-
Charles Babbage (computing machine)
In 1822, Charles Babbage conceptualized and began developing the Difference Engine, considered to be the first automatic computing machine that was capable of computing several sets of numbers and making hard copies of the results. Babbage received some help with development of the Difference Engine from Ada Lovelace, considered by many to be the first computer programmer for her work and notes on the Difference Engine. -
john Atanasoff
John Atanasoff is known for being the Inventer of the first electronic computer in the 1930's. Between 1954 and 1973 there were various patent disputes. -
John Mauchly (ENIAC)
John Mauchly designed ENIAC in 1942. It was the first general purpose computer. He also did work on EDVAC(1944), BINAC and UNIVAC I. -
Tommy Flowers (Colossus)
During WWII Tommy Flowers was tasked with creating a decoder for relay-based bombe machines that would decrypt german codes. This project was never completed but it lead to flower's the Geheimschreiber in 1943, after that he created Colossus. Ten were produced and used for the remander of WWII -
Grace Hopper (Harvard Mark 1)
Grace Hopper was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark 1 computer in 1944. She invented the first compiler for a programming language, and was the person who helped popularized the idea machine-independent programming languages. That in term led to the development of COBOL, which was one of the first high-level programming languages. Also she is coined the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches. The term was inspired by an actual moth removed from the computer. -
John Backus (FORTRAN)
John Backus directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it -
Douglas Engelbart (computer mouse)
Douglas Engelbart is known for developing computer interface elements such as bitmapped screens, the mouse, hypertext, collaborative tools, and precursors to the graphical user interface. Many of his ideas came in mid-1960s back then most computers were inaccessible to many individuals. In 1967 Engelbart applied for a patent in and received it in 1970, for the wooden shell with two metal wheels. This was the first mouse. -
Steve Wozniak (Apple 1)
The Apple I (Apple 1) was the first Apple computer that originally sold for $666.66. The computer kit was developed by Steve Wozniak in 1976 and contained a 6502 8-bit processor and 4 kb of memory, which was expandable to 8 or 48 kb using expansion cards. Although the Apple I had a fully assembled circuit board the kit still required a power supply, display, keyboard, and case to be operational. Below is a picture of an Apple I from an advertisement by Apple. -
Bjarne Stroustrup (c++)
Bjarne Stroustrup is a Danish computer scientist, most notable for the creation and development of the widely used C++ programming language. Stroustrup has a master's degree in mathematics and computer science (1975) from Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Ph.D. in computer science (1979) -
Adam Osborne (Osborne 1)
Adam Osborne is know for the famous Homebrew Computer Club's in 1975. He created the portable computer and named it the Osborne 1. It was released in April 1981. It was no small machine being that it weighed 24.5 pounds but was cheap than most computers at the time only costing $1795 comparable features -
Bill Gates (MS DOS)
BIll Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 because he saw a opportunity to start a computer software, Microsoft, that partnered with IBM to created MS DOS in the 1980's. MS DOS's sales helped make Mircosoft the computer company they are today. -
Robert Gaskins (PowerPoint)
"Robert Gaskins invented PowerPoint, drawing on ten years of interdisciplinary graduate study at UC Berkeley and five years as manager of computer science research for an international telecommunications R&D laboratory in Silicon Valley." Many original documents written by Robert Gaskins during the early history of PowerPoint's strategy and development are online for public access. -
Tim Bermer-Lee (World Wide Web)
Tim Berner-Less is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989 then in 1990 he redistributed it was accepted by his manager Mike Sendall, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid-November of that same year. First website built was uploaded on August 1991. -
Lawrence "Larry" Page (Google cofounder)
Larry Page is most well known for cofounding google. In 1998, Page and his friend Sergey Brin incorporated Google, Inc. The domain name was Googol in the begining, Which was derived from a number that consists of one followed by one hundred zeros. Googol was choosen to represent the number of results that could be found. In short Page's mission with google was to "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
