."
Feigenbaum completed his undergraduate degree, and a Ph.D., at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). In his PhD thesis, carried out under the supervision of Herbert Simon, he developed EPAM, one of the first computer models of how people learn.
He received the ACM Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science, jointly withRaj Reddy in 1994 "For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology". A former chief scientist of the Air Force, he received the U.S. Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 1997. In 2007 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He founded the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. He is currently a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University.
He was co-founder of several start-ups, such as IntelliCorp and Teknowledge.
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd
(August 23, 1923 – April 18, 2003) was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational modelfor database management, the theoretical basis forrelational databases. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned achievement.
Edgar Frank Codd was born on the Isle of Portlandin England. After attending Poole Grammar School, he studied mathematics and chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford, before serving as a pilot in theRoyal Air Force during the Second World War. In 1948, he moved to New York to work for IBM as a mathematical programmer. In 1953, angered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Codd moved to Ottawa, Canada. A decade later he returned to theU.S. and received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Two years later he moved to San Jose, California, to work at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory, where he continued to work until the 1980s. During the 1990s, his health deteriorated and he ceased work.
Codd received the Turing Award in 1981, and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of theAssociation for Computing Machinery.
Codd died of heart failure at his home in Williams Island, Florida, at the age of 79 on April 18, 2003.
Marc Andreessen
- Born: 9 July 1971
- Birthplace: Cedar Falls, Iowa
- Best Known As: Creator of the Netscape web browser
Marc Andreessen was the co-founder and chief technical mind behind the Internet company Netscape. Andreessen was still a student researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993 when he helped conceive and create the first popular Internet browser, known as Mosaic. After graduation he moved to California and soon teamed with former Silicon Graphics founder James Clark to found Netscape. Andreessen was just 22 years old. The company released its first browser, Netscape Navigator, in December of 1994. Netscape held its intial public offering on 9 August 1995, and the stock jumped from an opening price of $28 to an astounding closing price of $58 on the first day. (Netscape's IPO effectively kicked off the dot-com stock boom of the late 1990s.) By the end of 1995, Andreessen was worth over $170 million and had become the very model of the ascendant techno-geek; Business Week magazine later called him a "hamburger-chomping pop icon for the cyber generation." Andreessen continued at Netscape as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and then served as their executive vice president of products until America Online (AOL) acquired the company in 1999. Andreessen was briefly the CTO of AOL, but left later in 1999 to create Loudcloud, a web services firm. The company name was changed to Opsware in 2002, with Andreessen continuing as its chairman.
Andreessen grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, where his mother worked for the clothing company Land's End.
Jon Postel 
Jonathan Bruce Postel
(August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death. The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute. His obituary was written by Vint Cerfand published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work.
Postel attended UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.A (1968) in Engineering. Attending UCLA, he completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974.
While at UCLA, he was involved in early work on the ARPANET; he later moved to the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, where he spent the rest of his career.
Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFCs 791-793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. He wrote or co-authored more than 200 RFCs.
Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.
All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division ("Division 7") of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.
On January 28, 1998, Postel, on his own authority, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers and instructed them to change the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions (NSI)'s A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. (198.41.0.4) to DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus dividing control of Internet naming between IANA and the four remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, the .mil server, BRL and NSI. He soon received a telephone call from a furious Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's senior science advisor, who instructed him to undo this change - which he did. Within a week, the US NTIA issued its "Green Paper" asserting the US government's definitive authority over the Internet DNS root zone.
Postel died of complications after heart valve replacement surgery in Los Angeles, on October 16, 1998, 9 months after the DNS Root Authority incident.
Steve Jobs
- Born: 24 February 1955
- Birthplace: San Francisco, California
- Best Known As: The co-founder of Apple computers
Steve Jobs was a college dropout when he teamed up with Steve Wozniak in 1976 to sell personal computers assembled in Jobs' garage. That was the beginning of Apple Computers, which revolutionized the computing industry and made Jobs a multimillionaire before he was 30 years old. He was forced out of the company in 1985 and started the NeXT Corporation, but returned to his old company in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT. Jobs soon became Apple's chief executive officer and sparked a resurgence in the company with products like the colorful iMac computer and the iPod music player. Jobs is also the CEO of Pixar, the animation company responsible for movies like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock; the deal made Jobs the largest individual shareholder of Disney stock. Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003 and had surgery in July of 2004, and was criticized by some for not disclosing his illness to stockholders until after the fact. His health was in the news again in 2008, when his extreme weight loss sparked rumors that his cancer had recurred. Jobs refused to speak publicly about his health, but in January of 2009 he took a formal six-month leave of absence from Apple, saying that his health problems were "more complex than I originally thought." He had a liver transplant later that year and returned to work at Apple on a part-time basis in June of 2009.
Some sources list Los Altos, California as Jobs's place of birth. However, in a 1995 oral history interview with The Smithsonian, Jobs said, "I was born in San Francisco, California, USA, planet Earth, February 24, 1955." Jobs was given up for adoption after birth and raised by his adoptive parents in Silicon Valley.
