People

Adam Smith

He wrote the book A Wealth of Nations in 1776. It had the analogy of the pin manufacturers, explaining worker specialization.

Charles Babbage

In 1819, he wanted to automate math calculations and was inspired by the French logarithmic tables. He also wanted to help the British Navy with motivation, and he wanted to do this with a mechanical machine called the Difference Engine. Still, he underestimated its cost and ultimately could only create a prototype. Nonetheless, he still started thinking about an Analytical Engine that could perform general calculations with any mathematical operation; however, in 1834 when he asked the prime minister for funds, he was rejected. He also wrote On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers, describing the Bankers Clearing House in London and how they reduced the inefficiency by meeting at a clearing house and recording the amounts owed in a ledger.

Gaspard De Prony

He was French and created the logarithmic tables and used the “method of differences” to break down calculating logarithms into many small steps that unskilled workers can perform.

Ada Lovelace

She was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and was friends with Babbage; she described an algorithm for finding Bernoulli Numbers using the analytical engine and is considered the first computer programmer.

David Hilbert

He created the Entschidungsproblem in 1928, asking if any problem can be solved algorithmically.

Alonzo Church

He was one person who solved the Entschidungsproblem, but his solution was not as memorable as other solutions.

Alan Turing

He solved the Entschidungsproblem, saying that there is a long roll of tape, and a machine can advance or rewind to any square, therefore can be used to identify some patterns and reject others. Through later research, he found no algorithm for the Entschidungsproblem, for example, evaluating the effectiveness of another algorithm. He then developed a series of machines called bombes to help decode intercepted messages from Germany. After, he helped to create an early computer called the ACE.

Robert Porter

He was then appointed director of the 1890 census.

Herman Hollerith

He was a young inventor appointed by Smith in 1888, and he created the Hollerith Tabulating Machine, inspired by the organette.

Christopher Latham Sholes

In 1869, he designed and patented the first typewriter.

James Densmore

He provided funds for Sholes to improve his typewriter

Philo Remington

In 1873, he started a small business manufacturing typewriters that grew from 1,000 units in 1880 to over 20,000 in 1890.

Dorr E. Felt

In 1887, he invented the Comptometer in Chicago

William S. Burroughs

Developed a mechanical calculator around the same time as Felt.

James Ritty

He was a successful businessman, and in 1879, he invented the first cash register.

John H. Patterson

He bought the rights to Ritty’s cash register and created his own company called The National Cash Registry(NCR)

Thomas J. Watson Sr.

He was a rising salesman under John H. Patterson but was abruptly fired; he joined CTR as a general manager and implemented what he learned at NCR. Eventually, he would become the CEO of IBM.

Vannevar Bush

He created the Differential Analyzer between 1928 and 1931.

Howard Aiken

He was a graduate student at Harvard, and he helped to create the Mark 1

John Atansasoff

He was a professor at Iowa State University and helped build the Atansoff-Berry Computer around the same time as the Mark I

Clifford Berry

He was a graduate student at Iowa State University and helped build the Atansoff-Berry Computer around the same time as the Mark I

Konrad Zuse

He was a young engineer in Germany who graduated from the College of Berlin Charlottenburg in 1935 with a degree in civil engineering and built the Z1, which had binary arithmetic and a memory unit in his spare time.

Helmut Schreyer

Konrad Zuse’s friend who wrote a proposal to the German Army for funds for a larger, fully electronic computer.

Paul Ceruzzi

He is a historian who says it would be a “What If” moment if the German Army accepted the Z1.

Dr. Herman Goldstine

In 1943, he was assigned to oversee the computer team in Pennsylvania. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan before being drafted into the army in 1942. He reached out to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to try and build the world’s most powerful electronic computer, the ENIAC.

Adele Goldstine

She is Dr. Herman Goldstine’s wife and went on a recruiting trip across the country to help create the firing tables.

John Mauchly

He was a newly hired instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. In August 1942, he submitted a request for a high-speed electronic calculator that was rejected because it was too far-fetched. Dr. Herman Goldstine reached out to help after he heard about the idea and helped to design and build the ENIAC. He also helped to build the UNIVAC.

J. Presper Eckert

He was a brilliant graduate student from the University of Pennsylvania, and he was the lead engineer on the ENIAC. He also helped to build the UNIVAC.

Frances Bilas Spence, Jean Bartik, Ruth Licterman Teitelbaum, Kathleen McNulty, Elizabeth Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer

The first 6 programmers on the ENIAC.

John Von Neumann

He was a mathematician who helped to build the atom bomb and helped to work on the EDVAC. He also wrote the "First Draft” report on the EDVAC. After he finished working on the ENIAC and EDVAC, he went back to New Jersey and worked at the Institute of Advanced Study(IAS) He then built his computer, just known as the IAS computer, and he is credited with the basic design of all modern computer, and has that type of architecture named after him.

Max Newman

He was a Mathematics Professor at Manchester University, and helped to create the Manchester Baby.

Frederick Williams

Created the Williams Tube as a new type of memory storage, and helped build the Manchester Baby.

Maurice Wilkes

He was a physicist at Cambridge University, and he attended the Moore School Lectures and created the EDSAC.

James Rand Jr.

He was the president of Remington Rand and bought Mauchly and Eckert failing company.

Walter Cronkite

He was a famous TV Host, and he was the one to introduce the UNIVAC’s predictions of the 1952 elections.

Robert Noyce

He invented the microprocessor and the integrated circuit. He worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, a company he had founded several years earlier. He then created Intel with Gordon Moore.

Jack Kilby

He invented the microchip.

