List of programmers
Encyclopedia
This is a list of programmer
Programmer
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...

s notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions.

A

  • Michael Abrash
    Michael Abrash
    Michael Abrash is a technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. The original 8086 processor, the focus of the book, was several generations behind the state of the art by...

     - Popularized Mode X for DOS. This allows for faster video refresh and square pixels.
  • Scott Adams
    Scott Adams (game designer)
    Scott Adams is the co-founder, with ex-wife Alexis, of Adventure International, an early publisher of games for home computers....

     - one of earliest developers of CP/M
    CP/M
    CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...

     and DOS
    DOS
    DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

     games
  • Leonard Adleman
    Leonard Adleman
    Leonard Max Adleman is an American theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California. He is known for being a co-inventor of the RSA cryptosystem in 1977, and of DNA computing...

     - co-creator of RSA algorithm (the A in the name stands for Adleman), coined the term computer virus
  • Alfred Aho
    Alfred Aho
    Alfred Vaino Aho is a Canadian computer scientist.-Career:Aho received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton University...

     - co-creator of AWK (the A in the name stands for Aho), and main author of famous Dragon book
    Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
    Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools is a famous computer science textbook by Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman about compiler construction...

  • JJ Allaire
    JJ Allaire
    In 1995 Joseph J. Allaire co-founded Allaire Corporation with his brother Jeremy Allaire, creating the web development tool ColdFusion. In March 2001, Allaire was sold to Macromedia where ColdFusion was integrated into the Macromedia MX product line...

     - creator of ColdFusion Application Server, ColdFusion Markup Language
    ColdFusion Markup Language
    ColdFusion Markup Language, more commonly known as CFML, is a scripting language for web development that runs on the JVM, the .NET framework, and Google App Engine...

  • Andrei Alexandrescu
    Andrei Alexandrescu
    Andrei Alexandrescu is a Romanian C++ programmer and author. He is particularly known for his pioneering work on policy-based design implemented via template metaprogramming. These ideas are articulated in his book Modern C++ Design and were first implemented in his programming library, Loki. He...

     - author, expert C++, D languages
  • Paul Allen
    Paul Allen
    Paul Gardner Allen is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates...

     - Altair BASIC
    Altair BASIC
    Altair BASIC was an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product , distributed by MITS under a contract...

    , Applesoft BASIC
    Applesoft BASIC
    Applesoft BASIC was a dialect of Microsoft BASIC supplied with the Apple II series of computers. It superseded Integer BASIC and was the BASIC in ROM in all Apple II series computers after the original Apple II model. It was also referred to as FP because of the command used to invoke it instead...

    , co-founded Microsoft
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

  • Eric Allman
    Eric Allman
    Eric Paul Allman is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley.-Education and training:...

     - sendmail
    Sendmail
    Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and -delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol used for email transport over the Internet....

    , syslog
    Syslog
    Syslog is a standard for computer data logging. It allows separation of the software that generates messages from the system that stores them and the software that reports and analyzes them...

  • Marc Andreessen
    Marc Andreessen
    Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...

     - co-creator of Mosaic
    Mosaic (web browser)
    Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...

    , co-founder of Netscape
  • Bill Atkinson
    Bill Atkinson
    Bill Atkinson is an American computer engineer and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, San Diego, where Apple Macintosh developer Jef Raskin was one of his professors...

     - QuickDraw
    QuickDraw
    QuickDraw is the 2D graphics library and associated Application Programming Interface which is a core part of the classic Apple Macintosh operating system. It was initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. QuickDraw still exists as part of the libraries of Mac OS X, but has been...

    , HyperCard
    HyperCard
    HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written...



B

  • John Backus
    John Backus
    John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form , the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax.He also did research in...

     - FORTRAN
    Fortran
    Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

    , BNF
  • Richard Bartle
    Richard Bartle
    Richard Allan Bartle is a British writer, professor and game researcher, best known for being the co-creator of MUD1 and the author of the seminal Designing Virtual Worlds. He is one of the pioneers of the massively multiplayer online game industry.-Life and career:Bartle received a Ph.D...

     - MUD
    MUD
    A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...

    , with Roy Trubshaw
    Roy Trubshaw
    Roy Trubshaw was a programmer at the University of Essex who co-authored MUD1, the first MUD, with Richard Bartle on a DEC PDP-10. Both of them now work together at Multi-User Entertainment with Trubshaw being the company’s technical director....

    , creator of MUDs
  • Brian Behlendorf
    Brian Behlendorf
    Brian Behlendorf is a technologist, computer programmer, and an important figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache...

     - Apache
    Apache HTTP Server
    The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache , is web server software notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. In 2009 it became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone...

  • Kent Beck
    Kent Beck
    Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of the Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development software development methodologies. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001....

     - Created Extreme Programming
    Extreme Programming
    Extreme programming is a software development methodology which is intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements...

     and co-creator of JUnit
    JUnit
    JUnit is a unit testing framework for the Java programming language. JUnit has been important in the development of test-driven development, and is one of a family of unit testing frameworks collectively known as xUnit that originated with SUnit....

  • Donald Becker
    Donald Becker
    right|thumbnail|Donald Becker is a developer, well-known for writing many of the Ethernet drivers for the Linux operating system. Thousands of computers around the world routinely use his drivers to connect to the Internet....

     - Linux
    Linux
    Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

     Ethernet
    Ethernet
    Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

     drivers, Beowulf
    Beowulf (computing)
    A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them...

     clustering
  • Doug Bell
    Doug Bell
    Douglas Andrew Bell is a computer game developer active in the industry from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.He is best known for his role as the lead designer and programmer for the classic Dungeon Master series of computer games from San Diego studio FTL Games...

     - Dungeon Master series of computer games
  • Fabrice Bellard
    Fabrice Bellard
    Fabrice Bellard is a computer programmer who is best known as the creator of the FFmpeg and QEMU software projects. He has also developed a number of other programs, including the Tiny C Compiler....

     - Creator of FFMPEG
    FFmpeg
    FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...

     open codec library, QEMU
    QEMU
    QEMU is a processor emulator that relies on dynamic binary translation to achieve a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPU architectures....

     virtualization tools
  • Tim Berners-Lee
    Tim Berners-Lee
    Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...

     - inventor of World Wide Web
    World Wide Web
    The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

  • Daniel J. Bernstein
    Daniel J. Bernstein
    Daniel Julius Bernstein is a mathematician, cryptologist, programmer, and professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago...

     - djbdns
    Djbdns
    The djbdns software package is a DNS implementation created by Daniel J. Bernstein due to his frustrations with repeated BIND security holes. A $1000 prize for the first person to find a privilege escalation security hole in djbdns was awarded in March 2009 to Matthew Dempsky., djbdns's tinydns...

    , qmail
    Qmail
    qmail is a mail transfer agent that runs on Unix. It was written, starting December 1995, by Daniel J. Bernstein as a more secure replacement for the popular Sendmail program...

  • Eric Bina
    Eric Bina
    Eric J. Bina is the co-creator of Mosaic and the co-founder of Netscape. In 1993, Bina along with Marc Andreessen authored the first version of Mosaic while working as a programmer at National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Bina attended...

     - co-creator of Mosaic web browser
    Mosaic (web browser)
    Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...

  • Marc Blank
    Marc Blank
    Marc Blank is an American game developer and software engineer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first hit text adventure computer games, Zork....

     - co-creator of Zork
    Zork
    Zork was one of the first interactive fiction computer games and an early descendant of Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language...

  • Joshua Bloch
    Joshua Bloch
    Joshua J. Bloch is a software engineer, currently employed at Google, and a technology author. He led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the Java Collections Framework, the java.math package, and the assert mechanism...

     - core Java language designer, lead the Java collections framework
    Java collections framework
    The Java collections framework is a set of classes and interfaces that implement commonly reusable collection data structures.Although it is a framework, it works in a manner of a library...

     project
  • Bert Bos
    Bert Bos
    Gijsbert Bos is a computer scientist. He studied mathematics at the University of Groningen, and wrote his PhD thesis on Rapid user interface development with the script language Gist....

     - author of Argo
    Argo (web browser)
    Argo was part of a project to make the Internet accessible to scholars in the Humanities at the University of Groningen. The Argo web browser was created in August 1994 by Bert Bos....

     web browser, co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
    Cascading Style Sheets
    Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...

  • David Bradley
    David Bradley (engineer)
    David Bradley was one of the twelve engineers who worked on the original IBM PC, developing the computer ROM BIOScode. He is credited by some for inventing the "Control-Alt-Delete" key combination that was used to reboot the computer.-Control-Alt-Delete:...

     - coder on the IBM PC
    IBM PC
    The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...

     project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible BIOS
    BIOS
    In IBM PC compatible computers, the basic input/output system , also known as the System BIOS or ROM BIOS , is a de facto standard defining a firmware interface....

    es
  • Andrew Braybrook
    Andrew Braybrook
    Andrew Braybrook is a software engineer, a former game programmer. He created video games such as Paradroid, Gribbly's Day Out, Fire and Ice, Uridium and Morpheus. He also programmed the Commodore Amiga conversion of the arcade game Rainbow Islands.Braybrook started out writing accounting programs...

     - video games Paradroid
    Paradroid
    Paradroid is a Commodore 64 computer game written by Andrew Braybrook and published by Hewson Consultants in 1985. It was also remade as Paradroid 90 for the Amiga and Atari ST home computers and as Paradroid 2000 for the Acorn Archimedes. There exist several fan-made remakes for modern PCs...

    and Uridium
    Uridium
    Uridium is a science fiction side-scrolling shoot 'em up for the Commodore 64 . It consists of fifteen levels, each named after a metal element, with the last level being called Uridium...

  • Larry Breed
    Lawrence M. Breed
    Lawrence M. Breed is a computer scientist, artist and inventor, best known for his involvement in the APL programming language.- Career :While at Stanford University in 1961, he created the first computer animation language, MACS, and demonstrated it publicly with Earl Boebert.While getting his M.S...

     - co-developer of APL\360
  • Jack E. Bresenham
    Jack E. Bresenham
    Jack Elton Bresenham is a former professor of computer science.-Biography:He retired from 27 years of service at IBM as a Senior Technical Staff Member in 1987. He taught for 16 years at Winthrop University and has nine patents...

     - creator of Bresenham's line algorithm
    Bresenham's line algorithm
    The Bresenham line algorithm is an algorithm which determines which points in an n-dimensional raster should be plotted in order to form a close approximation to a straight line between two given points...

  • Dan Bricklin - co-creator of VisiCalc
    VisiCalc
    VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool...

    , the first personal spreadsheet
    Spreadsheet
    A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...

     program
  • Walter Bright
    Walter Bright
    Walter Bright is a computer programmer known for being the designer of the D programming language. He was also the main developer of the first C++ compiler that translated directly to object without going via C, Zortech C++ . Before the C++ compiler, he developed the Datalight C compiler, also...

     - Digital Mars
    Digital Mars
    Digital Mars is a small American software company owned by Walter Bright that makes C and C++ compilers for Windows and DOS. They also distribute the compilers for free on their web site....

    , First C++ compiler, author of D (programming language)
    D (programming language)
    The D programming language is an object-oriented, imperative, multi-paradigm, system programming language created by Walter Bright of Digital Mars. It originated as a re-engineering of C++, but even though it is mainly influenced by that language, it is not a variant of C++...

    .
  • Richard Brodie - Microsoft Word
  • Grady Booch
    Grady Booch
    Grady Booch is an American software engineer. Booch is best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. Grady is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments...

     - Co-creator of Unified Modeling Language
    Unified Modeling Language
    Unified Modeling Language is a standardized general-purpose modeling language in the field of object-oriented software engineering. The standard is managed, and was created, by the Object Management Group...

  • Stephen Bourne - Creator of Bourne shell
    Bourne shell
    The Bourne shell, or sh, was the default Unix shell of Unix Version 7 and most Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh - which will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic link or hard link to a compatible shell - even when more modern shells are used by most users.Developed by Stephen Bourne at AT&T...