Tim Berners-Lee
- Born: 8 June 1955
- Birthplace: London, England
- Best Known As: Inventor of the World Wide Web
British physicist. The son of computer scientists, he graduated from Oxford University and in 1980 accepted a fellowship at CERN in Geneva. In 1989 he suggested a global hypertext project. He and his CERN colleagues created a communications protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that standardized communication between computer servers and clients. Their text-based Web browser was released to the public in 1991, marking the beginnings of the World Wide Web and general public use of the Internet. Berners-Lee declined all opportunities to profit from his immensely valuable innovation. In 1994 he joined MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science as director of the World Wide Web Consortium. His numerous honours include the inaugural Millennium Technology Prize (2004) and the Charles Stark Draper Prize (2007). He was knighted in 2004.Tim Berners-Lee is the primary inventor of the World Wide Web, the system of text links and multimedia capabilities that made the Internet accessible to mass audiences. Lee wrote the original Web software himself in 1990 and made it available on the Internet in 1991. He joined MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 and remains a leading authority on Internet issues. His 1999 book Weaving the Web described the Web's birth and growth. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II announced that Berners-Lee would be made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for his work on the Web.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was awarded the first Millennium Technology Prize, a Finland-based award for excellence which carries a cash prize of one million Euros.
Linus Torvalds
- Born: 28 December 1969
- Birthplace: Helsinki, Finland
- Best Known As: The guy who wrote the kernel for the Linux Operating System
1969-, Finnish computer software engineer. A member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority, he attended the Univ. of Helsinki (M.S., 1996), where he also taught. In the early 1990s he began working on a Unix-like operating system for personal computers built with Intel microprocessors, leading to the release of version 1.0 of the Linux kernel in 1994. Together with other free software developed under the GNU public license, Linux has become the core of a stable, graphical operating system that has been freely installed and improved by millions of computer users looking for an alternative to systems developed by Microsoft, Apple, and other companies. From 1997 to 2003 Torvalds worked at Transmeta Corp. in California as a software developer while continuing to supervise the development of the Linux kernel. In 2003 he became a fellow at Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a Linux-development consortium in Beaverton, Oreg.; OSDL was merged in 2007 into the Linux Foundation (est. 2007), which now sponsors his work.In 1991 Linus Torvalds was a college student at the University of Helsinki. Starting with the basics of a Unix system, he wrote the kernel -- original code -- for a new system for his x86 PC that was later dubbed Linux (pronounced linn-ucks). Torvalds revealed the original source code for free -- making him a folk hero among programmers -- and users around the world began making additions and now continue to tweak it. Linux is considered the leader in the practice of allowing users to re-program their own operating systems.
Richard Matthew Stallman
(born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated "rms",is an American softwarefreedom activist, and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement and, in October 1985, set up theFree Software Foundation.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against bothsoftware patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely-used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.
Bill Gates
- Born: 28 October 1955
- Birthplace: Seattle, Washington
- Best Known As: Founder of the Microsoft Corporation
Name at birth: William Gates III
Bill Gates is the head of the software company Microsoft and is one of the world's wealthiest men. Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in the 1970s, though Allen left the company in 1983. Gates oversaw the invention and marketing of the MS-DOS operating system, the Windows operating interface, the Internet Explorer browser, and a multitude of other popular computer products. Along the way he gained a reputation for fierce competitiveness and aggressive business savvy. During the 1990s rising Microsoft stock prices made Gates the world's wealthiest man; his wealth has at times exceeded $75 billion, making Gates a popular symbol of the ascendant computer geek of the late 20th century. In June of 2006, Gates announced that he would step down from day-to-day involvement in Microsoft by July of 2008. He said he would then remain chairman of the Microsoft board while focusing on his charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates married Melinda French, a Microsoft employee, on 1 January 1994. The couple have three children: daughters Jennifer Katharine (b. 1996) and Phoebe Adele (b. 2002) and son Rory John (b. 1999)... Gates's personal charitable initiative, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has focused on global health issues, especially on preventing malaria and AIDS in poor countries... For their philanthropic activities, Time magazine named Bill and Melinda Gates (along with rock star and activist Bono) its Persons of the Year for 2005.
Blaise Pascal
- Born: 19 June 1623
- Birthplace:Clermont-Ferrand, France
- Died: 19 August 1662
- Best Known As: 17th century mathematical genius
A prodigy in math, Blaise Pascal was a contemporary and rival of René Descartes. In spite of years of ill health and a short life, Pascal accomplished quite a bit: he published a significant work on the geometry of conical sections when he was only sixteen; he invented a calculating machine by the time he was nineteen; he and Pierre de Fermat founded the modern theory of probability; he described the principle that is the basis for the hydraulic press (called Pascal's Law); and he proved that there was a vacuum above the atmosphere. Pascal had a religious conversion in the 1650s and devoted himself to religion instead of science. He is famous for the philosophical theorem known as Pascal's Wager, and for the remark that history would have been different had Cleopatra's nose been differently shaped.
Charles Babbage
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- Born: 26 December 1792
- Birthplace: Teignmouth, Devonshire, England
- Died: 18 October 1871
- Best Known As: Inventor of the Difference Engine
Charles Babbage was a 19th century mathematician and inventor whose calculating machines earned him a top spot in the history of mechanical computing. Babbage's early career was devoted to practical applied science, particularly in manufacturing. But he is most famous for his work on what he called the Difference Engine and, later, the Analytical Engine. As early as 1822 he speculated that a machine could be used to compute complex mathematical problems and calculate and correct errors in logarithm tables and astronomical charts. He obtained government grants and began work on the Difference Engine, only to decide later that it would be easier to scrap the work and start fresh on a new idea, the Analytical Engine. The British government withdrew funding in 1842 and stuck the incomplete Difference Engine in the Science Museum, where it still sits. Babbage, using his own money, spent the rest of his life working on the Analytical Engine, but never finished it. He was assisted by Lord Byron's daughter, Ada Augusta, the countess of Lovelace and an amateur mathematician. In spite of his failure to completely develop a working machine, Babbage (and Lady Lovelace) are legendary heroes in the prehistory of the computing age; he is sometimes called "the grandfather of modern computing."
