Shawn Fanning (1980) invented p2p with Napster
Larry Page (1973) co-founded the Google internet search engine, with Sergey Brin (1973)
Miguel de Icaza (1972) is a Mexican free software programmer,
best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects
Marc Andreessen (1971) is best known as a cofounder of Netscape Communications
Corporation and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser
Linus Torvalds (1969) is a Finnish software engineer best
known for initiating the development of the Linux kernel
Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) is the creator of the PHP programming language
Alan Cox (1968) is a computer programmer heavily involved
in the development of the Linux kernel since its early days
哈康-维姆·莱( Håkon Wium Lie) (1965) is best known for proposing the concept of Cascading Style Sheets
Kevin Mitnick (1963) is a controversial computer hacker in the United States
Steve Mann (1962)
Steve McConnell (1962) was named as one of the three most influential people in the software
industry by Software Development Magazine in 1998, along with Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds
Gabe Newell (1962) was the program manager for Windows 1.0 and 2.0
Michael Hawley (1961)
Brendan Eich (1961)
Jaron Lanier (1960)
Nathan Myhrvold (1960) formerly Chief Technology Officer
at Microsoft, is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures
Guido van Rossum is best known as the author of the Python programming language
Alan Cooper is sometimes called "the father of Visual Basic"
Eric S. Raymond (1957)
Tim Paterson (1956) is the original author of the popular MS-DOS operating system
Danny Hillis (1956) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines
Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MI
Tim Bray (1955) is a major contributor to the XML and Atom web standards, and an entrepreneur
Dave Winer (1955)
Steve Jobs (1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple
James Gosling (1955) is best known as the father of the Java programming language
Grady Booch (1955) is best known for developing the
Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh
Tim Berners-Lee (1955) invented the World Wide Web and HTML
Bill Gates (1955) is the Chairman of Microsoft
Larry Wall (1954) created the Perl programming language
蒂姆·奥莱利(Tim O'Reilly) (1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media
Scott McNealy (1954) is the Chairman of Sun Microsystems
Bill Joy (1954) co-founded Sun Microsystems
Sid Meier (1954)
David Deutsch (1953) pioneer of quantum computing
Andy Hertzfeld (1953) was a key member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s
Paul Allen (1953) formed Microsoft with Bill Gates
Richard Stallman (1953) launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system
Adi Shamir (1952) was one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm
Philippe Kahn (1952) is the founder of Borland, a producer of software development tools
Dan Bricklin (1951) is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program
Bill Atkinson (1951) designed and implemented HyperCard, the first popular hypermedia system
Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) developed the C++ programming language
Mitch Kapor (1950) is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3,
the "killer application" often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s
Bertrand Meyer (1950) developed the Eiffel programming language
Doug Lenat (1950) is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in
artificial intelligence, especially machine learning (with his AM and Eurisko programs), knowledge
representation, blackboard systems, and "ontological engineering" (with his Cyc program at MCC and at Cycorp)
Steve Wozniak (1950) co-founded Apple Computer, with Steve Jobs in 1976
and created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s
Bob Frankston (1949) is the co-creator with Dan Bricklin of the VisiCalc spreadsheet
program and the co-founder of Software Arts, the company that developed it
Ward Cunningham (1949) invented the wiki
David Bradley (1949) was one of the twelve engineers who worked
on the original IBM PC, developing the computer's ROM BIOS code
Leonid Levin (1948) is well known for his work in randomness in computing, algorithmic
complexity and intractability, foundations of mathematics and computer science, algorithmic
probability, theory of computation, and information theory
Charles Simonyi (1948) as head of Microsoft's application software
group, oversaw the creation of Microsoft's flagship office applications
Robert Tarjan (1948) is the discoverer of several important graph algorithms, including Tarjan's
off-line least common ancestors algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps
John Ousterhout is the creator of the Tcl scripting language and is well known for his work
in distributed operating systems, high-performance file systems, and user interfaces
Ronald Rivest (1947) is most celebrated for his work on public-key encryption
with Len Adleman and Adi Shamir, specifically the RSA algorithm
Ben Shneiderman (1947)
Wayne Ratliff (1946) wrote the database program dBASE II
Andrew Yao (1946) received the Turing Award, in recognition of his fundamental contributions
to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number
generation, cryptography, and communication complexity
Robert Metcalfe (1946)
Whitfield Diffie (1944)
Larry Ellison (1944) is the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation
Andy Tanenbaum (1944) is best known as the author of Minix, a free Unix-like operating system
for teaching purposes, and for his computer science textbooks, regarded as standard texts in the field
Jim Gray (1944-2007) has contributed to the building of several major database and transaction processing
systems, including the groundbreaking System R while at IBM, Terraserver, and Skyserver for Microsoft.