  • Andries Brouwer
    Andries Brouwer
    Andries Evert Brouwer is a Dutch mathematician and computer programmer, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology . His varied research interests include several branches of discrete mathematics, particularly graph theory and coding theory...

     - Hack, former maintainer of man pager , Linux kernel
    Linux kernel
    The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....

     hacker
  • Danielle Bunten Berry
    Danielle Bunten Berry
    Danielle Bunten Berry , born Daniel Paul Bunten, and also known as Dan Bunten, was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game M.U.L.E. , and 1984's The Seven Cities of Gold.-Biography:Bunten was born in St Louis, Missouri, and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas as a...

     (Dani Bunten) - M.U.L.E.
    M.U.L.E.
    M.U.L.E. is a seminal multiplayer video game by Ozark Softscape. It was published in 1983 by Electronic Arts. It was originally written for the Atari 400/800, and was later ported to the Commodore 64, the Nintendo Entertainment System and the IBM PC Jr. Japanese versions also exist for the...

    , multiplayer video game
  • Dries Buytaert
    Dries Buytaert
    Dries Buytaert is an open-source software programmer notable as founder and lead developer of the Drupal CMS.- Career :...

     - Creator of Drupal
    Drupal
    Drupal is a free and open-source content management system and content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and...



C

  • Steve Capps
    Steve Capps
    Steve Capps is a computer programmer and engineer who is best known for his work on the Apple Inc. Macintosh computer and Newton OS during the 1980s and 1990s. He started working at the Xerox Corporation while still a computer science student at the Rochester Institute of Technology...

     - co-creator of Macintosh and Newton
    Apple Newton
    The MessagePad was the first series of personal digital assistant devices developed by Apple for the Newton platform in 1993. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of Apple's MessagePad devices was done in Japan by the Sharp Corporation...

  • John D. Carmack - first person shooters Doom, Quake
  • Vinton Cerf - TCP/IP, NCP
    Network Control Program
    The Network Control Program provided the middle layers of the protocol stack running on host computers of the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet...

  • Ward Christensen
    Ward Christensen
    Ward Christensen, born in West Bend, Wisconsin, U.S., is the founder of the CBBS bulletin board, the first bulletin board system ever brought online...

     - Wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS
  • Edgar F. Codd
    Edgar F. Codd
    Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases...

     - principal architect of the relational model
    Relational model
    The relational model for database management is a database model based on first-order predicate logic, first formulated and proposed in 1969 by Edgar F...

  • Bram Cohen
    Bram Cohen
    Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent...

     - BitTorrent protocol design and implementation
  • Alain Colmerauer
    Alain Colmerauer
    Alain Colmerauer is a French computer scientist.After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble, he spent 1967–1970 as Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal, where he created Q-Systems, one of the earliest linguistic formalisms used in the development of the TAUM-METEO machine...

     - Prolog
    Prolog
    Prolog is a general purpose logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is declarative: the program logic is expressed in terms of...

  • Alan Cooper
    Alan Cooper
    Alan Cooper is known for his role in humanizing technology through his groundbreaking work in software design. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic," Cooper is the author of the books, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why...

     - Visual Basic
    Visual Basic
    Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...

  • Alan Cox
    Alan Cox
    Alan Cox is a British computer programmer who formerly maintained the 2.2 branch of the Linux kernel and continues to be heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel, an association that dates back to 1991...

     - co-developer of Linux
    Linux
    Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

     kernel
  • Brad Cox
    Brad Cox
    Brad Cox is a computer scientist and Ph.D. of mathematical biology known mostly for his work in software engineering , software componentry, and the Objective-C programming language....

     - Objective-C
    Objective-C
    Objective-C is a reflective, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language.Today, it is used primarily on Apple's Mac OS X and iOS: two environments derived from the OpenStep standard, though not compliant with it...

  • Mike Cowlishaw
    Mike Cowlishaw
    Mike Cowlishaw is a retired IBM Fellow, a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering , the Institute of Engineering and Technology , and the British Computer Society.- Career at IBM :Cowlishaw joined IBM...

     - REXX and NetRexx
    REXX
    REXX is an interpreted programming language that was developed at IBM. It is a structured high-level programming language that was designed to be both easy to learn and easy to read...

    , LEXX editor
    Oxford English Dictionary
    The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...

    , image processing, decimal
    Decimal
    The decimal numeral system has ten as its base. It is the numerical base most widely used by modern civilizations....

     arithmetic packages
  • Mark Crispin
    Mark Crispin
    Mark Crispin is best known as the father of the IMAP protocol, having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He is the author or co-author of numerous RFCs; and is the principal author of UW IMAP, one of the reference implementations of the IMAP4rev1...

     - creator of IMAP, author of UW-IMAP, one of reference implementations of IMAP4
  • Pamela Crossley - creator of SIMPLE for academic management of web pages
  • Ward Cunningham
    Ward Cunningham
    Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham , on...

     - creator of Wiki
    Wiki
    A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

     concept
  • William Crowther
    William Crowther
    William Crowther is a computer programmer and caver. He is best known as the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of game design and created a new game genre, text adventures.-Biography:During the early 1970s Crowther worked at defense...

     - Colossal Cave Adventure
  • Dave Cutler
    Dave Cutler
    David Neil Cutler, Sr. is an American software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including RSX-11M, VMS and VAXELN at Digital Equipment Corporation and Windows at Microsoft.- Personal history :...

     - architect of VMS, Windows NT
    Windows NT
    Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...



D

  • Ole-Johan Dahl
    Ole-Johan Dahl
    Ole-Johan Dahl was a Norwegian computer scientist and is considered to be one of the fathers of Simula and object-oriented programming along with Kristen Nygaard.- Career :...

     - co-creator of SIMULA
    Simula
    Simula is a name for two programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard...

  • James Duncan Davidson
    James Duncan Davidson
    James Duncan Davidson is an American photographer and former software developer. While a software engineer at Sun Microsystems , Davidson created Tomcat, a Java‐based webserver application and the Ant Java‐based build tool.He was raised in Oklahoma and Texas, and is currently self‐employed as both...

     - creator of Tomcat, now part of Jakarta Project
    Jakarta Project
    The Jakarta Project creates and maintains open source software for the Java platform. It operates as an umbrella project under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, and all of Jakarta products are released under the Apache License.-Subprojects:...

  • L. Peter Deutsch
    L. Peter Deutsch
    L Peter Deutsch or Peter Deutsch is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter....

     - Ghostscript
    Ghostscript
    Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format page description languages.- Features :...

    , Assembler for PDP-1
    PDP-1
    The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...

    , XDS-940 timesharing
    Time-sharing
    Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...

     system, QED
    QED (text editor)
    QED is a line-oriented computer text editor that was developed by Butler Lampson and L. Peter Deutsch for the Berkeley Timesharing System running on the SDS 940. It was implemented by L...

     original co-author
  • Edsger Dijkstra
    Edsger Dijkstra
    Edsger Wybe Dijkstra ; ) was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.Shortly before his...

     - contributions to ALGOL
    ALGOL
    ALGOL is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages and became the de facto way algorithms were described in textbooks and academic works for almost the next 30 years...

    , Dijkstra's algorithm
    Dijkstra's algorithm
    Dijkstra's algorithm, conceived by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra in 1956 and published in 1959, is a graph search algorithm that solves the single-source shortest path problem for a graph with nonnegative edge path costs, producing a shortest path tree...

    , Goto Statement Considered Harmful
  • Matt Dillon
    Matt Dillon (computer scientist)
    Matthew Dillon is a computer scientist living in Berkeley, California. He is best known for his contributions to FreeBSD and for starting the DragonFly BSD project....

     - programmer of various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD
  • Martin Dougiamas
    Martin Dougiamas
    Martin Dougiamas , lives in Perth, Australia and is an educator and computer scientist with postgraduate degrees in Computer Science and Education...

     - creator and lead developer of Moodle
    Moodle
    Moodle is a free source e-learning software platform, also known as a Course Management System, Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment...

  • Adam Dunkels
    Adam Dunkels
    Adam Dunkels, Ph.D., is a Swedish software engineer, researcher and co-founder of the Networked Embedded Systems Group at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science in Kista, Sweden. His research is mainly focused on networking technology and distributed communication for small embedded devices and...

     - author of Contiki
    Contiki
    Contiki is a small, open source, highly portable multitasking computer operating system developed for use on a number of memory-constrained networked systems ranging from 8-bit computers to embedded systems on microcontrollers, including sensor network motes...

     operating system, the lwIP
    LwIP
    lwIP is a widely used open source TCP/IP stack designed for embedded systems. lwIP was originally developed by Adam Dunkels at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and is now developed and maintained by a world wide network of developers led by Kieran Mansley.lwIP is used by many...

     and uIP
    UIP
    Meanings of UIP:*United International Pictures film distributor*Universal Installer Project - An XML file format describing a product to be installed. It was developed by Macrovision for their InstallShield suite...

     embedded TCP/IP stacks, inventor of protothreads
    Protothreads
    In computer science, a protothread is a low-overhead mechanism for concurrent programming.Protothreads function as stackless, lightweight threads providing a blocking context cheaply using minimal memory per protothread ....



E

  • Les Earnest
    Les Earnest
    Lester Donald Earnest was born in the United States on December 17, 1930. He began his career as a computer programmer in 1954 during a stint as a U.S. Navy Aviation Electronics Officer & Digital Computer Project Officer at Naval Air Development Center, Johnsville, Pennsylvania...

     - author of finger
    Finger protocol
    In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information.-Name/Finger protocol:...

     program
  • Brendan Eich
    Brendan Eich
    Brendan Eich is a computer programmer and creator of the JavaScript scripting language. He is the chief technology officer at the Mozilla Corporation.-Education:...

     - creator of JavaScript
    JavaScript
    JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

  • Larry Ellison
    Larry Ellison
    Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation, one of the world's leading enterprise software companies. As of 2011, he is the third wealthiest American citizen, with an estimated worth of $33 billion.- Early life :Larry Ellison was born in the...

     - co-creator of Oracle database
    Oracle database
    The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....

    , co-founder of Oracle Corporation
    Oracle Corporation
    Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...

  • Marc Ewing
    Marc Ewing
    Marc Ewing is the creator and originator of the Red Hat brand of software, most notably the Red Hat range of Linux operating system distributions. He was involved in the 86open project in the mid-90s....

     - creator of Red Hat Linux
    Red Hat Linux
    Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004.Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994...



F

  • Dan Farmer
    Dan Farmer
    Dan Farmer is an American computer security researcher. In a summer course in 1989, in order to graduate from Purdue University he started the development of the COPS program for identifying security issues on Unix systems under Gene Spafford, first releasing it after leaving Purdue in late 1989...

     - Creator of COPS
    COPS (software)
    COPS was the first common Unix computer system security scanning tool,created by Dan Farmer; Gene Spafford helped him start it in 1989 while Dan was in summer school at Purdue University.-Features:...

     and SATAN
    Satan
    Satan , "the opposer", is the title of various entities, both human and divine, who challenge the faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible...

     Security Scanners
  • Stuart Feldman
    Stuart Feldman
    Stuart Feldman received an A.B. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University and a Ph.D in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is best known as the creator of the computer software program make for UNIX systems...

     - creator of make, author of Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix
    Unix
    Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

  • David Filo
    David Filo
    David Filo is an American businessman and the co-founder of Yahoo! with Jerry Yang.Until the company decided to switch to PHP, his Filo Server Program, written in the C programming language, was the server-side scripting software used to dynamically serve variable web pages, called Filo Server...

     - co-creator of Yahoo!
    Yahoo!
    Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

  • Brad Fitzpatrick
    Brad Fitzpatrick
    Bradley Joseph "Brad" Fitzpatrick , is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached....

     - creator of memcached
    Memcached
    In computing, memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other sites. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the...

    , Livejournal
    LiveJournal
    LiveJournal is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community....

     and OpenID
    OpenID
    OpenID is an open standard that describes how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner, eliminating the need for services to provide their own ad hoc systems and allowing users to consolidate their digital identities...