Ada King countess of Lovelace
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(born Dec. 10, 1815, London, Eng. — died Nov. 29, 1852, London) English mathematician. Her father was the poet Lord Byron. In 1835 she married William King, 8th Baron King; when he was created an earl in 1838, she became countess of Lovelace. Having studied with the famous mathematician-logician Augustus De Morgan, she was introduced to Charles Babbage's Difference Engine (calculator) and studied plans for his Analytical Engine (computer) as early as 1833. In 1843 she translated and annotated an article about the Analytical Engine by Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea. In correspondence with Babbage, she also described how the Analytical Engine could be "programmed" to calculate certain numbers; this work has been called the first computer program, and in consequence she has been called the first computer programmer. Ada, a computer programming language, is named for her.
Lovelace was fascinated by Charles Babbage's idea for a new mechanical calculating machine, the Difference Engine. In 1842 Luigi F. Menabrea [b. Chambéry, Savoy, France, September 4, 1809, d. St Cassin, France, May 24, 1896] summarized the concept behind Babbage's more advanced calculating machine, the Analytical Engine. Lovelace translated Menabrea's article into English and added her own notes as well as diagrams and other information. She predicted that such a machine, which Babbage never built, would have many applications beyond arithmetic calculations, from scientific research to composing music and producing graphics. She explained how the machine might be instructed to perform a series of calculations. The programming language ADA is named for her, although the countess has only a slender claim to the frequently used label of "first programmer." But she really did write a program, one for calculating Bernoulli numbers--not a mean feat.
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Herman Hollerith
(born Feb. 29, 1860, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S. — died Nov. 17, 1929, Washington, D.C.) U.S. inventor. He attended Columbia University's School of Mines and later assisted in the 1880 U.S. census. By the time of the 1890 census, he had invented machines to record statistics by electrically reading and sorting punched cards, and the census results were consequently obtained in one-third the time required in 1880. In 1896 he founded the Tabulating Machine Co., which later became IBM Corp.Hollerith's electromechanical sensing and punching devices were forerunners of the input/output units of later computers.
He was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of the company that became IBM.
Hollerith punched card
Personal life
Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, where he spent his early childhood. He entered the City College of New York in 1875 and graduated from the Columbia University School of Mines with an "Engineer of Mines" degree in 1879. In 1880 he listed himself as a mining engineer while living in Manhattan, and completed his Ph.D. in 1890 at Columbia University. Despite his time in New York City, Herman Hollerith lived most of his life in Buffalo.
John Vincent Atanasoff
(born Oct. 4, 1903, Hamilton, N.Y., U.S. — died June 15, 1995, Frederick, Md.) U.S. physicist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. With Clifford Berry, he developed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (1937 – 42), a machine capable of solving differential equations using binary arithmetic. In 1941 he joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory; he participated in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll (1946). In 1952 he established the Ordnance Engineering Co., which he later sold to Aerojet Engineering Corp. In 1973, after a judge voided a patent owned by Sperry Rand Corp. on ENIAC, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was credited as the first electronic digital computer
1997 replica of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer at Durham Center, Iowa State University
George Robert Stibitz
(April 20, 1904 – January 31, 1995) is internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was a Bell Labs researcher known for his 1930s and 1940s work on the realization ofBoolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element.
Born in York, Pennsylvania, he received his bachelor's degreefrom Denison University in Granville, Ohio, his master's degree from Union College in 1927, and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics in 1930 from Cornell University.
In 1940 he and Samuel Williams, a colleague at Bell Labs, built the Complex Number Calculator, considered a forerunner of the digital computer. He accomplished the first remote computer operation by inputting problems via a teleprinter, and he pioneered computer applications in biomedical areas, such as the movement of oxygen in the lungs, brain cell structure, diffusion of nutrients and drugs in the body, and capillary transport. The holder of 38 patents, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 1983.
Richard Wesley Hamming
(Chicago, February 11, 1915 –Monterey, California, January 7, 1998) was an Americanmathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window (described in Section 5.8 of his book Digital Filters), Hamming numbers, Sphere-packing (orhamming bound) and the Hamming distance.
He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1937, a master's degree from theUniversity of Nebraska in 1939, and finally a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1942. He was a professor at theUniversity of Louisville during World War II, and left to work on theManhattan Project in 1945, programming one of the earliest electronic digital computers to calculate the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists. The objective of the program was to discover if the detonation of anatomic bomb would ignite theatmosphere. The result of the computation was that this would not occur, and so the United Statesused the bomb, first in a test inNew Mexico, and then twice againstJapan.
Later, from 1946 to 1976, he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he collaborated with Claude E. Shannon. During this period, he was an Adjunct Professor at the City College of New York, School of Engineering. On July 23, 1976 he moved to the Naval Postgraduate School, where he worked as an Adjunct Professor until 1997, when he became Professor Emeritus.
He was a founder and president of the Association for Computing Machinery. His philosophy on scientific computing appears as preface to his 1962 book on numerical methods:
Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart
(born January 30, 1925) is an American inventor and early computer pioneer.
