Alonzo Church
American mathematician and logician who created the lambda calculus, proved the decision problem undecidable, and helped found the theory of computation.
People
The inventors and builders behind the languages and the tools.
152 entries, all primary-sourced
John von Neumann
Hungarian-American mathematician whose 1945 EDVAC report set out the stored-program architecture used by almost every computer since, and who also helped found game theory and the study of cellular automata.
Grace Hopper
US Navy officer and computing pioneer who built early compilers and pushed programming toward English-like languages, helping lead to COBOL.
Jack Tramiel
Founder of Commodore and later owner of Atari's consumer division, who championed 'computers for the masses' and whose price wars reshaped and then crashed the early home-computer market.
Chuck Peddle
Engineer who led the design of the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor and the Commodore PET, helping make low-cost personal computing possible.
Hubert Zimmermann
French computer scientist (1941-2012), principal architect of the OSI Reference Model and a contributor to the pioneering Cyclades packet network, later co-founder of Chorus Systemes.
Jim Gray
Database researcher at IBM System R, Tandem, and Microsoft who formalized transactions and the ACID properties, won the 1998 ACM Turing Award, and was lost at sea in 2007.
Ivan Sutherland
American computer scientist whose 1963 Sketchpad system founded interactive computer graphics; later a pioneer of virtual reality and VLSI design, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1988.
Paul Baran
RAND Corporation engineer who, in the early 1960s, designed a distributed, survivable communications network using message blocks and adaptive routing, one of the independent origins of packet switching.
Donald Davies
British computer scientist at the National Physical Laboratory who coined the term 'packet,' independently invented packet switching in 1965-66, and built the NPL network.
Lawrence Roberts
ARPA program manager and chief architect of the ARPANET, who turned packet switching into a working network design and oversaw the building of the Internet's predecessor.
Steve Crocker
As a UCLA graduate student, Steve Crocker wrote RFC 1 in April 1969 and helped found the Network Working Group, creating the open, collaborative document series and culture that shaped how internet standards are written.
Leonard Kleinrock
UCLA professor who developed early mathematical theory of data networks at MIT and whose laboratory hosted the first ARPANET node and sent the network's first message in October 1969.
Ada Lovelace
English mathematician whose 1843 notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine include what is widely regarded as the first published algorithm intended for a machine.
Adi Shamir
Israeli cryptographer, the 'S' in RSA, co-recipient of the 2002 Turing Award.
Alan Turing
British mathematician who founded theoretical computer science with the Turing machine, helped break the Enigma cipher at Bletchley Park, and proposed the Turing test.
Anders Hejlsberg
Danish software engineer who wrote the compiler that became Borland's Turbo Pascal, then went on to create Delphi, C#, and TypeScript.
Andrew Tanenbaum
Professor and author of MINIX and widely used operating systems textbooks, who argued the microkernel case in the 1992 debate with Linus Torvalds.
Andrew Tridgell
Australian programmer who created Samba and rsync, and whose work on a BitKeeper-compatible tool in 2005 preceded the end of the Linux kernel's free BitKeeper license.
Barry Boehm
Software engineering pioneer who created the spiral model and the COCOMO cost-estimation model and quantified how the cost of fixing defects rises the later they are found.
Bill Joy
Berkeley graduate student who wrote the vi editor and much of BSD Unix, then co-founded Sun Microsystems.
Bjarne Stroustrup
Danish computer scientist who designed and implemented C++ at Bell Labs, bringing object-oriented programming to the world of C.
Brendan Eich
Netscape engineer who created JavaScript in 1995, later co-founded Mozilla and the Brave browser.
Brian Behlendorf
A co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server and the Apache Software Foundation who spent his career building open-source collaboration infrastructure.
Brian Kernighan
Bell Labs researcher who co-wrote 'The C Programming Language' with Dennis Ritchie and helped create Unix tools, and who became one of the great explainers of the Unix way of working.
Bruce Schneier
Cryptographer, author of 'Applied Cryptography' and designer of the Blowfish and Twofish ciphers, and one of the most influential public voices on security, privacy, and the politics of technology.
Carver Mead
Caltech professor who popularized the term 'Moore's Law,' co-led the VLSI design revolution with Lynn Conway, and pioneered neuromorphic computing.
Charles Babbage
English mathematician and inventor who designed the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, the first design for a general-purpose programmable computer.
Chris Lattner
Compiler engineer who created the LLVM infrastructure as a research project and later led the design of Apple's Swift language.
Claude Shannon
American engineer and mathematician known as the father of information theory, whose 1937 master's thesis applied Boolean algebra to switching circuits and whose 1948 paper founded the mathematical theory of communication.
D. Richard Hipp
Creator of SQLite and the Fossil version control system, known for releasing SQLite into the public domain.
Dave Cutler
The operating-system engineer who led VMS at DEC and then architected Windows NT at Microsoft, shaping the kernel under modern Windows.
David Heinemeier Hansson
The Danish programmer who created Ruby on Rails while building Basecamp at 37signals, popularizing convention over configuration and opinionated, happiness-focused web frameworks.
David Patterson
UC Berkeley computer architect who led the Berkeley RISC project, co-authored the field-defining textbooks with John Hennessy, helped create RISC-V, and shared the 2017 ACM Turing Award.
Dennis Ritchie
Bell Labs researcher who created the C programming language and, with Ken Thompson, co-developed the Unix operating system.
Diane Greene
Co-founder and longtime CEO of VMware who built it into a major virtualization company, and later led a large cloud business.
Dick Grune
Dutch computer scientist who wrote the original CVS shell scripts in the mid-1980s at the Vrije Universiteit, on top of RCS.
Diego Ongaro
Computer scientist who created the Raft consensus algorithm during his Stanford PhD work with John Ousterhout.
Donald Chamberlin
IBM researcher who co-designed SQL, originally called SEQUEL, with Raymond Boyce in the 1970s, and who later helped create the XML query language XQuery.
Donald Knuth
Stanford computer scientist who wrote The Art of Computer Programming, created TeX and literate programming, and won the 1974 Turing Award.
Doug Cutting
Open-source search and big-data pioneer who created Lucene, Nutch, and Apache Hadoop, bringing Google's MapReduce and GFS ideas into open source.
Douglas Crockford
American programmer who discovered and specified the JSON data format and wrote 'JavaScript: The Good Parts' and the JSLint tool.
Douglas McIlroy
Bell Labs researcher who invented Unix pipes, wrote core utilities, and articulated the Unix philosophy of small composable tools.
Edgar F. Codd
IBM researcher who invented the relational model of data in 1970 and won the 1981 ACM Turing Award for founding the theory behind relational databases.
Edsger Dijkstra
Dutch computer scientist who invented a famous shortest-path algorithm, championed structured programming and program correctness, and won the 1972 Turing Award.
Eric Brewer
UC Berkeley computer scientist who proposed the CAP theorem and co-founded the search company Inktomi.
Erich Gamma
Swiss computer scientist, one of the 'Gang of Four' authors of 'Design Patterns,' co-creator of JUnit, and a leader of the Eclipse Java tooling and Visual Studio Code.
Fred Brooks
IBM engineer who managed the System/360 and OS/360 projects and wrote the software-engineering classics The Mythical Man-Month and No Silver Bullet.