  • Andrew Fluegelman
    Andrew Fluegelman
    Andrew Cardozo Fluegelman was a publisher, photographer, programmer and attorney best known as the inventor of what is now known as the shareware business model for software marketing...

     - author PC-Talk
    PC-Talk
    PC-Talk was a communications software program. It was one of the first three widely popular software products sold via the marketing method that became known as shareware...

     communications software; considered a co-creator of shareware
    Shareware
    The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...

  • Brian Fox - creator of Bash, Readline, GNU
    GNU
    GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...

     Finger
    Finger protocol
    In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information.-Name/Finger protocol:...

    , Meta-HTML
  • Jim Fruchterman
    Jim Fruchterman
    Jim Fruchterman is a leading social entrepreneur. He is a former rocket scientist and technology entrepreneur who creates social technology enterprises that target under-served communities....

     - founder of Arkenstone (now part of Freedom Scientific
    Freedom Scientific
    Freedom Scientific is a corporation which researches, creates, and sells technology intended for people who are blind or have low vision and those with learning disabilities. The company's Blind and Low Vision Group's products include software and hardware to help people with low vision work with...

    ) and Benetech
    Benetech
    Benetech was founded in 1989 by high technology entrepreneur Jim Fruchterman in Palo Alto, California. Benetech is a not-for-profit social enterprise organization: it creates technology social ventures, such as Bookshare , the Route 66 Literacy Project, the Miradi environmental project management...

    , created scanners for blind
    Blindness
    Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness...

     people


G

  • Elon Gasper
    Elon Gasper
    Elon James Gasper is the former Senior VP at VizX Labs and co-founder of 1980s era software company Bright Star Technology. Described by Ken Williams as "a genius ex-college professor specializing in linguistics," Elon holds several patents relating to Lip Sync and other technology, and has been...

     - co-founded Bright Star Technology, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech. HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc.
  • Bill Gates
    Bill Gates
    William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...

     - Altair BASIC
    Altair BASIC
    Altair BASIC was an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product , distributed by MITS under a contract...

    , co-founded Microsoft
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

  • Steve Gibson - creator of SpinRite
    SpinRite
    SpinRite is a computer software program for scanning magnetic data storage devices such as hard disks, recovering data from them and refreshing their surfaces. It is proprietary and commercial software written by Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation. The first version was released in 1988....

  • John Gilmore - GDB
  • Adele Goldberg
    Adele Goldberg (computer scientist)
    Adele Goldberg is a computer scientist who participated in the development of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and various concepts related to object oriented programming while a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, in the 1970s.Goldberg began working at PARC in 1973, and...

     - co-creator of Smalltalk
    Smalltalk
    Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

  • Ryan C. Gordon
    Ryan C. Gordon
    Ryan C. Gordon is a former Loki Software employee who is now responsible for icculus.org, which hosts many Loki Software projects as well as several new projects created by himself and others...

     (a.k.a. Icculus) - Lokigames, ioquake3, MojoSetup, etc.
  • James Gosling
    James Gosling
    James A. Gosling, OC is a computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language.-Education and career:In 1977, Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary...

     - Java
    Java (programming language)
    Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

    , Gosling Emacs
    Gosling Emacs
    Gosling Emacs was an Emacs implementation written in 1981 by James Gosling in C. Its extension language, Mocklisp, has a syntax that appears similar to Lisp, but Mocklisp does not have lists or any other structured datatypes...

    , NeWS
    NeWS
    NeWS was a windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1980s. Originally known as "SunDew", its primary authors were James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal...

  • Bill Gosper
    Bill Gosper
    Ralph William Gosper, Jr. , known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer from Pennsauken Township, New Jersey...

     - Macsyma
    Macsyma
    Macsyma is a computer algebra system that was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT as part of Project MAC and later marketed commercially...

    , Lisp machine
    Lisp machine
    Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations...

    , hashlife
    Hashlife
    Hashlife is a memoized algorithm for computing the long-term fate of a given starting configuration in Conway's Game of Life and related cellular automata, much more quickly than would be possible using alternative algorithms that simulate each time step of each cell of the automaton...

    , helped Donald Knuth
    Donald Knuth
    Donald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...

     on Vol.2 of The Art of Computer Programming
    The Art of Computer Programming
    The Art of Computer Programming is a comprehensive monograph written by Donald Knuth that covers many kinds of programming algorithms and their analysis....

     (Semi-numerical algorithms)
  • Andrew Gower
    Andrew Gower
    Andrew Christopher Gower is a British video game developer and co-founder of Cambridge-based Jagex Games Studio, the company he founded with Paul Gower and Constant Tedder. He wrote the MMORPG RuneScape with the assistance of his brother, Paul Gower. In December 2010 he left the Jagex board of...

     - RuneScape Classic, RuneScape
    RuneScape
    RuneScape is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game released in January 2001 by Andrew and Paul Gower, and developed and published by Jagex Games Studio. It is a graphical browser game implemented on the client-side in Java, and incorporates 3D rendering...

    , co-founded Jagex
    Jagex
    Jagex Games Studio, based in Cambridge, is the UK’s largest independent developer and publisher of online games. Jagex is best known for RuneScape, the world's largest free-to-play MMORPG....

  • Paul Gower - RuneScape Classic, RuneScape
    RuneScape
    RuneScape is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game released in January 2001 by Andrew and Paul Gower, and developed and published by Jagex Games Studio. It is a graphical browser game implemented on the client-side in Java, and incorporates 3D rendering...

    , co-founded Jagex
    Jagex
    Jagex Games Studio, based in Cambridge, is the UK’s largest independent developer and publisher of online games. Jagex is best known for RuneScape, the world's largest free-to-play MMORPG....

  • Paul Graham - Yahoo! Store, On Lisp
    On Lisp
    On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp is a book by Paul Graham on macro programming in Common Lisp. It is currently out of print, but can be freely downloaded as a pdf.-External links:**Free versions of "On Lisp"******...

    , ANSI Common Lisp
    Common Lisp
    Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...

  • John Graham-Cumming
    John Graham-Cumming
    John Graham-Cumming is a British programmer best known for having originated a successful petition to the British Government asking for an apology for its persecution of Alan Turing for his homosexuality....

     - author of POPFile
    POPFile
    POPFile is a free, open source, cross-platform mail filter originally written in Perl by John Graham-Cumming and maintained by a team of volunteers. It uses a naive Bayes classifier to filter mail. This allows the filter to "learn" and classify mail according to the user's preferences. Typically...

    , a Bayesian filter-based e-mail classifier
  • Ralph Griswold
    Ralph Griswold
    Ralph E. Griswold was a computer scientist known for his research into high-level programming languages and symbolic computation. His language credits include the string processing language SNOBOL, SL5, and Icon.He attended Stanford University, receiving a bachelor's degree in physics, then an...

     - co-creator of SNOBOL
    SNOBOL
    SNOBOL is a generic name for the computer programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4...

    , creator of Icon (programming language)
  • Richard Greenblatt
    Richard Greenblatt (programmer)
    Richard D. Greenblatt is an American computer programmer. Along with Bill Gosper, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of distinction in the Lisp and the MIT AI Lab communities.-Childhood:...

     - Lisp machine
    Lisp machine
    Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations...

    , Incompatible Timesharing System
    Incompatible Timesharing System
    ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System , was an early, revolutionary, and influential time-sharing operating system from MIT; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC.In addition to being technically influential ITS, the...

    , MacHack
    MacHack (chess)
    Mac Hack is a computer chess program written by Richard D. Greenblatt. Also known as Mac Hac and ', it was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

  • Scott Guthrie
    Scott Guthrie
    Scott Guthrie is a vice president in the Microsoft Developer Division. He runs the development teams that build ASP.NET, Common Language Runtime , Core .NET Base Class Library, Silverlight, Windows Forms, WPF, Internet Information Services 7.5, Commerce Server, .NET Compact Framework, Visual Web...

    , (a.k.a. ScottGu) - ASP.NET Creator
  • Andi Gutmans
    Andi Gutmans
    Andi Gutmans is an Israeli programmer with Swiss roots, PHP developer and co-founder of Zend Technologies. A graduate of the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Gutmans and fellow student Zeev Suraski created PHP 3 in 1997...

     - co-creator of PHP
    PHP
    PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

     programming language


H

  • Jim Hall
    Jim Hall (programmer)
    Jim Hall is a computer programmer and advocate of free software, best known for his work on FreeDOS. Hall began writing the free replacement for the MS-DOS operating system in 1994 when he was still a physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls...

     - started the FreeDOS
    FreeDOS
    FreeDOS is an operating system for IBM PC compatible computers. FreeDOS is made up of many different, separate programs that act as "packages" to the overall FreeDOS Project...

     project
  • David Heinemeier Hansson
    David Heinemeier Hansson
    David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki...

     - created the Ruby on Rails
    Ruby on Rails
    Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.-History:...

     framework for developing web applications.
  • David Albert Huffman - created the Huffman Code compression algorithm.
  • Rebecca Heineman
    Rebecca Heineman
    Rebecca Ann Heineman is an American video game programmer. A long-time veteran of the computer game industry , Heineman was a founding member of Interplay Productions, Logicware, Contraband Entertainment...

     - Author of Bard's Tale III
    Bard's Tale III
    The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate is a computer fantasy role-playing game created by Interplay Productions in 1988. It is the second sequel to The Bard's Tale. It was designed by "Burger" Bill Heineman , Bruce Schlickbernd, and Michael A. Stackpole...

    : Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars
    Dragon Wars
    Dragon Wars is a fantasy computer role-playing game developed by Interplay Entertainment in 1989, and distributed by Activision.-Story:The story from the back of the original box:-Development:...

    .
  • Anders Hejlsberg
    Anders Hejlsberg
    Anders Hejlsberg is a prominent Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools...

     - Turbo Pascal
    Turbo Pascal
    Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment for the Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS, developed by Borland under Philippe Kahn's leadership...

    , Borland Delphi
    Borland Delphi
    Embarcadero Delphi is an integrated development environment for console, desktop graphical, web, and mobile applications.Delphi's compilers use its own Object Pascal dialect of Pascal and generate native code for 32- and 64-bit Windows operating systems, as well as 32-bit Mac OS X and iOS...

    , C#
  • Ted Henter
    Ted Henter
    Ted Henter is an American computer programmer and businessman. He studied engineering, but learned computer programming and started his own business after becoming blind in a car accident in 1978, which put an end to a promising career as an international motorcycle racer.In 1987, he teamed up with...

     - founder of Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific
    Freedom Scientific
    Freedom Scientific is a corporation which researches, creates, and sells technology intended for people who are blind or have low vision and those with learning disabilities. The company's Blind and Low Vision Group's products include software and hardware to help people with low vision work with...

    ) creator of Jaws, screen reader
    Screen reader
    A screen reader is a software application that attempts to identify and interpret what is being displayed on the screen . This interpretation is then re-presented to the user with text-to-speech, sound icons, or a Braille output device...

     software for blind people
  • Andy Hertzfeld
    Andy Hertzfeld
    Andy Hertzfeld is a computer scientist who was a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer from August 1979 until March 1984, where he was a designer for the Macintosh system software...

     - co-creator of Macintosh, co-founder of General Magic
    General Magic
    General Magic was a company co-founded by Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat that developed a new kind of handheld communications device they called a "personal intelligent communicator", which was a PDA precursor that stressed communications....

    , co-founder of Eazel
    Eazel
    Eazel was a software company based in Mountain View, California from 1999 to 2001.The enterprise was staffed with former employees of Apple Computer, Netscape, Be Inc., Linuxcare, Microsoft, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, among others. Mike Boich was CEO; Bud Tribble was VP of Engineering; Andy...