He invented hypertext, the multiwindow display, the mouse, and groupware. His demonstration of these capabilities in San Francisco in 1968 started the process of development that led to the MicrosoftWindows operating system. Engelbart's group at SRI was one of the original four members of the ARPANET, precursor of the Internet. After his retirement, he led the Bootstrap Institute, researching ways to support cooperative work by computers. In 1997 he received the Turing Award.
He is best known for inventing the computer mouse, as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs; and as a committed and vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems.
His lab at SRI was responsible for more breakthrough innovation than possibly any other lab before or since. Engelbart had embedded in his lab a set of organizing principles, which he termed his "bootstrapping strategy", which he specifically designed to bootstrap and accelerate the rate of innovation achievable.
John McCarthy
(born September 4, 1927, in Boston,Massachusetts), is an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and is the inventor of the Lisp programming language. He also developed ideas about the processing characteristics of trees (as used in computing), as distinct from nets. He is a recipient of the Kyoto Prize (1988), and the National Medal of Science (1990).
Seymour Roger Cray
(September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was an U.S. electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded the company Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel Birnbaum, then CTO of HP, said of him:
“ It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them.
”
He worked in the 1950s on the UNIVAC I, a landmark first-generation digital computer, and he led the design of the world's first transistor-based computer (the CDC 1604). In 1972 he founded Cray Research, Inc., and there built the fastest and most powerful supercomputers in the world, using his innovative multiprocessing design. The Cray-2 (1985) could perform 1.2 billion calculations per second, an incredible pace in its day.
Charles Bachman
was born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1924, while his father, Charlie Bachman, was the head football coach at Kansas State College. Bachman attended high school in East Lansing, Michigan before joining the U.S. Army Anti-Aircraft Artillery Corps during World War II. During the war, he spent two years in the Southwest Pacific Theater, March 1944 through February 1946 in New Guinea, Australia and the Philippine Islands. Here he was first exposed to and used fire control computers for aiming 90 mm guns. After his discharge from the military, he attendedMichigan State College and graduated in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering (Tau Beta Phi). In 1950 he graduated with a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. At the same time he had attended Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and completed three quarters of the requirements for an MBA.[1]
Bachman spent his entire career as practising software engineer rather than in academia. Initially starting work in 1950 at Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan, he rose to the position of Data Processing manager before leaving in 1960 to join General Electric, where he developed theIntegrated Data Store (IDS), one of the first database management systems. Working in conjunction with Weyerhaeuser Lumber, he developed the first multiprogramming access to the IDS database. Later at GE he developed the "dataBasic" product that offered database support to the Basic Language timesharing users. Later in his career, he joined a smaller firm, Cullinane Information Systems (later called Cullinet), which offered a version of IDS that was called IDMSand supported the IBM mainframes.
He received the ACM Turing Award in 1973 for "his outstanding contributions to database technology". He was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1977 for his pioneering work in database systems. He is listed in the Database Hall of Fame.
Bachman papers[2] from 1951 to 2007 are collected at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. This collection contains detailed archival material describing database software development. Includes documentation on Dow Chemical (1951-1960), General Electric (1960-1970), Honeywell Information Systems (1970-1981), Cullinane Database Systems/Cullinet (1972-1986), Bachman Information Systems, Inc. (1982-1996) as well as several professional organizations.
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie (right)
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie
(born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on C and otherprogramming languages, and on operating systemssuch as Multics and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated fromHarvard University with degrees in physics andapplied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center.
Ivan Edward Sutherland
(born 1938 in Hastings,Nebraska) is an American computer scientist andInternet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.
From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Henri Gouraud who devised theGouraud shading technique, and Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods.
In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague David Evans. The company has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe (John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).
From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's Computer Science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs.
Dr. Sutherland is currently a Fellow and Vice President emeritus at Sun Microsystems and is a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley (Fall 2005 - Spring 2008). Currently, Dr. Sutherland is also leading the research in Asynchronous Systems atPortland State University and has founded Asynchronous Research Center (ARC) at Portland State University.
Edward Albert Feigenbaum
(born January 20, 1936; Weehawken, New Jersey) is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence. He is often called the "father of expert systems."
Feigenbaum completed his undergraduate degree, and a Ph.D., at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). In his PhD thesis, carried out under the supervision of Herbert Simon, he developed EPAM, one of the first computer models of how people learn.
He received the ACM Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science, jointly withRaj Reddy in 1994 "For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology". A former chief scientist of the Air Force, he received the U.S. Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 1997. In 2007 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He founded the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. He is currently a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University.
He was co-founder of several start-ups, such as IntelliCorp and Teknowledge.
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd
(August 23, 1923 – April 18, 2003) was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational modelfor database management, the theoretical basis forrelational databases. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned achievement.
Edgar Frank Codd was born on the Isle of Portlandin England. After attending Poole Grammar School, he studied mathematics and chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford, before serving as a pilot in theRoyal Air Force during the Second World War. In 1948, he moved to New York to work for IBM as a mathematical programmer. In 1953, angered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Codd moved to Ottawa, Canada. A decade later he returned to theU.S. and received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Two years later he moved to San Jose, California, to work at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory, where he continued to work until the 1980s. During the 1990s, his health deteriorated and he ceased work.
Codd received the Turing Award in 1981, and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of theAssociation for Computing Machinery.