Among his more well known achievements are granular database locking, two-tier transaction commit semantics,
and the data cube operator for data warehousing applications.
Butler Lampson (1943) was one of the founding members of Xerox PARC in 1970, where he worked in the
Computer Science Laboratory (CSL). His now-famous vision of a personal computer was captured in the 1972
memo entitled "Why Alto?". In 1973, the Xerox Alto, with its three-button mouse and full-page-sized monitor
was born, and is now considered to be the first actual personal computer
Peter Norton (1943) produced a popular tool to retrieve erased data from DOS disks,
which was followed by several other tools which were collectively known as the Norton Utilities
Vint Cerf (1943) is commonly referred to as one of the "founding fathers of the Internet" for his key technical
and managerial role, together with Bob Kahn, in the creation of the Internet and the TCP/IP protocols which it uses
Ken Thompson (1943) is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with
the B programming language and his shepherding the UNIX and Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating systems
Michael Stonebraker (1943)
Nolan Bushnell (1943) founded Atari
Nicholas Negroponte (1943)
Jef Raskin (1943-2005) was an American human-computer interface expert best-known
for starting the Macintosh project for Apple Computer in the late 1970s
Jon Postel (1943-1998) is principally known for being the Editor of the Request for Comment
document series, and for serving as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death
Edward Tufte (1942)
Dave Cutler (1942) is a noted software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including the
RSX-11, VMS and VAXELN systems of Digital Equipment Corporation and Windows NT from Microsoft
Ed Roberts (1942) was the founder and president of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry
Systems (MITS) which built the Altair 8800, one of the very first hobbyist personal computers
Brian Kernighan (1942)
Gary Kildall (1942-1994) created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc.
Leslie Lamport (1941) his research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of distributed systems
Federico Faggin (1941) received a patent for the first computer microprocessor
Alfred Aho (1941)
Amir Pnueli (1941) received the Turing Award in 1996 for seminal work introducing temporal logic
into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification
Dennis Ritchie (1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix
David Parnas (1941)
Ray Tomlinson (1941)
Clive Sinclair (1940)
William Yeager (1940) is best-known for his development of the first multiple-protocol router
software during his 20 year tenure at Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Laboratory
John Warnock (1940) is best known as the co-founder with Charles
Geschke of Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company
Alan Kay (1940) is known for his early work on object-oriented programming and user interface design
Barbara Liskov (1939) became the first woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD in Computer Science, in 1968
from Stanford University. She has led many significant projects, including the design and implementation of CLU, the first
programming language to support data abstraction; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of
distributed programs; and Thor, an object-oriented database system. With Jeannette Wing, she developed a particular
definition of subtyping, commonly known as the Liskov substitution principle
Rudolf Bayer (1939) is famous for inventing two data sorting structures: the
B-tree with Edward M. McCreight, and later the UB-tree with Volker Markl
Ivar Jacobson (1939)
John Hopcroft (1939) received the Turing Award "for fundamental
achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures"
Donald Knuth (1938) is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming
Per Brinch Hansen (1938)
Stewart Brand (1938)
Ivan Sutherland (1938) received the Turing Award in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad,
an early predecessor to the graphical user interface that became ubiquitous in personal computers
Bob Kahn (1938) invented the TCP protocol, and along with Vinton G. Cerf created
the IP protocol, the technologies used to transmit information on the Internet
Raj Reddy (1937) is a world-renowned researcher in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Human-Computer Interaction
Ted Nelson (1937) coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is
credited with first use of the words hypermedia, transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and teledildonics
Don Estridge (1937-1985) led development of the original IBM
Personal Computer (PC), and thus is known as "father of the IBM PC"
Robert Floyd (1936-2001) his contributions include the design of Floyd's algorithm, which efficiently finds all shortest paths
in a graph, and work on parsing. In one isolated paper he introduced the important concept of error diffusion for rendering
images, also called Floyd-Steinberg dithering (though he distinguished dithering from diffusion)
Edward Feigenbaum (1936) is often called the "Father of expert systems."