  • Rich Hickey - creator of Clojure
    Clojure
    Clojure |closure]]") is a recent dialect of the Lisp programming language created by Rich Hickey. It is a general-purpose language supporting interactive development that encourages a functional programming style, and simplifies multithreaded programming....

     language
  • D. Richard Hipp
    D. Richard Hipp
    Dwayne Richard Hipp is the architect and primary author of SQLite as well as Fossil SCM. He and his wife, Ginger G. Wyrick, currently live and work in Charlotte, North Carolina. He also authored the Lemon Parser Generator and CVSTrac. CVSTrac became the inspiration for Trac. He is also a member of...

     - creator of SQLite
    SQLite
    SQLite is an ACID-compliant embedded relational database management system contained in a relatively small C programming library. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain and implements most of the SQL standard...

  • C. A. R. Hoare
    C. A. R. Hoare
    Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare , commonly known as Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist best known for the development of Quicksort, one of the world's most widely used sorting algorithms...

     - first implementation of quicksort, ALGOL 60
    ALGOL 60
    ALGOL 60 is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It gave rise to many other programming languages, including BCPL, B, Pascal, Simula, C, and many others. ALGOL 58 introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them...

     compiler, Communicating sequential processes
    Communicating sequential processes
    In computer science, Communicating Sequential Processes is a formal language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems. It is a member of the family of mathematical theories of concurrency known as process algebras, or process calculi...

  • James Holmes - Committer on Struts project, create of Struts Console
  • Grace Hopper
    Grace Hopper
    Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language...

     - Harvard Mark I
    Harvard Mark I
    The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator , called the Mark I by Harvard University, was an electro-mechanical computer....

     computer, FLOW-MATIC
    FLOW-MATIC
    FLOW-MATIC, originally known as B-0 , was the first English-like data processing language. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand under Grace Hopper.-Development:...

    , COBOL
    COBOL
    COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....

  • Dave Hyatt
    Dave Hyatt
    Dave Hyatt is an American software developer currently employed by Apple Inc. , where he is part of the development team responsible for the Safari web browser and WebKit framework. Hyatt was part of the original team that shipped the beta releases and 1.0 release of Safari...

     - co-author of Mozilla Firefox
    Mozilla Firefox
    Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...



I

  • Miguel de Icaza
    Miguel de Icaza
    Miguel de Icaza is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects.-Early years:Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México but never received a degree. He came from a family of scientists in which his...

     - GNOME
    GNOME
    GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

     project leader, initiator of Mono
    Mono (software)
    Mono, pronounced , is a free and open source project led by Xamarin to create an Ecma standard compliant .NET-compatible set of tools including, among others, a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime....

     project
  • Roberto Ierusalimschy
    Roberto Ierusalimschy
    Roberto Ierusalimschy is an associate professor of informatics at PUC-Rio . He is the leading architect of the Lua programming language and the author of Programming in Lua and Programming in Lua, Second Edition...

     - Lua leading architect
  • Dan Ingalls - co-creator of Smalltalk
    Smalltalk
    Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

     and Bitblt
  • Geir Ivarsøy
    Geir Ivarsøy
    Geir Ivarsøy was the lead programmer at Opera Software. He and Jon von Tetzchner were part of a research group at the Norwegian state phone company where they developed browsing software called MultiTorg Opera...

     - co-creator of Opera
    Opera (web browser)
    Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...

     web browser
  • Ken Iverson
    Kenneth E. Iverson
    Kenneth Eugene Iverson was a Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the APL programming language in 1962. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 for his contributions to mathematical notation and programming language theory...

     - APL, J
    J (programming language)
    The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Kenneth E. Iverson and Roger Hui, is a synthesis of APL and the FP and FL function-level languages created by John Backus....

  • Toru Iwatani - creator of Pac-Man
    Pac-Man
    is an arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980. Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is considered one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games,...



J

  • Bo Jangeborg
    Bo Jangeborg
    Bo Jangeborg is a Swedish computer programmer. He made several programs for the ZX Spectrum, the best known being the game Fairlight, its sequel Fairlight II and the graphic tool The Artist...

     - Sinclair ZX Spectrum games
  • Paul Jardetzky - author of server program for the first webcam
    Trojan room coffee pot
    The Trojan Room coffee pot was the inspiration for the world's first webcam. The coffee pot was located in the so-called Trojan Room within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge...

  • Lynne Jolitz
    Lynne Jolitz
    Lynne Greer Jolitz is a figure in free software and founded many startups in Silicon Valley with her husband William.Lynne Jolitz is probably most famous for her work in pioneering open source operating systems with 386BSD with her husband...

     - 386BSD
    386BSD
    386BSD, sometimes called "Jolix", was a free Unix-like operating system based on BSD, first released in 1992. It ran on PC compatible computer systems based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor...

  • William Jolitz
    William Jolitz
    William Frederick Jolitz , commonly known as Bill Jolitz, is best known for developing the 386BSD operating system from 1989 to 1994 along with his wife Lynne Jolitz.Jolitz received his BA in Computer Science from UC Berkeley....

     - 386BSD
    386BSD
    386BSD, sometimes called "Jolix", was a free Unix-like operating system based on BSD, first released in 1992. It ran on PC compatible computer systems based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor...

  • Rod Johnson - creator of Spring framework
  • Stephen C. Johnson
    Stephen C. Johnson
    Stephen Curtis Johnson spent nearly 20 years at Bell Labs and AT&T where he wrote yacc, lint, spell and the Portable C Compiler machine .Johnson earned his PhD in mathematics but has spent his entire career in computer science...

     - yacc
    Yacc
    The computer program yacc is a parser generator developed by Stephen C. Johnson at AT&T for the Unix operating system. The name is an acronym for "Yet Another Compiler Compiler." It generates a parser based on an analytic grammar written in a notation similar to BNF.Yacc used to be available as...

  • Bill Joy
    Bill Joy
    William Nelson Joy , commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003...

     - BSD
    Berkeley Software Distribution
    Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...

    , csh
    C shell
    The C shell is a Unix shell that was created by Bill Joy while a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been distributed widely, beginning with the 2BSD release of the BSD Unix system that Joy began distributing in 1978...

    , vi
    Vi
    vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.The original code for vi...

    , co-founder of Sun Microsystems
    Sun Microsystems
    Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

  • Robert K. Jung - creator of ARJ
    ARJ
    ARJ is a software tool designed by Robert K. Jung for creating high-efficiency compressed file archives. ARJ is currently on version 2.85 for DOS and 3.15 for Windows and supports 16-bit and 32-bit Intel architectures.ARJ was one of two mainstream archivers for DOS and Windows during early and...



K

  • Poul-Henning Kamp
    Poul-Henning Kamp
    Poul-Henning Kamp is a Danish FreeBSD developer, responsible for implementation of the widely used MD5 password hash algorithm, a vast quantity of systems code, including the FreeBSD GEOM storage layer, GBDE cryptographic storage transform, part of the UFS2 file system implementation, FreeBSD...

     - MD5
    MD5
    The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm is a widely used cryptographic hash function that produces a 128-bit hash value. Specified in RFC 1321, MD5 has been employed in a wide variety of security applications, and is also commonly used to check data integrity...

     password hash algorithm, FreeBSD GEOM
    GEOM
    GEOM is the main storage framework for the FreeBSD operating system. It is available in FreeBSD 5.0 and higher and provides a standardized way to access storage layers. GEOM is modular and allows for geom modules to connect to the framework. For example, the geom_mirror module will provide RAID1 or...

     and GBDE
    GBDE
    GBDE, standing for GEOM Based Disk Encryption, is a block device-layer disk encryption system written for FreeBSD, initially introduced in version 5.0. It is based on the GEOM disk framework. GBDE was designed and implemented by Poul-Henning Kamp and Network Associates Inc...

    , part of the UFS2, FreeBSD Jail
    FreeBSD Jail
    The FreeBSD jail mechanism is an implementation of operating system-level virtualization that allows administrators to partition a FreeBSD-based computer system into several independent mini-systems called jails....

    s, malloc
    Malloc
    C dynamic memory allocation refers to performing dynamic memory allocation in the C via a group of functions in the C standard library, namely malloc, realloc, calloc and free....

     and the Beerware
    Beerware
    Beerware is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek term for software released under a very relaxed license. It provides the end user with the right to use a particular program .-Description:...

     license
  • Mitch Kapor
    Mitch Kapor
    Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...

     - Lotus 1-2-3
    Lotus 1-2-3
    Lotus 1-2-3 is a spreadsheet program from Lotus Software . It was the IBM PC's first "killer application"; its huge popularity in the mid-1980s contributed significantly to the success of the IBM PC in the corporate environment.-Beginnings:...

    , founded Lotus Development Corporation
  • Phil Katz
    Phil Katz
    Phillip Walter Katz was a computer programmer best known as the co-creator of the zip file format for data compression, and the author of PKZIP, a program for creating zip files which ran under DOS.- Career :...

     - creator of ZIP file format, author of PKZIP
    PKZIP
    PKZIP is an archiving tool originally written by Phil Katz and marketed by his company PKWARE, Inc. The common "PK" prefix used in both PKZIP and PKWARE stands for "Phil Katz".-History:...

  • Alan Kay
    Alan Kay
    Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...

     - Smalltalk
    Smalltalk
    Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

    , Dynabook
    Dynabook
    The Dynabook concept, created by Alan Kay in 1968, described what is now known as a laptop computer or a tablet or slate computer with nearly eternal battery life and software aimed at giving children access to digital media...

    , Object-oriented programming
    Object-oriented programming
    Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...

    , Squeak
    Squeak
    The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation. It is object-oriented, class-based and reflective.It was derived directly from Smalltalk-80 by a group at Apple Computer that included some of the original Smalltalk-80 developers...

  • Mel Kaye
    Mel Kaye
    The Story of Mel is an archetypical piece of computer programming folklore. Its subject, Mel Kaye, is the canonical Real Programmer.- Story :Ed Nather’s The Story of Mel details the extraordinary programming prowess of a former collegue of his, "Mel", at Royal McBee Computer Corporation...

     - a real programmer
    Real programmer
    The term Real Programmer is computer programmers' folklore to describe the archetypical "hardcore" programmer who eschews the modern languages and tools of the day in favour of more direct and efficient solutions – closer to the hardware...

  • John Kemeny
    John George Kemeny
    John George Kemeny was a Hungarian American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for co-developing the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas E. Kurtz. Kemeny served as the 13th President of Dartmouth College from 1970 to 1981 and pioneered the use of computers in...

     - co-creator of BASIC
    BASIC
    BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....

  • Stan Kelly-Bootle
    Stan Kelly-Bootle
    Stan Kelly-Bootle is an author of nine books and numerous magazine articles, and songwriter. His most famous song is the Liverpool Lullaby , which Cilla Black recorded in 1969 as the B-side to her pop hit Conversations...

     - Manchester Mark 1
    Manchester Mark 1
    The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester from the Small-Scale Experimental Machine or "Baby" . It was also called the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, or MADM...

    , The Devil's DP Dictionary
  • Brian Kernighan
    Brian Kernighan
    Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The 'K' of K&R C and the 'K' in AWK both stand for...

     - co-creator of AWK (the K in the name stands for Kernighan), author of ditroff text-formatting tool
  • Gary Kildall
    Gary Kildall
    Gary Arlen Kildall was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur who created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc....

     - CP/M
    CP/M
    CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...

  • Tom Knight - Incompatible Timesharing System
    Incompatible Timesharing System
    ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System , was an early, revolutionary, and influential time-sharing operating system from MIT; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC.In addition to being technically influential ITS, the...

  • Jim Knopf - aka Jim Button, author PC-File
    PC-File
    PC-File was a flat file database computer application most often run on DOS. It was one of the first of three widely popular software products sold via the marketing method that became known as shareware...

     flatfile database; considered a co-creator of shareware
    Shareware
    The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...

  • Donald E. Knuth - TeX
    TeX
    TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....

    , CWEB
    CWEB
    CWEB is a computer programming system created by Donald Knuth and Silvio Levy as a follow up to Knuth's WEB literate programming system, using the C programming language instead of Pascal....

