Larry Wall (1954) created the Perl programming language

Tim O'Reilly (1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media

Scott McNealy (1954) is the Chairman of Sun Microsystems

Bill Joy (1954) co-founded Sun Microsystems

Sid Meier (1954)

David Deutsch (1953) pioneer of quantum computing

Andy Hertzfeld (1953) was a key member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s

Paul Allen (1953) formed Microsoft with Bill Gates

Richard Stallman (1953) launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system

Adi Shamir (1952) was one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm

Philippe Kahn (1952) is the founder of Borland, a producer of software development tools

Dan Bricklin (1951) is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program

Bill Atkinson (1951) designed and implemented HyperCard, the first popular hypermedia system

Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) developed the C++ programming language

Mitch Kapor (1950) is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3,

the "killer application" often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s

Bertrand Meyer (1950) developed the Eiffel programming language

Doug Lenat (1950) is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in

artificial intelligence, especially machine learning (with his AM and Eurisko programs), knowledge

representation, blackboard systems, and "ontological engineering" (with his Cyc program at MCC and at Cycorp)

Steve Wozniak (1950) co-founded Apple Computer, with Steve Jobs in 1976

and created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s

Bob Frankston (1949) is the co-creator with Dan Bricklin of the VisiCalc spreadsheet

program and the co-founder of Software Arts, the company that developed it

Ward Cunningham (1949) invented the wiki

David Bradley (1949) was one of the twelve engineers who worked

on the original IBM PC, developing the computer's ROM BIOS code

Leonid Levin (1948) is well known for his work in randomness in computing, algorithmic

complexity and intractability, foundations of mathematics and computer science, algorithmic

probability, theory of computation, and information theory

Charles Simonyi (1948) as head of Microsoft's application software

group, oversaw the creation of Microsoft's flagship office applications

Robert Tarjan (1948) is the discoverer of several important graph algorithms, including Tarjan's

off-line least common ancestors algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps

John Ousterhout is the creator of the Tcl scripting language and is well known for his work

in distributed operating systems, high-performance file systems, and user interfaces

Ronald Rivest (1947) is most celebrated for his work on public-key encryption

with Len Adleman and Adi Shamir, specifically the RSA algorithm

Ben Shneiderman (1947)

Wayne Ratliff (1946) wrote the database program dBASE II

Andrew Yao (1946) received the Turing Award, in recognition of his fundamental contributions

to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number

generation, cryptography, and communication complexity

Robert Metcalfe (1946)

Whitfield Diffie (1944)

Larry Ellison (1944) is the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation

Andy Tanenbaum (1944) is best known as the author of Minix, a free Unix-like operating system

for teaching purposes, and for his computer science textbooks, regarded as standard texts in the field

Jim Gray (1944-2007) has contributed to the building of several major database and transaction processing

systems, including the groundbreaking System R while at IBM, Terraserver, and Skyserver for Microsoft.

Among his more well known achievements are granular database locking, two-tier transaction commit semantics,

and the data cube operator for data warehousing applications.

Butler Lampson (1943) was one of the founding members of Xerox PARC in 1970, where he worked in the

Computer Science Laboratory (CSL). His now-famous vision of a personal computer was captured in the 1972

memo entitled "Why Alto?". In 1973, the Xerox Alto, with its three-button mouse and full-page-sized monitor

was born, and is now considered to be the first actual personal computer

Peter Norton (1943) produced a popular tool to retrieve erased data from DOS disks,

which was followed by several other tools which were collectively known as the Norton Utilities

Vint Cerf (1943) is commonly referred to as one of the "founding fathers of the Internet" for his key technical

and managerial role, together with Bob Kahn, in the creation of the Internet and the TCP/IP protocols which it uses

Ken Thompson (1943) is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with

the B programming language and his shepherding the UNIX and Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating systems

Michael Stonebraker (1943)

Nolan Bushnell (1943) founded Atari

Nicholas Negroponte (1943)

Jef Raskin (1943-2005) was an American human-computer interface expert best-known

for starting the Macintosh project for Apple Computer in the late 1970s

Jon Postel (1943-1998) is principally known for being the Editor of the Request for Comment

document series, and for serving as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death

Edward Tufte (1942)

Dave Cutler (1942) is a noted software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including the

RSX-11, VMS and VAXELN systems of Digital Equipment Corporation and Windows NT from Microsoft

Ed Roberts (1942) was the founder and president of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry

Systems (MITS) which built the Altair 8800, one of the very first hobbyist personal computers

Brian Kernighan (1942)

Gary Kildall (1942-1994) created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc.