Richard Stearns (1936) with Juris Hartmanis, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of
their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory"
Richard Karp (1935) is a computer scientist and computational theorist, notable for
research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985
Gordon Bell (1934) is a leading computer engineer and manager, an early employee of Digital
Equipment Corporation (DEC) who designed several of their PDP machines and later rose to
Vice President of Engineering and oversaw the development of the VAX
James Fergason (1934) invented liquid crystal display or LCD
Niklaus Wirth (1934) was the chief designer of the programming
languages Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon
Robin Milner (1934) developed LCF, one of the first tools for automated theorem proving. The language he developed
for LCF, ML, was the first language with polymorphic type inference and type-safe exception handling. In a very different area,
Milner also developed a theoretical framework for analyzing concurrent systems, the Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS),
and its successor, the pi-calculus
Tony Hoare (1934) is probably best known for the development of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm.
He also developed Hoare logic, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) used to specify the
interactions of concurrent processes (including the Dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the Occam programming language
William Kahan (1933) was the primary architect behind the IEEE 754 standard for floating-point computation
(and its radix-independent follow-on, IEEE 854) and developed the Kahan summation algorithm, an important
algorithm for minimizing error introduced when adding a sequence of finite precision floating point numbers
Dana Scott (1932) his work on automata theory earned him the Turing Award in 1976, while his collaborative work with
Christopher Strachey in the 1970s laid the foundations of modern approaches to the semantics of programming languages
Fran Allen (1932) her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization
Jay Miner (1932-1994)
James Russell (1931) invented the compact disc
Michael Rabin (1931) received the Turing award with Dana Scott for their joint paper
"Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem," which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines
Fred Brooks (1931) is a software engineer and computer scientist, best-known for managing the development
of OS/360, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month
Ole-Johan Dahl (1931-2002) is considered to be one of the fathers
of Simula and object-oriented programming along with Kristen Nygaard
Edsger Dijkstra (1930-2002) among his contributions to computer science is the shortest path-algorithm,
also known as Dijkstra's algorithm, the THE multiprogramming system, and the semaphore construct, for
coordinating multiple processors and programs
Gordon Moore (1929) is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's law
Juris Hartmanis (1928) with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 Turing Award "in recognition
of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory"
Thomas Eugene Kurtz (1928) co-developed the BASIC programming language in 1963/64, together with John George Kemeny
Jean E. Sammet (1928)
Peter Naur (1928) his last name is the N in the BNF notation (Backus-Naur form), used in the description of the
syntax for most programming languages. He contributed to the creation of the ALGOL 60 programming language
Seymour Papert (1928) is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence,
as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language
Marvin Minsky (1927) is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence
(AI), co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy
John McCarthy (1927) was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his
1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and invented the Lisp programming language
Allen Newell (1927-1992) contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest
AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957) (with Herbert Simon)
Robert Noyce (1927-1990)
Fernando Corbató (1926) is a prominent computer scientist, notable
as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems
Ken Olsen (1926)
Paul Baran (1926) was one of the developers of packet-switched
networks along with Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock
John Diebold (1926-2005)
Kristen Nygaard (1926-2002) is acknowledged as the co-inventor of object-oriented
programming and the programming language Simula with Ole-Johan Dahl in the 1960s
John George Kemeny (1926-1992) is best known for co-developing
the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas Eugene Kurtz
Douglas Engelbart (1925) is best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English); as a
pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs
John Cocke (1925-2002) is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture"
David A. Huffman (1925-1999) is best known for his legendary
Huffman code, a compression scheme for lossless variable length encoding
Seymour Cray (1925-1996) was a U.S. electrical engineer and
supercomputer architect who founded the company Cray Research
Friedrich Ludwig Bauer (1924) together with Klaus Samelson invented the stack
machine, a fundamental device for both theory and practice of programming
Donald D. Chamberlin (1924)
Charles Bachman (1924) developed the IDS (Integrated Data Store), one of the first database management systems
John Backus (1924-2007) led the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN)
and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax
Jack Kilby (1923-2005) invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working
at Texas Instruments, as well as the handheld calculator and thermal printer
Edgar F. Codd (1923-2003) made seminal contributions to the theory of relational databases
Gene Amdahl (1922)
Alan Perlis (1922-1990) was awarded the first Turing Award in 1966, according to the citation, for his
influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction. This is a reference
to the work he had done as a member of the team that developed the ALGOL programming language
Kenneth E. Iverson (1920-2004) developed the APL programming language, was honored with the
Turing Award in 1979 for his contributions to mathematical notation and programming language theory
Bob Bemer (1920- 2004)
John Presper Eckert (1919-1995)
James H. Wilkinson (1919-1986) discovered many significant algorithms
Herb Grosch (1918)
Jay Forrester (1918)
Clifford Berry (1918-1963) helped John Vincent Atanasoff create the
first digital electronic computer in 1939, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer
Betty Holberton (1917-2001) was one of the programmers for the ENIAC computer