    , Metafont
    METAFONT
    Metafont is a programming language used to define vector fonts. It is also the name of the interpreter that executes Metafont code, generating the bitmap fonts that can be embedded into e.g. PostScript...

    , The Art of Computer Programming
    The Art of Computer Programming
    The Art of Computer Programming is a comprehensive monograph written by Donald Knuth that covers many kinds of programming algorithms and their analysis....

    , Concrete Mathematics
    Concrete Mathematics
    Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science, by Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, and Oren Patashnik, is a mathematical textbook that is widely used in computer-science departments. It provides mathematical knowledge and skills for computer science, especially for the analysis of algorithms...



L

  • Andre LaMothe
    Andre LaMothe
    André LaMothe is a computer scientist, author and embedded systems developer. He was responsible for the development of hardware and software for artificial intelligence research and worked specifically on the sparse distributed memory project at NASA's Research Institute for Advanced Computer...

    - LaMothe is the creator of the XGameStation,one of the world's first video game console development kits
  • Tom Lane
    Tom Lane (Open Source Software Developer)
    Tom Lane is a computer scientist dedicated to Open source software. In a 2000 study, he was cited as one of the leading contributors to Open Source software.Tom Lane's contributions to Open source include:* Organizer of the Independent JPEG Group...

     - primary author of libjpeg
    Libjpeg
    libjpeg is a library written entirely in C which contains a widely-used implementation of a JPEG decoder, JPEG encoder and other JPEG utilities...

    , major developer of PostgreSQL
    PostgreSQL
    PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...

  • Leslie Lamport
    Leslie Lamport
    Leslie Lamport is an American computer scientist. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University, respectively in 1963 and 1972...

     - LaTeX
    LaTeX
    LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...

  • Butler Lampson
    Butler Lampson
    Butler W. Lampson is a renowned computer scientist.After graduating from the Lawrenceville School , Lampson received his Bachelor's degree in Physics from Harvard University in 1964, and his Ph.D...

     - QED
    QED (text editor)
    QED is a line-oriented computer text editor that was developed by Butler Lampson and L. Peter Deutsch for the Berkeley Timesharing System running on the SDS 940. It was implemented by L...

     original co-author
  • Sam Lantinga
    Sam Lantinga
    Sam Oscar Lantinga was the lead software engineer at Blizzard Entertainment, where he is known to the community as Slouken. He may be most famous as the creator of the Simple DirectMedia Layer, a very popular open source multimedia programming library, and also developed the compatibility database...

     - creator of SDL
    Simple DirectMedia Layer
    Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform, free and open source multimedia library written in C that presents a simple interface to various platforms' graphics, sound, and input devices....

  • Dick Lathwell
    Richard H. Lathwell
    Richard H. Lathwell was the 1973 recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery....

     - co-developer of APL\360
  • Chris Lattner
    Chris Lattner
    Chris Lattner is an American software developer, best known as the primary author of the Low Level Virtual Machine project and related projects, such as the clang compiler. He is currently the chief architect of the Compiler Group at Apple Inc.- Background :...

     - primary author of Low Level Virtual Machine
    Low Level Virtual Machine
    The Low Level Virtual Machine is a compiler infrastructure written in C++ that is designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and "idle-time" optimization of programs written in arbitrary programming languages...

     project
  • Samuel J Leffler
    Samuel J Leffler
    Samuel J Leffler is a computer scientist, known forhis extensive work on BSD, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in thepresent day. Among other projects, he created FlexFAX,libtiff, and theFreeBSD WirelessDevice Drivers....

     - BSD
    Berkeley Software Distribution
    Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...

    , FlexFAX
    HylaFAX
    HylaFAX is the leading fax server for Unix-like computer systems. It uses a client-server design and supports the sending and receiving of faxes as well as text pages, on any scale from low to very high volumes, if necessary making use of large numbers of modems...

    , libtiff
    Libtiff
    Libtiff is a library for reading and writing Tagged Image File Format files. The set also contains command line tools for processing TIFFs. It is distributed in source code and can be found as binary builds for all kinds of platforms...

    , FreeBSD Wireless Device Drivers
  • Rasmus Lerdorf
    Rasmus Lerdorf
    Rasmus Lerdorf is a Danish programmer with Canadian citizenship and is most notable as the creator of the PHP scripting language. He authored the first two versions...

     - original creator of PHP
    PHP
    PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

  • Michael Lesk - Lex
    Lex programming tool
    Lex is a computer program that generates lexical analyzers . Lex is commonly used with the yacc parser generator. Lex, originally written by Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt, is the standard lexical analyzer generator on many Unix systems, and a tool exhibiting its behavior is specified as part of the...

  • Gordon Letwin
    Gordon Letwin
    James Gordon Letwin is an American software developer and one of the original twelve Microsoft employees.Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked for Heathkit, on HDOS and Benton Harbor Basic....

     - Architect of OS/2
    OS/2
    OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal...

    , author of HPFS file system
  • Rockford Lhotka
    Rockford Lhotka
    Rockford Lhotka is an author and columnist who writes on topics concerning Microsoft-centric programming with an emphasis on object oriented design strategies. He is a Microsoft Regional Director, a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, and an INETA speaker. He also writes for MSDN Online...

     - Creator of the CSLA
    Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture
    Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture is a software framework created by Rockford Lhotka that provides a standard way to create robust object oriented programs using business objects. Business objects are objects that abstract business entities in an object oriented program...

     framework
  • Håkon Wium Lie
    Håkon Wium Lie
    Håkon Wium Lie is a web pioneer, a standards activist, and, , the Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software.He is best known for proposing the concept of Cascading Style Sheets while working with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN in 1994. As an employee at W3C, he developed CSS into a...

     - co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
    Cascading Style Sheets
    Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...

  • Robert Love
    Robert Love
    Robert M. Love is an American author, speaker, Google engineer, and open source software developer.Love is best known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, with notable work including the preemptive kernel, process scheduler, kernel event layer, virtual memory subsystem, and inotify...

     - Linux kernel
    Linux kernel
    The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....

     developer
  • Ada Lovelace
    Ada Lovelace
    Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace , born Augusta Ada Byron, was an English writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine...

     - First programmer (of Charles Babbage
    Charles Babbage
    Charles Babbage, FRS was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer...

    s' Analytical Engine
    Analytical engine
    The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, a design for a mechanical calculator...

    )
  • Al Lowe
    Al Lowe
    Al Lowe is an American musician and game designer/programmer who developed several adventure games, mostly for Sierra On-Line. He is best known for his creation of Leisure Suit Larry and the long-running series it spawned....

     - creator of Leisure Suit Larry
    Leisure Suit Larry
    Leisure Suit Larry is a series of adventure games written by Al Lowe and published by Sierra from 1987 to 2009. The main character, whose full name is Larry Laffer, is a balding, dorky, double entendre-speaking, leisure suit-wearing "loser" in his 40s...

     series


M

  • Raphael Manfredi
    Raphael Manfredi
    Raphaël Manfredi has been the author of many open-source programs since 1990.He is currently the main software architect of gtk-gnutella but has also made numerous contributions to Perl.- External links :*- References :...

     - contributions to Perl
    Perl
    Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

    , software architect and maintainer of gtk-gnutella
    Gtk-gnutella
    gtk-gnutella is a peer-to-peer file sharing application which runs on the gnutella network. gtk-gnutella uses the GTK+ toolkit for its graphical user interface. Released under the GNU General Public License, gtk-gnutella is free software.- History :...

  • Khaled Mardam-Bey
    Khaled Mardam-Bey
    Khaled Mardam-Bey is a British programmer of Palestinian and Syrian origin. He is notable for creating and developing the popular Internet Relay Chat client for Microsoft Windows mIRC.-mIRC:...

     - Creator of mIRC (Internet Relay Chat Client)
  • Yukihiro Matsumoto
    Yukihiro Matsumoto
    is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter ....

     - Ruby
    Ruby (programming language)
    Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

  • John McCarthy
    John McCarthy (computer scientist)
    John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" , invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems...

     - Lisp
  • Craig McClanahan
    Craig McClanahan
    Craig R. McClanahan is a programmer and original author of the Apache Struts framework for building web applications. He was part of the expert group that defined the servlet 2.2, 2.3 and JSP 1.1, 1.2 specifications. He is also the architect of Tomcat's servlet container Catalina.-External links:*...

     - original author of Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container
  • Daniel D. McCracken
    Daniel D. McCracken
    Daniel D. McCracken was a computer scientist in the United States. He was a Professor of Computer Sciences at the City College of New York, and the author of over two dozen textbooks on computer programming. His A Guide to Fortran Programming and its successors were the standard textbooks on...

     - professor at City College
    City College of New York
    The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...

     and author of Guide to Algol
    ALGOL
    ALGOL is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages and became the de facto way algorithms were described in textbooks and academic works for almost the next 30 years...

     Programming
    , Guide to Cobol
    COBOL
    COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....

     Programming
    , Guide to Fortran
    Fortran
    Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

     Programming
    (1957)
  • Douglas McIlroy
    Douglas McIlroy
    Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2007 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. Dr...

     - pipes and filters, concept of software componentry, Unix
    Unix
    Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

     tools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.)
  • Shawn McKenzie
    Shawn McKenzie
    Richard Shawn McKenzie is an Open Source Software programmer living in Katy, Texas in the Houston, Texas metropolitan area....

     - AutoTheme
  • Marshall Kirk McKusick
    Marshall Kirk McKusick
    Marshall Kirk McKusick is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2004, and still serves on the board. He is also on the editorial board of...

     - BSD
    Berkeley Software Distribution
    Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...

    , work on FFS
    Unix File System
    The Unix file system is a file system used by many Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is also called the Berkeley Fast File System, the BSD Fast File System or FFS...

    , implementor of soft updates
    Soft updates
    In computer file systems, soft updates is an approach to maintaining disk integrity after a crash or power outage. They are an alternative to journaling file systems....

  • Markus Persson
    Markus Persson
    Markus Alexej Persson is a Swedish indie game developer and founder of Mojang AB. He is best known for creating the sandbox building game Minecraft.- Biography :...

     - Creator of Minecraft
  • Bertrand Meyer
    Bertrand Meyer
    Bertrand Meyer is an academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He created the Eiffel programming language.-Education and academic career:...

     - Eiffel
    Eiffel (programming language)
    Eiffel is an ISO-standardized, object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer and Eiffel Software. The design of the language is closely connected with the Eiffel programming method...

    , Object-oriented Software Construction
    Object oriented design
    Object-oriented design is the process of planning a system of interacting objects for the purpose of solving a software problem. It is one approach to software design.-Overview:...

    , Design by contract
    Design by contract
    Design by contract , also known as programming by contract and design-by-contract programming, is an approach to designing computer software...

  • Bob Miner
    Bob Miner
    Robert Nimrod "Bob" Miner was a co-founder of Oracle Corporation and architect of Oracle's relational database management system....

     - co-creator of Oracle database
    Oracle database
    The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....

    , co-founder of Oracle Corporation
    Oracle Corporation
    Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...

  • Jeff Minter
    Jeff Minter
    Jeff 'Yak' Minter is a British computer/video game designer and programmer. He is the founder of software house Llamasoft and his recent works include Neon , a non-game music visualization program that has been built into the Xbox 360 console, and the video games Space Giraffe , and Space Invaders...

     - Psychedelic, and often llama
    Llama
    The llama is a South American camelid, widely used as a meat and pack animal by Andean cultures since pre-Hispanic times....

    -related video game
  • Lou Montulli
    Lou Montulli
    Louis J. Montulli II is a programmer who is well known for his work in producing web browsers. In 1991 and 1992 he co-authored a text web browser called Lynx with Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac while he was at the University of Kansas...

     - creator of Lynx browser, cookies
    HTTP cookie
    A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user's browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site...

    , the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, HTTP over SSL, browser integration with animated GIFs, founding member of HTML working group at W3C
  • Bram Moolenaar
    Bram Moolenaar
    Bram Moolenaar is an active member of the open source software community. He is the author of Vim, a text editor that is very popular among programmers and power users....