Heinz Rutishausher

He worked with Konrad Zuse, anad wrote a paper on the Plan Preparation Machine.

Grace Hopper

She was an influential proponent of computer compilers and she helped to program the Mark I.

John Backus

He was Creator of FORTRAN.

Fred Brooks

He was the manager of the IBM System/360 system and created his law that states that adding manpower to a late software project only makes it later.

Earl Larson

He was the Judge that struck down the ENIAC Patent and put it into the public domain.

Jay Forrester

He was in charge of the electromechanical, analog system on Project Whirlwind.

John McCarthy

He was a pioneer at MIT, and he believed that computers could be made for a wider audience through time-sharing.

Fernando Corbato

He led the team at MIT to build the timesharing system known as CTSS in 1963.

John Kemeny and Thomas E Kurtz

The Dartmouth Professors who created the BASIC programming language.

Kenneth Olsen

He was a former MIT computer engineer, and created the company Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957.

Ken Thompson

One of the creators of Unix, however, did not create the C programming language.

Dennis Ritchie

One of the creators of Unix, and the C programming language.

J. C. R. Licklider

He was the director of the Information Processing Techniques Office(IPTO) of the Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA) and he hoped by networking computers together, researchers would be able to use them more efficiently.

Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran and Donald Davies

These 3 researchers independently proposed a store and forward packet transfer method in the 1960s.

Norm Abramson

He was a professor at the University of Hawaii, and he realized that Hawaii’s terrain made it difficult for wired connections between computers, so he devised a packet switching network called the ALOHAnet where packets are delivered by radio waves instead of telephone lines.

Robert Taylor

He was a former director at ARPA, and he was hired to manage the day-to-day affairs of the Palo Alto Research Center or PARC and helped to create the Alto computer.

Douglas Engelbart

He invented the mouse and had been featured in the “Mother of All Demos” in 1968.

Vint Cerf and Bob E. Kahn

The 2 developers who developed TCP/IP in 1974, and received a Presidential Medial of Freedom.

Robert Metcalfe

He connected Alto Machines to a cheap cable running throughout the PARC research building in 1974, and he called this system the Ethernet.

Alan Kay

He was a PARC Researcher that created the programming language called Smalltalk.

Barbara Liskov

She was a developer at MIT and created an Object Oriented Programming Language called CLU.

Gordon Moore

He was a co-founder of Intel, and he created a law stating that the processing power of computers doubled every few years.

Ted Hoff

He realized that rather than building many specialized chips, you could build a general chip, the build in the specific functions that were needed.

Bill Gates

M i c r o s o f t. (He was a student at Harvard and developed a version of BASIC that was compatible with the Altair Intel 8080 processor. IBM used this version of BASIC, and it became extremely popular. He also convinced IBM to pay them a small license fee for every copy sold; he also created a new Operating System at the time called QDOS and then changed the name to MS-DOS. He did many other things that I can’t fit into this flashcard.)

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs

The founders of Apple. One of the members visited Xerox PARC, saw a demonstration of the Alto, and realized that point-and-click GUI was the future.

Daniel Bricklin

He was a student at Harvard and created the VisiCalc Program.

William C. Lowe

He made a proposal to the senior management of IBM to create a personal computer out of off the shelf parts.

Garry Kildall

He created the CP/M Operating System, and he was unable to make a deal with IBM, because he was not at home to discuss the business deal.

Dorothy

Garry Kildall’s wife and business parter, who refused IBM’s offer to use CP/M because she had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Tim Paterson

He was a programmer at Seattle Computer Products(SCP), and Bill Gates contacted him to help create the QDOS(Later MS-DOS) operating system.

Michael Dell

He was a student at UT Austin, and he upgraded and resold computers from his dorm room. In 1985, he began to create his computers instead of upgrading others; interestingly, he only sold computers over mail order to keep his inventory and prices low.

Richard Stallman

He was a programmer at the AI Lab at MIT, and he advocated for open-source code and disliked the new lab policies. He then created a new free operating system called GNU, almost identical to the proprietary Unix code. However, it was missing a kernel.

Linus Torvalds

He was a college student in Finland, and he used Minix a Unix-like operating system, and he created a free Kernel for Unix, and he called it Linux.

Andrew Tanenbaum

He was a science professor at Vrije University in Amsterdam and he published the Minix kernel to improve its compatibility with the 80836 processor.

Ted Nelson

He created the system of Hypertext in the mid 1960s, and was inspired by an essay called We May Think written by Vannevar Bush.

Tim Berners Lee

He was an employee at CERN and created the internet that we know today in the 1990s.

Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina

They were employees at NCSA at the University of Illinois and created Mosaic.

Jim Clark

He was a legendary entrepreneur, and worked to market Mosaic. He had previously founded Silicon Graphics in 1983.

Marc Andreesen

He was one of the co-creators of the Mosaic system, once he left the University of Illinois, he then wrote Netscape Navigator.

Jerry Yang and David Filas

These two Stanford developers founded Yahoo in 1993 and based it on a hand-curated list of websites.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

They were a pair of Stanford Graduates that created Google, which used an algorithm to rank websites off of the amount of inbound links.

James Gosling

He is creator of Java in 1992, and at the time, he was a programmer at Sun Microsystems.

Ward Cunningham

He invented Wikipedia in 1995.

Mark Zuckerberg

He is the creator of Facebook, Instagram, Course Match and Facemash and Threads.

Elon Musk

The founder of the Boring Company, Tesla, NeuraLink and SpaceX and others. In 2021, he announced that he would be working on a line of intelligent robots.