Claude Shannon (1916-2001) has been called "the father of information theory",
and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory
Herbert Simon (1916-2001) was among the founding fathers of several of today's most important scientific
domains, including Artificial Intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, attention
economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery
Christopher Strachey (1916-1975)
John Tukey (1915-2000)
Richard Hamming (1915-1998) was an American mathematician 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 (or hamming bound) and the Hamming distance
J. C. R. Licklider (1915-1990)
Maurice Vincent Wilkes (1913) developed the concept of microprogramming from the
realisation that the Central Processing Unit of a computer could be controlled by a
miniature, highly specialised computer program in high-speed ROM
William Hewlett (1913-2001)
David Packard (1912-1996) William Hewlett founded HP, the company that grew
into the world's largest producer of electronic testing and measurement devices
Alan Turing (1912-1954) is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing provided
an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, formulating
the now widely accepted "Turing" version of the Church–Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model
has either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine. With the Turing test, he made a
significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence
Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) created the first functional program-controlled machine, the Z3, in 1941
William Shockley (1910-1989) co-invented the transistor
Stephen Cole Kleene (1909-1994) was best known for founding the branch of mathematical logic known
as recursion theory together with Alonzo Church, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others; and for inventing
regular expressions. By providing methods of determining which problems are solvable, Kleene's work led to the
study of which functions are computable
John Bardeen (1908-1991) invented the transistor, along with William Bradford Shockley and Walter Brattain
Paul Eisler (1907-1995) was an Austrian inventor born in Vienna. Among his innovations
were printing techniques which later became important in electrical and electronics manufacturing
John Mauchly (1907-1980)
Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) is best known for his two incompleteness theorems
Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I
calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language
Tommy Flowers (1905-1998)
Alonzo Church (1905-1995) created lambda calculus, formulated Church's thesis and Church's theorem
George Stibitz (1904-1995) was a Bell Labs researcher known for his 1930s and 1940s work on
the realization of Boolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element
John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995) was the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital
computer, a special-purpose machine that has come to be called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer
William Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was widely influential
within cybernetics, systems theory and complex systems
John von Neumann (1903-1957) described a computer architecture in which data and program memory
are mapped into the same address space. This architecture became the de facto standard
Walter Houser Brattain (1902-1987) was a physicist at Bell Labs who,
along with John Bardeen and William Shockley invented the transistor
Howard Aiken (1900-1973) was a pioneer in computing, being the primary engineer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer
Emil Leon Post (1897-1954) developed, independently of Alan Turing's Turing machine model, an essentially equivalent model
Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) is perhaps best known as the founder of cybernetics, a field that formalizes
the notion of feedback and has implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology,
philosophy, and the organization of society
Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) introduced the concept of what he called the memex in the 1930s,
a microfilm-based "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications,
and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility."
Thomas J. Watson (1874-1956) was the president of International Business Machines (IBM),
who oversaw that company's growth into an international force from the 1920s to the 1950s
莱昂·波利( Léon Bollée) (1870-1913) designed three calculating machines:
the Direct Multiplier, the Calculating Board and the Arithmographe
Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) was an American statistician who developed a mechanical
tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data
Theophil Wilgodt Odhner (1845-1903) is the inventor of the Odhner Arithmometer, a mechanical calculator
William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) constructed a logical machine, called the Logic Piano
Christopher Latham Sholes (1819-1890) designed the QWERTY keyboard
George Boole (1815-1864) is the inventor of Boolean algebra, the basis of all modern computer arithmetic
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) is mainly known for having written a description of
Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine
Joseph Henry (1797-1878) invented the electromechanical relay in 1835
Charles Babbage (1791-1871) designed the first programmable computer
Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar (1785-1870) designed and patented the Arithmometer, in 1820.
It was the first successful mechanical calculator that could add, subtract, and multiply
Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)
Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) improved on the original punched card design of
Jacques de Vaucanson's loom of 1745, to invent the Jacquard loom mechanism in 1804-1805
Mathieus Hahn (1739-1790) designed the first functional mechanical calculator
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) discovered the binary number system, anticipated Lagrangian interpolation,
algorithmic information theory, and invented the calculus ratiocinator as well as a machine that could execute all four
arithmetical operations, the Stepped Reckoner
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called the Pascaline
Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635) built the first automatic calculator in 1623
William Oughtred (1575-1660) is credited as the inventor of the slide rule
John Napier (1550-1617) invented Napier's bones, a multiplication aid
Al-Khawarizmi (780-850) the word algebra is derived from al-jabr, one of the two operations used to solve
quadratic equations, as described in his book. The word algorithm stems from algoritmi, the Latinization of his name.