     - author of text-editor Vim
    Vim (text editor)
    Vim is a text editor written by Bram Moolenaar and first released publicly in 1991. Based on the vi editor common to Unix-like systems, Vim is designed for use both from a command line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface...

  • David Moon
    David Moon
    David A. Moon is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on the Lisp programming language and being one of the founders of Symbolics.-Projects:* CLOS* MIT* Symbolics, where he developed generational garbage collection algorithms...

     - Maclisp
    Maclisp
    MACLISP is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. It originated at MIT's Project MAC in the late 1960s and was based on Lisp 1.5. Richard Greenblatt was the main developer of the original codebase for the PDP-6; Jonl White was responsible for its later maintenance and development...

    , ZetaLisp
  • Charles H. Moore
    Charles H. Moore
    Charles H. Moore is the inventor of the Forth programming language.- Biography :In 1968, while employed at the United States National Radio Astronomy Observatory , Moore invented the initial version of the Forth language to help control radio telescopes...

     - creator of Forth language
  • Roger Moore
    Roger Moore (computer scientist)
    Roger D. Moore was the 1973 recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery...

     - co-developer of APL\360, creator of IPSANET
    IPSANET
    IPSANET was a packet switching network written by I. P. Sharp Associates . Operation began in May 1976. It initially used IBM 3705s and Computer Automation LSI-2 computers as nodes. An Intel 80286 based-node was added in 1987. It was called the Beta node.The original purpose was to connect...

    , co-founder of I.P. Sharp Associates
    I. P. Sharp Associates
    I. P. Sharp Associates, IPSA for short, was a major Canadian computer time sharing, consulting and services firm of the 1970s and 80s. IPSA is particularly well known for its work on the APL programming language, an early packet switching computer network known as IPSANET, and a powerful...

  • Mike Muuss
    Mike Muuss
    Michael John Muuss was the author of the freeware network tool Ping.A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Muuss was a senior scientist specializing in geometric solid modeling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures and digital computer networks at the United States Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen...

     - author of ping
    Ping
    Ping is a computer network administration utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol network and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer...

    , network tool to detect hosts


N

  • Patrick Naughton
    Patrick Naughton
    Patrick Naughton is an American software developer, best known as being one of the original creators of the Java programming language.-Working for Sun:...

     - early Java
    Java (Sun)
    Java refers to several computer software products and specifications from Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, that together provide a system for developing application software and deploying it in a cross-platform environment...

     designer, xlock, HotJava
    HotJava
    HotJava was a modular, extensible web browser from Sun Microsystems implemented in Java. It was the first browser to support Java applets, and was Sun's demonstration platform for the then new technology. It has since been discontinued and is now no longer supported...

  • Peter Naur
    Peter Naur
    Peter Naur is a Danish pioneer in computer science and Turing award winner. His last name is the N in the BNF notation , used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages...

     - Backus-Naur form, ALGOL 60
    ALGOL 60
    ALGOL 60 is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It gave rise to many other programming languages, including BCPL, B, Pascal, Simula, C, and many others. ALGOL 58 introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them...

  • Graham Nelson
    Graham Nelson
    Graham A. Nelson is a British mathematician and poet and the creator of the Inform design system for creating interactive fiction games. He has also authored several IF games, including the acclaimed Curses and Jigsaw , using the experience of writing Curses in particular to expand the range of...

     - creator of Inform
    Inform
    Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7 , a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.- Z-Machine and...

     authoring system for Interactive fiction
    Interactive fiction
    Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...

  • Peter Norton
    Peter Norton
    Peter Norton is an American programmer, software publisher, author, and philanthropist. He is best known for the computer programs and books that bear his name. Norton sold his PC-Software business to Symantec Corporation in 1990....

     - programmer of famous file manager program, Norton Commander
    Norton Commander
    Norton Commander was a prototypical orthodox file manager , written by John Socha and released by Peter Norton Computing . NC is a file manager which provides a text user interface on top of DOS. It was officially produced by Symantec between 1986 and 1998...

  • Kristen Nygaard
    Kristen Nygaard
    Kristen Nygaard was a Norwegian computer scientist, programming language pioneer and politician. He was born in Oslo and died of a heart attack in 2002.-Object-oriented programming:...

     - SIMULA
    Simula
    Simula is a name for two programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard...



O

  • Ed Oates
    Ed Oates
    Edward A. "Ed" Oates co-founded Software Development Labs in August 1977 with Larry Ellison, and Bob Miner. Software Development Labs later became Oracle Corporation....

     - co-creator of Oracle database
    Oracle database
    The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....

    , co-founder of Oracle Corporation
    Oracle Corporation
    Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...

  • Steve O'Donnell
    Steve O'Donnell
    Steve O'Donnell may refer to:*Steve O'Donnell , Democratic nominee for U.S. Representative *Steven O'Donnell , Australian television presenter...

     - founder of GOAL Systems, lead developer of WDU
    WDU (software)
    WDU is a copy/backup/restore program for IBM's DOS, DOS/VS, and DOS/VSE environments.- The product :Westinghouse Disk Utility, popularly called WDU, has been a dominant force within the commercial dump/restore market for more than three decades...

    , Westi
    Westi (software)
    Westi was one of two early local teleprocessing packages for IBM's DOS/VSE environment. Westi stood for Westinghouse Terminal Interactive.- The product :...

    , creater of independent DOS
    DOS
    DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

     utilities, developer of Prompt
  • Martin Odersky
    Martin Odersky
    Martin Odersky is a German computer scientist and professor of programming methods at the EPFL. He specialises in code analysis and programming languages.In 1989 Odersky received his Ph.D...

     - Scala
  • Jarkko Oikarinen
    Jarkko Oikarinen
    Jarkko Oikarinen is the inventor of the first Internet chat network, called Internet Relay Chat , where he is known as WiZ. While working at the University of Oulu in August 1988, he wrote the first IRC server and client programs, which he produced to replace the MUT program on the Finnish BBS...

     - creator of Internet Relay Chat
    Internet Relay Chat
    Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...

     (IRC)
  • Andrew and Philip Oliver
    Oliver Twins
    The Oliver Twins are two British brothers, Philip and Andrew Oliver, who started to professionally develop computer games while they were still at school. Their first game, Super Robin Hood for the Amstrad CPC, was published in 1985 by Codemasters...

    , The Oliver Twins
    Oliver Twins
    The Oliver Twins are two British brothers, Philip and Andrew Oliver, who started to professionally develop computer games while they were still at school. Their first game, Super Robin Hood for the Amstrad CPC, was published in 1985 by Codemasters...

     - Many Sinclair ZX Spectrum games including Dizzy
    Dizzy
    Dizzy may refer to:* Dizziness, the state of being off balance-Nickname:* Dizzy Gillespie, American jazz trumpet player and composer* Johnny Moore , American rhythm and blues singer* Dizzy Reed, Guns N' Roses keyboardist...

  • John Ousterhout
    John Ousterhout
    John Kenneth Ousterhout is the chairman of Electric Cloud, Inc. and a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He founded Electric Cloud with John Graham-Cumming. Ousterhout previously was a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley where he created the Tcl...

     - creator of Tcl
    Tcl
    Tcl is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout. Originally "born out of frustration", according to the author, with programmers devising their own languages intended to be embedded into applications, Tcl gained acceptance on its own...

    /Tk
  • Onel de Guzman - A Filipino Programmer who created the ILOVEYOU virus on May 4, 2000.


P

  • Larry Page
    Larry Page
    Lawrence "Larry" Page is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin, is best known as the co-founder of Google. As of April 4, 2011, he is also the chief executive of Google, as announced on January 20, 2011...

     - Co-founder of Google,Inc
  • Alexey Pajitnov - creator of game Tetris
    Tetris
    Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...

     on Electronica 60
  • Seymour Papert
    Seymour Papert
    Seymour Papert is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language....

     - Logo (programming language)
    Logo (programming language)
    Logo is a multi-paradigm computer programming language used in education. It is an adaptation and dialect of the Lisp language; some have called it Lisp without the parentheses. It was originally conceived and written as functional programming language, and drove a mechanical turtle as an output...

  • Tim Paterson
    Tim Paterson
    Tim Paterson is an American computer programmer, best known as the original author of MS-DOS, the most widely used personal computer operating system in the 1980s....

     - author of 86-DOS (QDOS)
  • Jeffrey Peterson
    Jeffrey Peterson
    Jeffrey Peterson is an American technology entrepreneur and Arizona millionaire who is considered the pioneer of Hispanic Internet in the United States...

     - key free and open source software
    Free and open source software
    Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...

     architect, creator of Quepasa
    Quepasa
    Quepasa Corporation is a US-based social media technology company catering to Latin Audiences worldwide. Quepasa owns and operates Quepasa.com, a social network, Quepasa Games , a social game development studio, and Quepasa Contests, a social media advertising solution -About:Headquartered in West...

  • Charles Petzold
    Charles Petzold
    Charles Petzold is an American programmer and technical author on Microsoft Windows applications. He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional....

     - author of many Microsoft Windows
    Microsoft Windows
    Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

     programming books
  • Rob Pike - Wrote first bitmapped window system for Unix, co-creator of UTF-8
    UTF-8
    UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...

     character encoding, author of text editor sam and programming environment acme, main author of Plan 9
    Plan 9 from Bell Labs
    Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...

     and Inferno
    Inferno (operating system)
    Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs, but is now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software. Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly...

     operating systems
  • Kent Pitman
    Kent Pitman
    Kent M. Pitman is the President of and has been involved for many years in the design, implementation and use of Lisp and Scheme systems. He is often better known by his initials KMP.Kent Pitman is the author of the Common Lisp Condition System...

     - technical contributor to the ANSI Common Lisp
    Common Lisp
    Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...

     standard


R

  • Theo de Raadt
    Theo de Raadt
    Theo de Raadt , born May 19, 1968 in Pretoria, South Africa, is a software engineer who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects, and was a founding member of the NetBSD project.- Childhood :...

     - Founding member of NetBSD
    NetBSD
    NetBSD is a freely available open source version of the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix operating system. It was the second open source BSD descendant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. The NetBSD project is primarily focused on high quality design,...

    , founder of OpenBSD
    OpenBSD
    OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995...

     and OpenSSH
    OpenSSH
    OpenSSH is a set of computer programs providing encrypted communication sessions over a computer network using the SSH protocol...

  • Jef Raskin
    Jef Raskin
    Jef Raskin was an American human-computer interface expert best known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple in the late 1970s.-Early years and education:...

     - started the Macintosh project in Apple Computer
    Apple Computer
    Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

    , designed Canon Cat
    Canon Cat
    The Canon Cat was a task-dedicated, desktop computer released by Canon Inc. in 1987 at a price of $1495 USD. On the surface it was not unlike the dedicated word processors popular in the late 1970s to early 1980s, but it was far more powerful and incorporated many unique ideas for data...

     computer, developed The Humane Environment program
  • Eric Raymond
    Eric S. Raymond
    Eric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is an American computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. After the 1997 publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond was for a number of years frequently quoted as an unofficial spokesman for the open source movement...

     - Open Source movement
    Open source movement
    The open source movement is a broad-reaching movement of individuals who feel that software should be produced altruistically. Open source software is made available for anybody to use or modify, as its source code is made available. The software use is subject only to the stipulation that any...

    , author of fetchmail
    Fetchmail
    Fetchmail is an open source software utility for POSIX-compliant operating systems which is used to retrieve e-mail from a remote POP3, IMAP, ETRN or ODMR mail server to the user's local system. It was developed from the popclient program, written by Carl Harris.Its chief significance is perhaps...

  • Hans Reiser
    Hans Reiser
    Hans Thomas Reiser is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. He is the creator and primary developer of the ReiserFS computer file system, which is contained within the Linux kernel, as well as its attempted successor, Reiser4. In 2004 he founded Namesys, a...