Codd died of heart failure at his home in Williams Island, Florida, at the age of 79 on April 18, 2003.
Marc Andreessen
- Born: 9 July 1971
- Birthplace: Cedar Falls, Iowa
- Best Known As: Creator of the Netscape web browser
Marc Andreessen was the co-founder and chief technical mind behind the Internet company Netscape. Andreessen was still a student researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993 when he helped conceive and create the first popular Internet browser, known as Mosaic. After graduation he moved to California and soon teamed with former Silicon Graphics founder James Clark to found Netscape. Andreessen was just 22 years old. The company released its first browser, Netscape Navigator, in December of 1994. Netscape held its intial public offering on 9 August 1995, and the stock jumped from an opening price of $28 to an astounding closing price of $58 on the first day. (Netscape's IPO effectively kicked off the dot-com stock boom of the late 1990s.) By the end of 1995, Andreessen was worth over $170 million and had become the very model of the ascendant techno-geek; Business Week magazine later called him a "hamburger-chomping pop icon for the cyber generation." Andreessen continued at Netscape as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and then served as their executive vice president of products until America Online (AOL) acquired the company in 1999. Andreessen was briefly the CTO of AOL, but left later in 1999 to create Loudcloud, a web services firm. The company name was changed to Opsware in 2002, with Andreessen continuing as its chairman.
Andreessen grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, where his mother worked for the clothing company Land's End.
Jon Postel
Jonathan Bruce Postel
(August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death. The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute. His obituary was written by Vint Cerfand published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work.
Postel attended UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.A (1968) in Engineering. Attending UCLA, he completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974.
While at UCLA, he was involved in early work on the ARPANET; he later moved to the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, where he spent the rest of his career.
Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFCs 791-793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. He wrote or co-authored more than 200 RFCs.
Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.
All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division ("Division 7") of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.
On January 28, 1998, Postel, on his own authority, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers and instructed them to change the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions (NSI)'s A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. (198.41.0.4) to DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus dividing control of Internet naming between IANA and the four remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, the .mil server, BRL and NSI. He soon received a telephone call from a furious Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's senior science advisor, who instructed him to undo this change - which he did. Within a week, the US NTIA issued its "Green Paper" asserting the US government's definitive authority over the Internet DNS root zone.
Postel died of complications after heart valve replacement surgery in Los Angeles, on October 16, 1998, 9 months after the DNS Root Authority incident.
Steve Jobs
- Born: 24 February 1955
- Birthplace: San Francisco, California
- Best Known As: The co-founder of Apple computers
Steve Jobs was a college dropout when he teamed up with Steve Wozniak in 1976 to sell personal computers assembled in Jobs' garage. That was the beginning of Apple Computers, which revolutionized the computing industry and made Jobs a multimillionaire before he was 30 years old. He was forced out of the company in 1985 and started the NeXT Corporation, but returned to his old company in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT. Jobs soon became Apple's chief executive officer and sparked a resurgence in the company with products like the colorful iMac computer and the iPod music player. Jobs is also the CEO of Pixar, the animation company responsible for movies like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock; the deal made Jobs the largest individual shareholder of Disney stock. Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003 and had surgery in July of 2004, and was criticized by some for not disclosing his illness to stockholders until after the fact. His health was in the news again in 2008, when his extreme weight loss sparked rumors that his cancer had recurred. Jobs refused to speak publicly about his health, but in January of 2009 he took a formal six-month leave of absence from Apple, saying that his health problems were "more complex than I originally thought." He had a liver transplant later that year and returned to work at Apple on a part-time basis in June of 2009.
Some sources list Los Altos, California as Jobs's place of birth. However, in a 1995 oral history interview with The Smithsonian, Jobs said, "I was born in San Francisco, California, USA, planet Earth, February 24, 1955." Jobs was given up for adoption after birth and raised by his adoptive parents in Silicon Valley.
Tim Berners-Lee
- Born: 8 June 1955
- Birthplace: London, England
- Best Known As: Inventor of the World Wide Web
British physicist. The son of computer scientists, he graduated from Oxford University and in 1980 accepted a fellowship at CERN in Geneva. In 1989 he suggested a global hypertext project. He and his CERN colleagues created a communications protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that standardized communication between computer servers and clients. Their text-based Web browser was released to the public in 1991, marking the beginnings of the World Wide Web and general public use of the Internet. Berners-Lee declined all opportunities to profit from his immensely valuable innovation. In 1994 he joined MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science as director of the World Wide Web Consortium. His numerous honours include the inaugural Millennium Technology Prize (2004) and the Charles Stark Draper Prize (2007). He was knighted in 2004.Tim Berners-Lee is the primary inventor of the World Wide Web, the system of text links and multimedia capabilities that made the Internet accessible to mass audiences. Lee wrote the original Web software himself in 1990 and made it available on the Internet in 1991. He joined MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 and remains a leading authority on Internet issues. His 1999 book Weaving the Web described the Web's birth and growth. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II announced that Berners-Lee would be made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for his work on the Web.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was awarded the first Millennium Technology Prize, a Finland-based award for excellence which carries a cash prize of one million Euros.