Leslie Lamport (1941) his research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of distributed systems

Federico Faggin (1941) received a patent for the first computer microprocessor

Alfred Aho (1941)

Amir Pnueli (1941) received the Turing Award in 1996 for seminal work introducing temporal logic

into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification

Dennis Ritchie (1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix

David Parnas (1941)

Ray Tomlinson (1941)

Clive Sinclair (1940)

William Yeager (1940) is best-known for his development of the first multiple-protocol router

software during his 20 year tenure at Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Laboratory

John Warnock (1940) is best known as the co-founder with Charles

Geschke of Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company

Alan Kay (1940) is known for his early work on object-oriented programming and user interface design

Barbara Liskov (1939) became the first woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD in Computer Science, in 1968

from Stanford University. She has led many significant projects, including the design and implementation of CLU, the first

programming language to support data abstraction; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of

distributed programs; and Thor, an object-oriented database system. With Jeannette Wing, she developed a particular

definition of subtyping, commonly known as the Liskov substitution principle

Rudolf Bayer (1939) is famous for inventing two data sorting structures: the

B-tree with Edward M. McCreight, and later the UB-tree with Volker Markl

Ivar Jacobson (1939)

John Hopcroft (1939) received the Turing Award "for fundamental

achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures"

Donald Knuth (1938) is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming

Per Brinch Hansen (1938)

Stewart Brand (1938)

Ivan Sutherland (1938) received the Turing Award in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad,

an early predecessor to the graphical user interface that became ubiquitous in personal computers

Bob Kahn (1938) invented the TCP protocol, and along with Vinton G. Cerf created

the IP protocol, the technologies used to transmit information on the Internet

Raj Reddy (1937) is a world-renowned researcher in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Human-Computer Interaction

Ted Nelson (1937) coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is

credited with first use of the words hypermedia, transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and teledildonics

Don Estridge (1937-1985) led development of the original IBM

Personal Computer (PC), and thus is known as "father of the IBM PC"

Robert Floyd (1936-2001) his contributions include the design of Floyd's algorithm, which efficiently finds all shortest paths

in a graph, and work on parsing. In one isolated paper he introduced the important concept of error diffusion for rendering

images, also called Floyd-Steinberg dithering (though he distinguished dithering from diffusion)

Jon Hall

Edward Feigenbaum (1936) is often called the "Father of expert systems."

Richard Stearns (1936) with Juris Hartmanis, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of

their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory"

Richard Karp (1935) is a computer scientist and computational theorist, notable for

research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985

Gordon Bell (1934) is a leading computer engineer and manager, an early employee of Digital

Equipment Corporation (DEC) who designed several of their PDP machines and later rose to

Vice President of Engineering and oversaw the development of the VAX

James Fergason (1934) invented liquid crystal display or LCD

Niklaus Wirth (1934) was the chief designer of the programming

languages Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon

Robin Milner (1934) developed LCF, one of the first tools for automated theorem proving. The language he developed

for LCF, ML, was the first language with polymorphic type inference and type-safe exception handling. In a very different area,

Milner also developed a theoretical framework for analyzing concurrent systems, the Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS),

and its successor, the pi-calculus

Tony Hoare (1934) is probably best known for the development of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm.

He also developed Hoare logic, and the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) used to specify the

interactions of concurrent processes (including the Dining philosophers problem) and the inspiration for the Occam programming language

William Kahan (1933) was the primary architect behind the IEEE 754 standard for floating-point computation

(and its radix-independent follow-on, IEEE 854) and developed the Kahan summation algorithm, an important

algorithm for minimizing error introduced when adding a sequence of finite precision floating point numbers

Dana Scott (1932) his work on automata theory earned him the Turing Award in 1976, while his collaborative work with

Christopher Strachey in the 1970s laid the foundations of modern approaches to the semantics of programming languages

Fran Allen (1932) her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization

Jay Miner (1932-1994)

James Russell (1931) invented the compact disc

Michael Rabin (1931) received the Turing award with Dana Scott for their joint paper

"Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem," which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines

Fred Brooks (1931) is a software engineer and computer scientist, best-known for managing the development

of OS/360, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month

Ole-Johan Dahl (1931-2002) is considered to be one of the fathers

of Simula and object-oriented programming along with Kristen Nygaard

Edsger Dijkstra (1930-2002) among his contributions to computer science is the shortest path-algorithm,

also known as Dijkstra's algorithm, the THE multiprogramming system, and the semaphore construct, for

coordinating multiple processors and programs

Gordon Moore (1929) is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's law

Juris Hartmanis (1928) with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 Turing Award "in recognition

of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory"

Thomas Eugene Kurtz (1928) co-developed the BASIC programming language in 1963/64, together with John George Kemeny

Jean E. Sammet (1928)

Peter Naur (1928) his last name is the N in the BNF notation (Backus-Naur form), used in the description of the

syntax for most programming languages. He contributed to the creation of the ALGOL 60 programming language

Seymour Papert (1928) is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence,

as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language

Marvin Minsky (1927) is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence

(AI), co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy

John McCarthy (1927) was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his

1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and invented the Lisp programming language