     - Creator of ReiserFS
    ReiserFS
    ReiserFS is a general-purpose, journaled computer file system designed and implemented by a team at Namesys led by Hans Reiser. ReiserFS is currently supported on Linux . Introduced in version 2.4.1 of the Linux kernel, it was the first journaling file system to be included in the standard kernel...

     file system
  • John Resig
    John Resig
    John Resig is an application developer at Khan Academy. He was a JavaScript tool developer for the Mozilla Corporation. He is also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library. This library's goal is to simplify the process of writing cross-browser JavaScript code...

     - Creator and lead developer of jQuery
    JQuery
    jQuery is a cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. It was released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig...

     JavaScript library
  • Craig Reynolds
    Craig Reynolds (computer graphics)
    Craig W. Reynolds , is an artificial life and computer graphics expert, who created the Boids artificial life simulation in 1986. Reynolds worked on the film Tron as a scene programmer, and on Batman Returns as part of the video image crew. He is the author of the OpenSteer library.-External...

     - Creator of boids
    Boids
    Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference...

     computer graphics simulation
  • Dennis Ritchie
    Dennis Ritchie
    Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie , was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system...

     - C
    C (programming language)
    C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

    , Unix
    Unix
    Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

    , Plan 9 from Bell Labs
    Plan 9 from Bell Labs
    Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...

    , Inferno
    Inferno (operating system)
    Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs, but is now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software. Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly...

  • Ron Rivest
    Ron Rivest
    Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer. He is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...

     - co-creator of RSA algorithm (the R in the name stands for Rivest)
  • John Romero
    John Romero
    Alfonso John Romero is a game designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry. He is best known as a co-founder of id Software and was a designer for many of their games, including Wolfenstein 3D, Dangerous Dave, Doom and Quake...

     - first person shooters Doom, Quake
  • Blake Ross
    Blake Ross
    Blake Aaron Ross is an American software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla web browser; in particular, he started the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt, as well as the Spread Firefox project with Asa Dotzler while working as a contractor at the Mozilla Foundation...

     - co-author of Mozilla Firefox
    Mozilla Firefox
    Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

  • Guido van Rossum
    Guido van Rossum
    Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator For Life" , meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary...

     - Python
    Python (programming language)
    Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

  • Jeff Rulifson
    Jeff Rulifson
    Johns Frederick Rulifson is an American computer scientist.-Biography:Johns Frederick Rulifson was born August 20, 1941 in Bellefontaine, Ohio. His father was Erwin Charles Rulifson and mother was Virginia Helen Johns...

     - Lead programmer on the NLS
    NLS (computer system)
    NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s...

     project
  • Rusty Russell
    Rusty Russell
    Paul "Rusty" Russell is an Australian free software programmer and advocate.- Software development :Russell wrote the packet filtering systems ipchains and netfilter/iptables in the Linux operating system kernel...

     - Creator of iptables
    Iptables
    iptables is a user space application program that allows a system administrator to configure the tables provided by the Linux kernel firewall and the chains and rules it stores...

     for linux
    Linux
    Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

  • Steve Russell
    Steve Russell
    Steve "Slug" Russell is a programmer and computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, one of the earliest videogames, in 1961 with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT working on a DEC Digital PDP-1...

     - First Lisp interpreter; original Spacewar! graphic computer game.


S

  • Bob Sabiston
    Bob Sabiston
    Bob Sabiston is an American film art director, computer programmer, and creator of the Rotoshop software program for computer animation. Sabiston began developing software as a graduate researcher in the MIT Media Lab from 1986 to 1991...

     - Rotoshop
    Rotoshop
    Rotoshop is a proprietary graphics editing program created by Bob Sabiston.Rotoshop uses an animation technique called interpolated rotoscoping, which has been used in Richard Linklater's films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, as well as the Talk to Chuck advertising campaign for Charles Schwab....

    , interpolating rotoscope
    Rotoscope
    Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator...

     animation software
  • Muni Sakya
    Muni Sakya
    Muni Sakya is a Nepalese computer programmer credited with helping to usher in Information Technology in Nepal. He's also known for designing computer systems that can be operated in the Nepali language.-Information Technology in Nepal, Muni Sakya:...

     - Nepalese software
  • Carl Sassenrath
    Carl Sassenrath
    Carl Sassenrath is an architect of operating systems and computer languages. He brought multitasking to personal computers in 1985 with the creation of the Amiga Computer operating system kernel, and he is currently the designer of the REBOL computer language as well as the CTO of REBOL...

     - Amiga
    Amiga
    The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

    , REBOL
    REBOL
    REBOL is a cross-platform data exchange language and a multi-paradigm dynamic programming language originally designed by Carl Sassenrath for network communications and distributed computing. The language and its official implementation, which is a proprietary freely redistributable software are...

  • Chris Sawyer
    Chris Sawyer
    Chris Sawyer is a Scottish computer game developer who is best known for designing and programming Transport Tycoon and the RollerCoaster Tycoon series.-Career:...

     - Developer of Roller Coaster Tycoon and the Transport Tycoon
    Transport Tycoon
    Transport Tycoon and Transport Tycoon Deluxe are computer games developed by Chris Sawyer and published by MicroProse in 1994 , and 1995...

     series
  • Bill Schelter
    Bill Schelter
    William Frederick Schelter was a professor of mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin and a Lisp developer and programmer. Schelter is credited with the development of the GNU Common Lisp implementation of Common Lisp and the GPL'd version of the computer algebra system Macsyma called...

     - GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
    GNU Common Lisp
    GNU Common Lisp is the GNU Project's Common Lisp compiler, an evolutionary development of Kyoto Common Lisp. It produces native object code by first generating C code and then calling a C compiler....

  • Randal L. Schwartz
    Randal L. Schwartz
    Randal L. Schwartz , also known as merlyn, is an American author, system administrator and programming consultant.-Career:...

     - Just another Perl hacker
    Just another Perl hacker
    Just another Perl hacker, or JAPH, typically refers to a Perl program which prints "Just another Perl hacker," . Short JAPH programs are often used as signatures in online forums, or as T-shirt designs...

  • Adi Shamir
    Adi Shamir
    Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer. He is a co-inventor of the RSA algorithm , a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme , one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer...

     - co-creator of RSA algorithm (the S in the name stands for Shamir)
  • Mike Shaver
    Mike Shaver
    Mike Shaver is currently the Engineering Director at Facebook. He is known for his work on several other open source projects as well...

     - Founding member of Mozilla Organization
  • Cliff Shaw
    Cliff Shaw
    J.C. Shaw was a systems programmer at the RAND Corporation. He is a coauthor of the first artificial intelligence program, the Logic Theorist, and was one of the developers of Information Processing Language, a programming language of the 1950s. It is considered the true "father" of the JOSS...

     - IPL
    Information Processing Language
    Information Processing Language is a programming language developed by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon at RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Institute of Technology from about 1956...

    , the first AI language
  • Zed Shaw
    Zed Shaw
    Zed A. Shaw is a writer, software developer, and musician, most commonly known for creating the Mongrel web server for Ruby web applications, as well as his unconventional and sometimes controversial articles on technology, business, and technical communities...

     - Wrote the Mongrel Web Server, for Ruby web applications.
  • Emily Short
    Emily Short
    Emily Short is the pseudonym of an interactive fiction writer, perhaps best known for her debut game Galatea and her use of psychologically complex NPCs, or non-player game characters...

     - prolific writer of Interactive fiction
    Interactive fiction
    Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...

     and co-developer of Inform
    Inform
    Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7 , a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.- Z-Machine and...

     version 7
  • Jacek Sieka - Developer of DC++
    DC++
    DC++ is a free and open-source, peer-to-peer file-sharing client that can be used to connect to the Direct Connect network or to the ADC protocol...

     an open-source
    Open source
    The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

    , peer-to-peer
    Peer-to-peer
    Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

     file-sharing
    File sharing
    File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...

     client
    Client (computing)
    A client is an application or system that accesses a service made available by a server. The server is often on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network....

  • Ken Silverman
    Ken Silverman
    Ken Silverman is a game programmer, best known for writing the Build engine used in Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, and more than a dozen other games in the mid- to late-1990s...

     - creator of Duke Nukem 3D
    Duke Nukem 3D
    Duke Nukem 3D is a first-person shooter computer game developed by 3D Realms and published by GT Interactive Software. The full version was released for the PC . It is a sequel to the platform games Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II published by Apogee...

    's graphics engine
  • Charles Simonyi
    Charles Simonyi
    Charles Simonyi is a Hungarian-American computer software executive who, as head of Microsoft's application software group, oversaw the creation of Microsoft's flagship Office suite of applications. He now heads his own company, Intentional Software, with the aim of developing and marketing his...

     - Hungarian notation
    Hungarian notation
    Hungarian notation is an identifier naming convention in computer programming, in which the name of a variable or function indicates its type or intended use...

    , Microsoft Word
  • Colin Simpson - developer of CircuitLogix
    CircuitLogix
    CircuitLogix is a software electronic circuit simulator which uses PSpice to simulate thousands of electronic devices, models, and circuits. A version of CircuitLogix with fewer models, simulation, and export features is available free of charge to students after registration...

     simulation software
    Simulation software
    Simulation software is based on the process of modeling a real phenomenon with a set of mathematical formulas. It is, essentially, a program that allows the user to observe an operation through simulation without actually performing that operation...

  • Rich Skrenta
    Rich Skrenta
    Richard "Rich" Skrenta is a computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the search engine blekko....

     - co-founder of Open Directory Project
    Open Directory Project
    The Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz , is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings...

  • Matthew Smith
    Matthew Smith (games programmer)
    Matthew Smith is a British computer game programmer. He is best known for his games Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum, released in 1983 and 1984 respectively...

     - Sinclair ZX Spectrum games, including Manic Miner
    Manic Miner
    Manic Miner is a platform game originally written for the ZX Spectrum by Matthew Smith and released by Bug-Byte in 1983 . It is the first game in the Miner Willy series and among the pioneers of the platform game genre. The game itself was inspired by the Atari 800 game Miner 2049er...

     and Jet Set Willy
    Jet Set Willy
    Jet Set Willy is a computer game originally written for the ZX Spectrum home computer. It was published in 1984 by Software Projects and ported to most home computers of the time....

  • Henry Spencer
    Henry Spencer
    Henry Spencer is a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote "regex", a widely-used software library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News, a Usenet server program. He also authored The Ten Commandments for C Programmers. He is coauthor, with David Lawrence, of the book...

     - C News
    C News
    C News is a news server package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by Henry Spencer, at the University of Toronto as a replacement for B News. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in Washington, D.C....

    , Regex
  • Quentin Stafford-Fraser
    Quentin Stafford-Fraser
    James Quentin Stafford-Fraser was instrumental in the creation of the Trojan room coffee pot: the first webcam. He wrote the XCoffee client program which allowed the state of the coffee pot to be displayed on a screen....

     - author of original VNC
    Virtual Network Computing
    In computing, Virtual Network Computing is a graphical desktop sharing system that uses the RFB protocol to remotely control another computer...

     viewer, first Windows VNC server, client program for the first webcam
    Trojan room coffee pot
    The Trojan Room coffee pot was the inspiration for the world's first webcam. The coffee pot was located in the so-called Trojan Room within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge...

  • Richard Stallman
    Richard Stallman
    Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...

     - Emacs
    Emacs
    Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...

    , GCC
    GNU Compiler Collection
    The GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain...

    , GDB, founder and pioneer of GNU
    GNU
    GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...

     Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on ITS
    Incompatible Timesharing System
    ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System , was an early, revolutionary, and influential time-sharing operating system from MIT; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC.In addition to being technically influential ITS, the...

    , Lisp machine
    Lisp machine
    Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations...

     manual (chineual)
  • Guy Steele - Common Lisp
    Common Lisp
    Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...

    , Scheme
  • Alexander Stepanov
    Alexander Stepanov
    Alexander Alexandrovich Stepanov is the primary designer and implementer of the C++ Standard Template Library, which he started to develop around 1992 while employed at HP Labs...