Linus Torvalds
- Born: 28 December 1969
- Birthplace: Helsinki, Finland
- Best Known As: The guy who wrote the kernel for the Linux Operating System
1969-, Finnish computer software engineer. A member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority, he attended the Univ. of Helsinki (M.S., 1996), where he also taught. In the early 1990s he began working on a Unix-like operating system for personal computers built with Intel microprocessors, leading to the release of version 1.0 of the Linux kernel in 1994. Together with other free software developed under the GNU public license, Linux has become the core of a stable, graphical operating system that has been freely installed and improved by millions of computer users looking for an alternative to systems developed by Microsoft, Apple, and other companies. From 1997 to 2003 Torvalds worked at Transmeta Corp. in California as a software developer while continuing to supervise the development of the Linux kernel. In 2003 he became a fellow at Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a Linux-development consortium in Beaverton, Oreg.; OSDL was merged in 2007 into the Linux Foundation (est. 2007), which now sponsors his work.In 1991 Linus Torvalds was a college student at the University of Helsinki. Starting with the basics of a Unix system, he wrote the kernel -- original code -- for a new system for his x86 PC that was later dubbed Linux (pronounced linn-ucks). Torvalds revealed the original source code for free -- making him a folk hero among programmers -- and users around the world began making additions and now continue to tweak it. Linux is considered the leader in the practice of allowing users to re-program their own operating systems.
Richard Matthew Stallman
(born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated "rms",is an American softwarefreedom activist, and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement and, in October 1985, set up theFree Software Foundation.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against bothsoftware patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely-used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.
Bill Gates
- Born: 28 October 1955
- Birthplace: Seattle, Washington
- Best Known As: Founder of the Microsoft Corporation
Name at birth: William Gates III
Bill Gates is the head of the software company Microsoft and is one of the world's wealthiest men. Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in the 1970s, though Allen left the company in 1983. Gates oversaw the invention and marketing of the MS-DOS operating system, the Windows operating interface, the Internet Explorer browser, and a multitude of other popular computer products. Along the way he gained a reputation for fierce competitiveness and aggressive business savvy. During the 1990s rising Microsoft stock prices made Gates the world's wealthiest man; his wealth has at times exceeded $75 billion, making Gates a popular symbol of the ascendant computer geek of the late 20th century. In June of 2006, Gates announced that he would step down from day-to-day involvement in Microsoft by July of 2008. He said he would then remain chairman of the Microsoft board while focusing on his charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates married Melinda French, a Microsoft employee, on 1 January 1994. The couple have three children: daughters Jennifer Katharine (b. 1996) and Phoebe Adele (b. 2002) and son Rory John (b. 1999)... Gates's personal charitable initiative, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has focused on global health issues, especially on preventing malaria and AIDS in poor countries... For their philanthropic activities, Time magazine named Bill and Melinda Gates (along with rock star and activist Bono) its Persons of the Year for 2005.
George Robert Stibitz
(April 20, 1904 – January 31, 1995) is internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was a Bell Labs researcher known for his 1930s and 1940s work on the realization ofBoolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element.
Born in York, Pennsylvania, he received his bachelor's degreefrom Denison University in Granville, Ohio, his master's degree from Union College in 1927, and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics in 1930 from Cornell University.
In 1940 he and Samuel Williams, a colleague at Bell Labs, built the Complex Number Calculator, considered a forerunner of the digital computer. He accomplished the first remote computer operation by inputting problems via a teleprinter, and he pioneered computer applications in biomedical areas, such as the movement of oxygen in the lungs, brain cell structure, diffusion of nutrients and drugs in the body, and capillary transport. The holder of 38 patents, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 1983.
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Richard Wesley Hamming
(Chicago, February 11, 1915 –Monterey, California, January 7, 1998) was an Americanmathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window (described in Section 5.8 of his book Digital Filters), Hamming numbers, Sphere-packing (orhamming bound) and the Hamming distance.
He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1937, a master's degree from theUniversity of Nebraska in 1939, and finally a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1942. He was a professor at theUniversity of Louisville during World War II, and left to work on theManhattan Project in 1945, programming one of the earliest electronic digital computers to calculate the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists. The objective of the program was to discover if the detonation of anatomic bomb would ignite theatmosphere. The result of the computation was that this would not occur, and so the United Statesused the bomb, first in a test inNew Mexico, and then twice againstJapan.
Later, from 1946 to 1976, he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he collaborated with Claude E. Shannon. During this period, he was an Adjunct Professor at the City College of New York, School of Engineering. On July 23, 1976 he moved to the Naval Postgraduate School, where he worked as an Adjunct Professor until 1997, when he became Professor Emeritus.
He was a founder and president of the Association for Computing Machinery. His philosophy on scientific computing appears as preface to his 1962 book on numerical methods:
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Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart
(born January 30, 1925) is an American inventor and early computer pioneer.
He invented hypertext, the multiwindow display, the mouse, and groupware. His demonstration of these capabilities in San Francisco in 1968 started the process of development that led to the MicrosoftWindows operating system. Engelbart's group at SRI was one of the original four members of the ARPANET, precursor of the Internet. After his retirement, he led the Bootstrap Institute, researching ways to support cooperative work by computers. In 1997 he received the Turing Award.
He is best known for inventing the computer mouse, as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs; and as a committed and vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems.
His lab at SRI was responsible for more breakthrough innovation than possibly any other lab before or since. Engelbart had embedded in his lab a set of organizing principles, which he termed his "bootstrapping strategy", which he specifically designed to bootstrap and accelerate the rate of innovation achievable.
