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 not 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.