FREE COMPUTING HISTORY · 1951–1956
Personal computing arrives
Computers move from institutions toward desks while networks and reusable software connect them.
1951–1956
Computers move from institutions toward desks while networks and reusable software connect them.
- Radia Perlman — Spanning Tree Protocol; TRILL; "Mother of the Internet"; network routing foundations
- Bill Atkinson — HyperCard; MacPaint; QuickDraw; original Macintosh team
- Tom Mitchell — Machine Learning textbook; CMU ML department; learning theory
- John Hennessy — RISC (MIPS); Stanford president; Alphabet chairman; Computer Architecture
- Shigeru Miyamoto — Nintendo — Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong; game design as art form
- Adi Shamir — RSA (the "S"); differential cryptanalysis; visual cryptography
- Craig Newmark — Craigslist — early web classifieds
- Ralph Merkle — Merkle trees; Merkle puzzles; co-invented public-key cryptography; nanotechnology
- David Deutsch — Quantum Turing machine; Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm; The Fabric of Reality; constructor theory
- Richard Stallman — GNU; FSF; GPL; Emacs; GCC; free software movement
- Paul Allen — Co-founded Microsoft
- Steve Furber — Co-designed ARM processor; SpiNNaker neuromorphic project
- John Preskill — Coined "quantum supremacy" and "NISQ era"; quantum error correction; topological quantum computing
- Andy Hertzfeld — Original Macintosh system software; Circles (Google+); folklore.org
- Silvio Micali — Zero-knowledge proofs; pseudorandom generation; Algorand
- Rodney Brooks — Subsumption architecture; iRobot (Roomba); Rethink Robotics; embodied intelligence
- Scott McNealy — Co-founded Sun Microsystems — Java, NFS, SPARC, Solaris
- Larry Wall — Created Perl; "There's more than one way to do it"
- Philip Zimmermann — PGP — Pretty Good Privacy; encrypted email for the masses
- Pat Hanrahan — RenderMan shading language; Tableau co-founder; GPU shading models; Turing Award
- Tim O'Reilly — O’Reilly Media; helped popularize open source; popularized Web 2.0; technology publishing and convening
- John Ousterhout — Tcl/Tk; Raft consensus algorithm; A Philosophy of Software Design
- Sid Meier — Civilization series; Pirates!; pioneered strategy gaming genre
- E. Allen Emerson — Model checking co-inventor; temporal logic; Turing Award (2007)
- Guy Steele — Scheme co-creator; Java spec; Common Lisp; Fortress; "Growing a Language"
- Bill Joy — BSD Unix; vi editor; NFS; co-founded Sun; Java co-creator; "Why the future doesn't need us"
- Tim Berners-Lee — World Wide Web (HTTP, HTML, URLs); Semantic Web; W3C
- Bill Gates — Microsoft; MS-DOS; Windows
- Steve Jobs — Apple; Macintosh; iPod; iPhone; iPad; Pixar
- James Gosling — Created Java
- Eric Schmidt — Google CEO (2001–2011); helped scale Google infrastructure and its advertising business
- David Chaum — Blind signatures; DigiCash — invented digital cash (1989); mixnets; e-voting
- Gilles Brassard — BB84 quantum key distribution protocol (with Bennett); quantum cryptography
- Taher Elgamal — ElGamal public-key encryption and signatures; leadership in early commercial SSL deployment
- Grady Booch — UML co-creator; Booch method; Rational Software; software architecture
- Dave Winer — RSS; podcasting pioneer; outlining software; blogging pioneer
- Tim Bray — XML co-creator; Atom; Open Web advocate
- Guido van Rossum — Created Python
- Rob Pike — Go language; Plan 9; UTF-8 (with Thompson); Acme editor
- Peter Norvig — AI: A Modern Approach (with Russell); Google Research director; Lisp educator