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John McCarthy
(born September 4, 1927, in Boston,Massachusetts), is an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and is the inventor of the Lisp programming language. He also developed ideas about the processing characteristics of trees (as used in computing), as distinct from nets. He is a recipient of the Kyoto Prize (1988), and the National Medal of Science (1990).
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Seymour Roger Cray
(September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was an U.S. electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded the company Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel Birnbaum, then CTO of HP, said of him:
| “ | It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them. | ” |
Charles Bachman
was born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1924, while his father, Charlie Bachman, was the head football coach at Kansas State College. Bachman attended high school in East Lansing, Michigan before joining the U.S. Army Anti-Aircraft Artillery Corps during World War II. During the war, he spent two years in the Southwest Pacific Theater, March 1944 through February 1946 in New Guinea, Australia and the Philippine Islands. Here he was first exposed to and used fire control computers for aiming 90 mm guns. After his discharge from the military, he attendedMichigan State College and graduated in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering (Tau Beta Phi). In 1950 he graduated with a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. At the same time he had attended Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and completed three quarters of the requirements for an MBA.[1]
Bachman spent his entire career as practising software engineer rather than in academia. Initially starting work in 1950 at Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan, he rose to the position of Data Processing manager before leaving in 1960 to join General Electric, where he developed theIntegrated Data Store (IDS), one of the first database management systems. Working in conjunction with Weyerhaeuser Lumber, he developed the first multiprogramming access to the IDS database. Later at GE he developed the "dataBasic" product that offered database support to the Basic Language timesharing users. Later in his career, he joined a smaller firm, Cullinane Information Systems (later called Cullinet), which offered a version of IDS that was called IDMSand supported the IBM mainframes.
He received the ACM Turing Award in 1973 for "his outstanding contributions to database technology". He was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1977 for his pioneering work in database systems. He is listed in the Database Hall of Fame.
Bachman papers[2] from 1951 to 2007 are collected at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. This collection contains detailed archival material describing database software development. Includes documentation on Dow Chemical (1951-1960), General Electric (1960-1970), Honeywell Information Systems (1970-1981), Cullinane Database Systems/Cullinet (1972-1986), Bachman Information Systems, Inc. (1982-1996) as well as several professional organizations.
| Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie | |
|---|---|
Dennis Ritchie (right) |
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie
(born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on C and otherprogramming languages, and on operating systemssuch as Multics and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated fromHarvard University with degrees in physics andapplied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center.
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Ivan Edward Sutherland
(born 1938 in Hastings,Nebraska) is an American computer scientist andInternet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.
From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Henri Gouraud who devised theGouraud shading technique, and Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods.
In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague David Evans. The company has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe (John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).
From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's Computer Science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs.
Dr. Sutherland is currently a Fellow and Vice President emeritus at Sun Microsystems and is a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley (Fall 2005 - Spring 2008). Currently, Dr. Sutherland is also leading the research in Asynchronous Systems atPortland State University and has founded Asynchronous Research Center (ARC) at Portland State University.
Edward Albert Feigenbaum
(born January 20, 1936; Weehawken, New Jersey) is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence. He is often called the "father of expert systems."
Feigenbaum completed his undergraduate degree, and a Ph.D., at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). In his PhD thesis, carried out under the supervision of Herbert Simon, he developed EPAM, one of the first computer models of how people learn.
He received the ACM Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science, jointly withRaj Reddy in 1994 "For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology". A former chief scientist of the Air Force, he received the U.S. Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 1997. In 2007 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He founded the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. He is currently a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University.
He was co-founder of several start-ups, such as IntelliCorp and Teknowledge.
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Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd
(August 23, 1923 – April 18, 2003) was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational modelfor database management, the theoretical basis forrelational databases. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned achievement.
Edgar Frank Codd was born on the Isle of Portlandin England. After attending Poole Grammar School, he studied mathematics and chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford, before serving as a pilot in theRoyal Air Force during the Second World War. In 1948, he moved to New York to work for IBM as a mathematical programmer. In 1953, angered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Codd moved to Ottawa, Canada. A decade later he returned to theU.S. and received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Two years later he moved to San Jose, California, to work at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory, where he continued to work until the 1980s. During the 1990s, his health deteriorated and he ceased work.
Codd received the Turing Award in 1981, and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of theAssociation for Computing Machinery.
Codd died of heart failure at his home in Williams Island, Florida, at the age of 79 on April 18, 2003.
Marc Andreessen
- Born: 9 July 1971
- Birthplace: Cedar Falls, Iowa
- Best Known As: Creator of the Netscape web browser
Marc Andreessen was the co-founder and chief technical mind behind the Internet company Netscape. Andreessen was still a student researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993 when he helped conceive and create the first popular Internet browser, known as Mosaic. After graduation he moved to California and soon teamed with former Silicon Graphics founder James Clark to found Netscape. Andreessen was just 22 years old. The company released its first browser, Netscape Navigator, in December of 1994. Netscape held its intial public offering on 9 August 1995, and the stock jumped from an opening price of $28 to an astounding closing price of $58 on the first day. (Netscape's IPO effectively kicked off the dot-com stock boom of the late 1990s.) By the end of 1995, Andreessen was worth over $170 million and had become the very model of the ascendant techno-geek; Business Week magazine later called him a "hamburger-chomping pop icon for the cyber generation." Andreessen continued at Netscape as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and then served as their executive vice president of products until America Online (AOL) acquired the company in 1999. Andreessen was briefly the CTO of AOL, but left later in 1999 to create Loudcloud, a web services firm. The company name was changed to Opsware in 2002, with Andreessen continuing as its chairman.
