FREE COMPUTING HISTORY · 1900–1925
Foundations converge
Logic, learning, stored programs, codebreaking, electronics, and robotics begin to converge.
1900–1925
Logic, learning, stored programs, codebreaking, electronics, and robotics begin to converge.
- Howard Aiken — Led construction of the Harvard Mark I.
- Arthur Samuel — Coined “machine learning” and built a self-improving checkers program.
- Walter Brattain — Co-invented the point-contact transistor.
- Alonzo Church — Created lambda calculus and proved undecidability results.
- John von Neumann — Shaped stored-program computer architecture.
- John Atanasoff — Co-built an early electronic digital computing device.
- Andrey Kolmogorov — Founded algorithmic information theory and Kolmogorov complexity.
- Tommy Flowers — Designed and built Colossus for wartime codebreaking.
- Kurt Gödel — Proved that powerful formal systems have unavoidable incompleteness.
- Grace Hopper — Pioneered compilers and machine-independent programming.
- John Mauchly — Co-designed ENIAC and UNIVAC.
- John Bardeen — Co-invented the transistor.
- Jacques Herbrand — Developed a theorem foundational to automated reasoning.
- Stephen Kleene — Created regular expressions, the Kleene star, and recursion theory.
- William Shockley — Developed the junction transistor and founded Shockley Semiconductor.
- Konrad Zuse — Built programmable binary computers and designed Plankalkül.
- Frederic C. Williams — Created practical CRT memory used by the Manchester Baby.
- Alan Turing — Defined computation, universality, and the halting problem.
- Maurice Wilkes — Built EDSAC and pioneered microprogramming and software libraries.
- Richard Hamming — Created error-correcting codes and Hamming distance.
- J. C. R. Licklider — Envisioned interactive computing and helped seed the ARPANET.
- Horst Feistel — Created the Feistel structure behind DES and later block ciphers.
- Claude Shannon — Connected Boolean logic to circuits and founded information theory.
- Herbert A. Simon — Logic Theorist; bounded rationality; AI pioneer; Nobel in Economics
- Betty Holberton — ENIAC programmer; invented sort/merge generator; breakpoints; COBOL standards
- Abraham Robinson — Non-standard analysis; contributed to model theory used in formal verification
- Clifford Berry — Co-built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer
- Richard Feynman — Proposed quantum computing (1981); quantum electrodynamics; Feynman diagrams
- J. Presper Eckert — Co-designer of ENIAC and UNIVAC
- Nathaniel Rochester — IBM 701; first assembler; co-organized Dartmouth AI conference
- Julia Robinson — Hilbert's 10th problem; decision problems; first woman president of AMS
- Tom Kilburn — Manchester Baby; Atlas computer (pioneered virtual memory and paging)
- Lotfi Zadeh — Fuzzy logic; fuzzy set theory — alternative to classical Boolean logic for imprecise reasoning
- Alan Perlis — First Turing Award; ALGOL; "Epigrams on Programming"; programming language theory
- Joseph Weizenbaum — ELIZA (1966); critic of AI anthropomorphism; Computer Power and Human Reason
- Jack Kilby — Co-inventor of the integrated circuit
- Edgar F. Codd — Relational model for databases; Codd's 12 rules
- John Backus — FORTRAN; BNF; FP (functional programming language); Turing Award lecture on freeing from von Neumann style
- Donald Davies — Packet switching (independent invention, NPL, UK)
- Seymour Cray — CDC 6600 and Cray-1; architectures that defined high-performance scientific computing while “first supercomputer” remains category-dependent
- Douglas Engelbart — Mouse; "Mother of All Demos"; hypertext; collaborative computing
- John Cocke — Originated RISC concept at IBM; pioneered optimizing compiler techniques
- Joseph Engelberger — "Father of robotics"; Unimate — first industrial robot (1961)