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Ada Lovelace
1.What did the term 'computer' mean back then?, the word 'computer,' which first appears in English in the early 1600s, meant a person whose job it was to perform calculations.
2.Main contribution: Ada Lovelace is considered the first computer programmer. Even though she wrote about a computer, the Analytical Engine, that was never built, she realized that the computer could follow a series of simple instructions, a program, to perform a complex calculation. -
Charles Babbage
1.What did the term 'computer' mean? Babbage envisioned a machine with an input device, storage, a processor, a control unit and an output device, essentially a basic modern computer. This machine would be able to handle the basic calculations, thus eliminating human error.
2.Main contribution: Charles Babbage is credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer. During the mid-1830s Babbage developed plans for the Analytical Engine -
Alan Turing
Essentially through this theorizing, Turing created the computer: a single machine that can be turned to any well-defined task by being supplied with an algorithm, or a program.
Often considered the father of modern computer science, Alan Turing was famous for his work developing the first modern computers, decoding the encryption of German Enigma machines during the second world war, and detailing a procedure known as the Turing Test, forming the basis for artificial intelligence. -
Mauchly and Eckert
Prosper Eckert and John Mauchly, two young scientists at the time working at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering, developed the "absurd" idea of creating an electronic computer: a computer that would use electricity to "think."
Though the ENIAC patent was invalidated by the U.S. District Court in Minnesota, Eckert and Mauchly have nonetheless been credited by history with inventing the ENIAC, the world's first large-scale general purpose electronic computer -
Mark Dean
What did the term 'computer' mean? An inventor, computer scientist, and engineer, Mark E. Dean has spent his career working to make computers more accessible and powerful.
Main contribution: Dean, with the help of a colleague, improved the personal computer (PC) through the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) systems bus -
Grace Hopper
Grace Murray, born at the end of 1906 in New York, grew up and developed an interest in mathematics By the end of Hopper's career the term “computer” no longer meant a person assigned to make calculations, and, instead the term became a designation for a machine that did the same work
She was also a United States Navy rear admiral, helped develop COBOL one of the first high-level programming languages and invented the first compiler, a program that translates programming code to machine language