Allen Newell (1927-1992) contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest

AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957) (with Herbert Simon)

Robert Noyce (1927-1990)

Fernando Corbató (1926) is a prominent computer scientist, notable

as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems

Ken Olsen (1926)

Paul Baran (1926) was one of the developers of packet-switched

networks along with Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock

John Diebold (1926-2005)

Kristen Nygaard (1926-2002) is acknowledged as the co-inventor of object-oriented

programming and the programming language Simula with Ole-Johan Dahl in the 1960s

John George Kemeny (1926-1992) is best known for co-developing

the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas Eugene Kurtz

Douglas Engelbart (1925) is best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English); as a

pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs

David A. Huffman (1925-1999) is best known for his legendary

Huffman code, a compression scheme for lossless variable length encoding

Seymour Cray (1925-1996) was a U.S. electrical engineer and

supercomputer architect who founded the company Cray Research

Friedrich Ludwig Bauer (1924) together with Klaus Samelson invented the stack

machine, a fundamental device for both theory and practice of programming

Donald D. Chamberlin (1924)

Charles Bachman (1924) developed the IDS (Integrated Data Store), one of the first database management systems

John Backus (1924-2007) led the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN)

and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax

Jack Kilby (1923-2005) invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working

at Texas Instruments, as well as the handheld calculator and thermal printer

Edgar F. Codd (1923-2003) made seminal contributions to the theory of relational databases

Gene Amdahl (1922)

Alan Perlis (1922-1990) was awarded the first Turing Award in 1966, according to the citation, for his

influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction. This is a reference

to the work he had done as a member of the team that developed the ALGOL programming language

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920-2004) developed the APL programming language, was honored with the

Turing Award in 1979 for his contributions to mathematical notation and programming language theory

Bob Bemer (1920- 2004)

John Presper Eckert (1919-1995)

James H. Wilkinson (1919-1986) discovered many significant algorithms

Herb Grosch (1918)

Jay Forrester (1918)

Clifford Berry (1918-1963) helped John Vincent Atanasoff create the

first digital electronic computer in 1939, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer

Betty Holberton (1917-2001) was one of the programmers for the ENIAC computer

Claude Shannon (1916-2001) has been called "the father of information theory",

 and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory

Herbert Simon (1916-2001) was among the founding fathers of several of today's most important scientific

domains, including Artificial Intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, attention

economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery

Christopher Strachey (1916-1975)

John Tukey (1915-2000)

Richard Hamming (1915-1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for

computer science and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use

of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window (described in section 5.8 of his book Digital Filters), Hamming

numbers, Sphere-packing (or hamming bound) and the Hamming distance

J. C. R. Licklider (1915-1990)

Maurice Vincent Wilkes (1913) developed the concept of microprogramming from the

realisation that the Central Processing Unit of a computer could be controlled by a

miniature, highly specialised computer program in high-speed ROM

William Hewlett (1913-2001)

David Packard (1912-1996) William Hewlett founded HP, the company that grew

into the world's largest producer of electronic testing and measurement devices

Alan Turing (1912-1954) is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing provided

an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, formulating

the now widely accepted "Turing" version of the Church–Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model

has either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine. With the Turing test, he made a

significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence

Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) created the first functional program-controlled machine, the Z3, in 1941

William Shockley (1910-1989) co-invented the transistor

Stephen Cole Kleene (1909-1994) was best known for founding the branch of mathematical logic known

as recursion theory together with Alonzo Church, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others; and for inventing

regular expressions. By providing methods of determining which problems are solvable, Kleene's work led to the

study of which functions are computable

John Bardeen (1908-1991) invented the transistor, along with William Bradford Shockley and Walter Brattain

Paul Eisler (1907-1995) was an Austrian inventor born in Vienna. Among his innovations

were printing techniques which later became important in electrical and electronics manufacturing

John Mauchly (1907-1980)

Grace Hopper (1906-1992) was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I

calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language

Tommy Flowers (1905-1998)

Alonzo Church (1905-1995) created lambda calculus, formulated Church's thesis and Church's theorem

George Stibitz (1904-1995) was a Bell Labs researcher known for his 1930s and 1940s work on

the realization of Boolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element

John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995) was the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital

computer, a special-purpose machine that has come to be called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer

William Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was widely influential

within cybernetics, systems theory and complex systems

John von Neumann (1903-1957) described a computer architecture in which data and program memory

are mapped into the same address space. This architecture became the de facto standard

Walter Houser Brattain (1902-1987) was a physicist at Bell Labs who,

along with John Bardeen and William Shockley invented the transistor

Howard Aiken (1900-1973) was a pioneer in computing, being the primary engineer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer

Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) is perhaps best known as the founder of cybernetics, a field that formalizes

the notion of f