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: Proposed the Harvard Mark I and led computing work in collaboration with IBM engineers and the Harvard crew.
- Arthur Samuel: Pioneered machine-learning experiments with a checkers program, described in a 1959 paper.
- Walter Brattain: Co-invented the point-contact transistor.
- Alonzo Church: Lambda calculus; formal undecidability results; the Church-Turing thesis
- John von Neumann: Contributions to stored-program computer architecture, game theory, and self-reproducing automata
- John Atanasoff: Co-developed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, an early special-purpose electronic digital computing device
- Andrey Kolmogorov: Axiomatic probability; algorithmic complexity and contributions to algorithmic information theory
- Tommy Flowers: Led the team that designed and built Colossus for wartime codebreaking
- Kurt Gödel: Completeness of first-order logic; incompleteness for consistent, effectively axiomatized theories with sufficient arithmetic
- Grace Hopper: Automatic programming, A-0 routine compilation, FLOW-MATIC, and contributions to business-language development
- John Mauchly: Co-designed ENIAC and UNIVAC with J. Presper Eckert and their teams
- John Bardeen: Co-invented the point-contact transistor and co-developed the BCS theory of superconductivity
- Jacques Herbrand: Herbrand’s theorem connects first-order unsatisfiability with finite ground-instance contradictions
- Stephen Kleene: Regular expressions and finite automata; foundational contributions to recursion theory and the arithmetical hierarchy
- William Shockley: Junction-transistor theory and design; founder of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
- Konrad Zuse: Z-series electromechanical computers and the Plankalkül language design
- Frederic C. Williams: Co-developed Williams-Kilburn CRT memory and led work on the Manchester Baby
- Alan Turing: A formal model of computation and universality; undecidability, wartime cryptanalysis, machine intelligence, and morphogenesis
- Maurice Wilkes: Led EDSAC development; proposed microprogramming; co-developed early programming practice with Wheeler, Gill, and the Cambridge team
- Richard Hamming: Hamming codes and distance; error-control coding, numerical methods, and automatic programming
- J. C. R. Licklider: Advocated interactive computing and supported the research community that helped develop computer networking
- Horst Feistel: Feistel block-cipher structure and IBM cryptographic research that contributed to DES
- Claude Shannon: Algebraic analysis of switching circuits; mathematical information theory and secrecy systems
- 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: Supercomputer pioneer: CDC 6600 (first supercomputer), Cray-1
- 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)