FREE COMPUTING HISTORY · 1943–1951
Systems and silicon scale
Databases, networks, processors, operating systems, and software businesses grow into platforms.
1943–1951
Databases, networks, processors, operating systems, and software businesses grow into platforms.
- Michael Stonebraker — Ingres and Postgres; object-relational database architecture; C-Store/Vertica and VoltDB; database research and commercialization
- Charles Bennett — Reversible computing; quantum teleportation; quantum cryptography; Maxwell's demon resolution
- Bill Gosper — Gosper's algorithm; Game of Life patterns; continued fractions; MIT AI Lab hacker
- Andrew Tanenbaum — MINIX (inspired Linux); networking textbooks; distributed systems
- Whitfield Diffie — Co-invented public-key cryptography (1976)
- Jim Gray — Transaction processing; ACID properties; data cube; five-minute rule; Turing Award
- Larry Ellison — Co-founded Oracle — enterprise relational database dominance
- James H. Clark — Founded SGI; founded Netscape; geometry engine; 3D graphics pioneer
- Adele Goldberg — Smalltalk-80 co-developer; wrote definitive Smalltalk books; PARC learning research
- Martin Hellman — Co-invented public-key cryptography (1976)
- Leonard Adleman — RSA algorithm (the "A"); DNA computing pioneer
- Takeo Kanade — Lucas-Kanade optical flow; face detection; 3D vision; autonomous vehicles pioneer
- Ed Catmull — Co-founded Pixar; texture mapping; Z-buffer; subdivision surfaces; Creativity, Inc.
- Edmund Clarke — Model checking co-inventor; formal verification; Turing Award (2007)
- Robert Metcalfe — Ethernet; Metcalfe's Law
- Terry Winograd — SHRDLU natural language system; influenced HCI; advised Larry Page
- Joseph Sifakis — Model checking co-inventor; formal verification; Turing Award (2007)
- Geoffrey Hinton — Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, the 1986 backpropagation paper with Rumelhart and Williams, deep belief networks, and neural-network research
- Ronald Rivest — RSA (the "R"); MD5; RC4; RC5; election security
- David Patterson — RISC (SPARC/RISC-V); RAID; Computer Architecture; great ideas in computer architecture
- Gerald Jay Sussman — Scheme; SICP; constraint propagation; electrical engineering education
- Hal Abelson — SICP co-author; Creative Commons co-founder; open courseware pioneer
- James Rumbaugh — UML co-creator; OMT methodology; Rational Software
- Yuri Matiyasevich — Solved Hilbert's 10th problem (MRDP theorem); Diophantine equations
- Ray Kurzweil — Led omni-font optical character recognition and reading-machine integration; speech and music systems; articulated the Singularity as a prediction
- Leonid Levin — NP-completeness (independent of Cook); Levin's universal search; one-way functions
- Nancy Lynch — Distributed algorithms; FLP impossibility result; Distributed Algorithms textbook
- László Lovász — Graph theory; Lovász Local Lemma; lattice basis reduction (LLL algorithm); combinatorial optimization
- Leslie Valiant — PAC learning theory; #P-completeness; holographic algorithms; Valiant model
- Ward Cunningham — Invented the wiki (WikiWikiWeb, 1995); Agile Manifesto signatory
- Bob Frankston — Co-created VisiCalc
- Marc Raibert — Founded Boston Dynamics; legged locomotion; dynamic balance robots
- Jim Blinn — Blinn-Phong shading; bump mapping; Jim Blinn's Corner; JPL Voyager animations
- Christos Papadimitriou — Computational complexity; algorithmic game theory; Computational Complexity textbook
- Douglas Lenat — Cyc project; AM; Eurisko; symbolic AI; common sense reasoning
- Bjarne Stroustrup — C++ — OOP for systems programming; "C with Classes"
- Steve Wozniak — Apple I and Apple II hardware design
- Van Jacobson — TCP congestion control (Jacobson's algorithm); saved the Internet from congestion collapse (1988)
- Joe Armstrong — Created Erlang — fault-tolerant, concurrent, distributed systems (telecom/messaging backbone)
- Dan Bricklin — Co-created VisiCalc — first spreadsheet