Andreessen grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, where his mother worked for the clothing company Land's End.
| Jon Postel | |
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Jonathan Bruce Postel
(August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death. The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute. His obituary was written by Vint Cerfand published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work.
Postel attended UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.A (1968) in Engineering. Attending UCLA, he completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974.
While at UCLA, he was involved in early work on the ARPANET; he later moved to the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, where he spent the rest of his career.
Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFCs 791-793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. He wrote or co-authored more than 200 RFCs.
Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.
All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division ("Division 7") of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.
On January 28, 1998, Postel, on his own authority, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers and instructed them to change the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions (NSI)'s A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. (198.41.0.4) to DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus dividing control of Internet naming between IANA and the four remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, the .mil server, BRL and NSI. He soon received a telephone call from a furious Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's senior science advisor, who instructed him to undo this change - which he did. Within a week, the US NTIA issued its "Green Paper" asserting the US government's definitive authority over the Internet DNS root zone.
Postel died of complications after heart valve replacement surgery in Los Angeles, on October 16, 1998, 9 months after the DNS Root Authority incident.
Steve Jobs
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- Born: 24 February 1955
- Birthplace: San Francisco, California
- Best Known As: The co-founder of Apple computers
Steve Jobs was a college dropout when he teamed up with Steve Wozniak in 1976 to sell personal computers assembled in Jobs' garage. That was the beginning of Apple Computers, which revolutionized the computing industry and made Jobs a multimillionaire before he was 30 years old. He was forced out of the company in 1985 and started the NeXT Corporation, but returned to his old company in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT. Jobs soon became Apple's chief executive officer and sparked a resurgence in the company with products like the colorful iMac computer and the iPod music player. Jobs is also the CEO of Pixar, the animation company responsible for movies like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock; the deal made Jobs the largest individual shareholder of Disney stock. Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003 and had surgery in July of 2004, and was criticized by some for not disclosing his illness to stockholders until after the fact. His health was in the news again in 2008, when his extreme weight loss sparked rumors that his cancer had recurred. Jobs refused to speak publicly about his health, but in January of 2009 he took a formal six-month leave of absence from Apple, saying that his health problems were "more complex than I originally thought." He had a liver transplant later that year and returned to work at Apple on a part-time basis in June of 2009.
Some sources list Los Altos, California as Jobs's place of birth. However, in a 1995 oral history interview with The Smithsonian, Jobs said, "I was born in San Francisco, California, USA, planet Earth, February 24, 1955." Jobs was given up for adoption after birth and raised by his adoptive parents in Silicon Valley.
Tim Berners-Lee
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- Born: 8 June 1955
- Birthplace: London, England
- Best Known As: Inventor of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee is the primary inventor of the World Wide Web, the system of text links and multimedia capabilities that made the Internet accessible to mass audiences. Lee wrote the original Web software himself in 1990 and made it available on the Internet in 1991. He joined MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 and remains a leading authority on Internet issues. His 1999 book Weaving the Web described the Web's birth and growth. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II announced that Berners-Lee would be made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for his work on the Web.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was awarded the first Millennium Technology Prize, a Finland-based award for excellence which carries a cash prize of one million Euros.
Linus Torvalds
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- Born: 28 December 1969
- Birthplace: Helsinki, Finland
- Best Known As: The guy who wrote the kernel for the Linux Operating System
In 1991 Linus Torvalds was a college student at the University of Helsinki. Starting with the basics of a Unix system, he wrote the kernel -- original code -- for a new system for his x86 PC that was later dubbed Linux (pronounced linn-ucks). Torvalds revealed the original source code for free -- making him a folk hero among programmers -- and users around the world began making additions and now continue to tweak it. Linux is considered the leader in the practice of allowing users to re-program their own operating systems.
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Richard Matthew Stallman
(born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated "rms",is an American softwarefreedom activist, and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement and, in October 1985, set up theFree Software Foundation.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against bothsoftware patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely-used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.
Bill Gates
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- Born: 28 October 1955
- Birthplace: Seattle, Washington
- Best Known As: Founder of the Microsoft Corporation
Name at birth: William Gates III
Bill Gates is the head of the software company Microsoft and is one of the world's wealthiest men. Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in the 1970s, though Allen left the company in 1983. Gates oversaw the invention and marketing of the MS-DOS operating system, the Windows operating interface, the Internet Explorer browser, and a multitude of other popular computer products. Along the way he gained a reputation for fierce competitiveness and aggressive business savvy. During the 1990s rising Microsoft stock prices made Gates the world's wealthiest man; his wealth has at times exceeded $75 billion, making Gates a popular symbol of the ascendant computer geek of the late 20th century. In June of 2006, Gates announced that he would step down from day-to-day involvement in Microsoft by July of 2008. He said he would then remain chairman of the Microsoft board while focusing on his charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates married Melinda French, a Microsoft employee, on 1 January 1994. The couple have three children: daughters Jennifer Katharine (b. 1996) and Phoebe Adele (b. 2002) and son Rory John (b. 1999)... Gates's personal charitable initiative, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has focused on global health issues, especially on preventing malaria and AIDS in poor countries... For their philanthropic activities, Time magazine named Bill and Melinda Gates (along with rock star and activist Bono) its Persons of the Year for 2005.
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