     - Creator of Standard Template Library
    Standard Template Library
    The Standard Template Library is a C++ software library which later evolved into the C++ Standard Library. It provides four components called algorithms, containers, functors, and iterators. More specifically, the C++ Standard Library is based on the STL published by SGI. Both include some...

  • Bjarne Stroustrup
    Bjarne Stroustrup
    Bjarne Stroustrup ; born December 30, 1950 in Århus, Denmark) is a Danish computer scientist, most notable for the creation and the development of the widely used C++ programming language...

     - Creator of C++
    C++
    C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

  • Zeev Suraski
    Zeev Suraski
    Zeev Suraski is an Israeli programmer, PHP developer and co-founder of Zend Technologies. A graduate of the Technion in Haifa, Israel, Suraski and fellow student Andi Gutmans created PHP 3 in 1997. In 1999 they wrote the Zend Engine, the core of PHP 4, and founded Zend Technologies, which has...

     - co-creator of PHP
    PHP
    PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

     language
  • Gerald Jay Sussman
    Gerald Jay Sussman
    Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973 respectively. He has been involved in artificial intelligence research at MIT since 1964...

     - Scheme
  • Tim Sweeney
    Tim Sweeney (game developer)
    Tim Sweeney, born in 1970, is a computer game programmer and the founder of Epic Games, being best known for his work on ZZT and the Unreal Engine....

     - The Unreal engine
    Unreal
    Unreal is a first-person shooter video game developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and published by GT Interactive in May 1998...

    , UnrealScript
    UnrealScript
    UnrealScript is the scripting language of the Unreal Engine and is used for authoring game code and gameplay events....

    , ZZT
    ZZT
    ZZT is an ANSI character-based computer game, created in 1991 by Tim Sweeney of Epic Games , who later designed Unreal. It remains a popular DOS game creation system. ZZT itself is not an acronym for anything; its title was simply chosen so it would always appear at the very bottom of newsgroup...



T

  • Andrew Tanenbaum
    Andrew S. Tanenbaum
    Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum is a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He 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...

     - Minix
    Minix
    MINIX is a Unix-like computer operating system based on a microkernel architecture created by Andrew S. Tanenbaum for educational purposes; MINIX also inspired the creation of the Linux kernel....

  • Audrey "Autrijus" Tang
    Audrey Tang
    Audrey Tang is a Taiwanese free software programmer, who has been described as one of the "ten greats of Taiwanese computing."-Biography:...

     - designer of Pugs
    Pugs
    Pugs is a compiler and interpreter for the Perl 6 programming language, started on February 1, 2005 by Audrey Tang.Pugs development is now placed on hiatus, with most Perl 6 implementation efforts now taking place on Rakudo; however, its source repository is still used for storing the official Perl...

  • Simon Tatham
    Simon Tatham
    Simon Tatham is an English programmer known primarily for creating and maintaining PuTTY, a free software implementation of Telnet and SSH clients for Unix and Windows API platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator...

     - NASM
    NASM (computer program)
    The Netwide Assembler is an assembler and disassembler for the Intel x86 architecture. It can be used to write 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit programs. NASM is considered to be one of the most popular assemblers for Linux....

    , PuTTY
    PuTTY
    PuTTY is a free and open source terminal emulator application which can act as a client for the SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP computing protocols and as a serial console client...

  • Larry Tesler
    Larry Tesler
    Larry Tesler is a computer scientist working in the field of human-computer interaction. Tesler has worked at Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!...

     - the PUB markup language
    Markup language
    A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...

    , the Smalltalk
    Smalltalk
    Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

     code browser, debugger
    Debugger
    A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program that is used to test and debug other programs . The code to be examined might alternatively be running on an instruction set simulator , a technique that allows great power in its ability to halt when specific conditions are encountered but which...

     and object inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy
    Gypsy (software)
    Gypsy was the first document preparation system based on a mouse and graphical user interface to take advantage of those technologies to virtually eliminate modes. Its operation would be familiar to any user of a modern personal computer...

     word processor
  • Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner
    Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner
    Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner is the founder and former CEO of Opera Software. He and Geir Ivarsøy were part of a research group at the Norwegian state phone company where they developed browsing software called MultiTorg Opera...

     - co-creator of Opera
    Opera (web browser)
    Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...

     web browser
  • Avie Tevanian
    Avie Tevanian
    Avadis "Avie" Tevanian is a former Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple Computer from 1997 to 2003, and a former Chief Software Technology Officer from 2003 to 2006. He is a member of the board of embedded software tools company Green Hills Software. Tevanian was responsible for...

     - author of Mach kernel
  • Ken Thompson - main designer and author of Unix
    Unix
    Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

    , Plan 9
    Plan 9 from Bell Labs
    Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...

     and Inferno
    Inferno (operating system)
    Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs, but is now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software. Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly...

     operating systems, B and Bon languages (precursors of C
    C (programming language)
    C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

    ), creator of UTF-8
    UTF-8
    UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...

     character encoding, introduced regular expression
    Regular expression
    In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means for "matching" strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Abbreviations for "regular expression" include "regex" and "regexp"...

    s in QED
    QED (text editor)
    QED is a line-oriented computer text editor that was developed by Butler Lampson and L. Peter Deutsch for the Berkeley Timesharing System running on the SDS 940. It was implemented by L...

    .
  • Michael Tiemann
    Michael Tiemann
    Michael Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, as well as President of the Open Source Initiative. He previously was the Chief Technical Officer of Red Hat...

     - G++, GCC
    GNU Compiler Collection
    The GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain...

  • Linus Torvalds
    Linus Torvalds
    Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer and hacker, best known for having initiated the development of the open source Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator...

     - original author and current maintainer of Linux
    Linux
    Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

     kernel and creator of Git
    Git (software)
    Git is a distributed revision control system with an emphasis on speed. Git was initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on...

    , a source code management system
  • Michael Toy
    Michael Toy
    Michael Toy is an American computer programmer. He was one of the developers of the 1980s dungeon-crawling computer game Rogue. He later became an employee of SGI and followed its founder Jim Clark when he left to form Netscape...

     - co-developer of computer game Rogue
    Rogue (computer game)
    Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980. It was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, in part due to the procedural generation of game content. Rogue popularized dungeon crawling as a video game trope, leading...

  • Andrew Tridgell
    Andrew Tridgell
    Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell is an Australian computer programmer best known as the author of and contributor to the Samba file server, and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm....

     - Samba, Rsync
    Rsync
    rsync is a software application and network protocol for Unix-like and Windows systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate. An important feature of rsync not found in most similar...

  • Roy Trubshaw
    Roy Trubshaw
    Roy Trubshaw was a programmer at the University of Essex who co-authored MUD1, the first MUD, with Richard Bartle on a DEC PDP-10. Both of them now work together at Multi-User Entertainment with Trubshaw being the company’s technical director....

     - MUD
    MUD
    A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...

     - together with Richard Bartle
    Richard Bartle
    Richard Allan Bartle is a British writer, professor and game researcher, best known for being the co-creator of MUD1 and the author of the seminal Designing Virtual Worlds. He is one of the pioneers of the massively multiplayer online game industry.-Life and career:Bartle received a Ph.D...

    , creator of MUDs
  • Bob Truel
    Bob Truel
    Bob Truel is a computer programmer. He met Rich Skrenta in ninth grade in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania and has since co-founded several internet ventures with him and others, including the Open Directory Project with Bryn Dole, Chris Tolles, and Jeremy Wenokur in 1998, Newhoo in 1998, Topix.net with...

     - co-founder of Open Directory Project
    Open Directory Project
    The Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz , is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings...



V

  • Wietse Venema
    Wietse Venema
    Dr. Wietse Zweitze Venema is a Dutch programmer and physicist best known for writing the Postfix email system. He also wrote TCP Wrapper and collaborated with Dan Farmer and Samuel Johnson to produce the computer security tools SATAN and The Coroner's Toolkit.-Biography:He studied physics at the...

     - Postfix
    Postfix (software)
    In computing, Postfix is a free and open-source mail transfer agent that routes and delivers electronic mail. It is intended as a fast, easier-to-administer, and secure alternative to the widely-used Sendmail MTA....

    , SATAN
    Satan
    Satan , "the opposer", is the title of various entities, both human and divine, who challenge the faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible...

    , TCP Wrapper
    TCP Wrapper
    TCP Wrapper is a host-based networking ACL system, used to filter network access to Internet Protocol servers on operating systems such as Linux or BSD...

  • Paul Vixie
    Paul Vixie
    Paul Vixie is an American Internet pioneer, the author of several RFCs and well-known Unix software.Vixie attended George Washington High School in San Francisco, California. He received a Ph.D in computer science from Keio University in 2011....

     - BIND
    BIND
    BIND , or named , is the most widely used DNS software on the Internet.On Unix-like operating systems it is the de facto standard.Originally written by four graduate students at the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley , the name originates as an acronym from...

    , Cron
    Cron
    Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. Cron enables users to schedule jobs to run periodically at certain times or dates...

  • Patrick Volkerding
    Patrick Volkerding
    Patrick Volkerding is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. He is the "Slackware Benevolent Dictator for Life." Volkerding earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1993.For a short while, Chris Lumens and others assisted...

     - Original author and the current maintainer of Slackware
    Slackware
    Slackware is a free and open source Linux-based operating system. It was one of the earliest operating systems to be built on top of the Linux kernel and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. in 1993...

     Linux Distribution


W

  • Larry Wall
    Larry Wall
    Larry Wall is a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.-Education:Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976....

     - Warp (1980s space-war game), rn
    Rn (newsreader)
    rn is a news client written by Larry Wall and originally released in 1984. It was one of the first newsreaders to take full advantage of character-addressable CRT terminals...

    , patch
    Patch (Unix)
    patch is a Unix program that updates text files according to instructions contained in a separate file, called a patch file. The patch file is a text file that consists of a list of differences and is produced by running the related diff program with the original and updated file as arguments...

    , Perl
    Perl
    Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

  • Bob Wallace
    Bob Wallace
    Bob Wallace , was the ninth Microsoft employee, first popular user of the term shareware, creator of the word processing program PC-Write, founder of the software company Quicksoft and an "online drug guru" who devoted much time and money into the research of psychedelic drugs...

     - author PC-Write
    PC-Write
    PC-Write was a computer word processor and was one of the first three widely popular software products sold via the marketing method that became known as shareware. It was originally written by Bob Wallace, in early 1983....

     word processor; considered a co-creator of shareware
    Shareware
    The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...

  • John Walker
    John Walker (programmer)
    John Walker is a computer programmer and a co-founder of the computer-aided design software company Autodesk, and a co-author of early versions of AutoCAD, a product Autodesk originally acquired from programmer Michael Riddle...

     - co-founder of Autodesk
    Autodesk
    Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on 3D design software for use in the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media and entertainment industries. The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, a coauthor of the first versions of the company's...

  • John Warnock
    John Warnock
    John Edward Warnock is an American computer scientist best known as the co-founder with Charles Geschke of Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company. Dr. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and Chairman and CEO for his remaining sixteen years at the company...

     - creator of PostScript
    PostScript
    PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

  • Robert Watson - FreeBSD
    FreeBSD
    FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

     network stack parallelism, TrustedBSD project and OpenBSM
    OpenBSM
    OpenBSM is an open source implementation of Sun's Basic Security Module Audit API and file format. BSM, which is a system used for auditing, describes a set of system call and library interfaces for managing audit records as well as a token stream file format that permits extensible and...

  • Pei-Yuan Wei
    Pei-Yuan Wei
    Pei-Yuan Wei is the creator of ViolaWWW, the first popular graphical web browser.Pei-Yuan Wei was born in Taiwan. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1986 and received his higher education at the University of California, Berkeley.-Controversy:...

     - author of Viola
    ViolaWWW
    ViolaWWW, first developed in the early 1990s, for Unix and the X Windowing System, was the first popular web browser which, until Mosaic, was the most frequently used web browser for access to the World Wide Web...

    , one of earliest graphical browsers
  • Peter J. Weinberger
    Peter J. Weinberger
    Peter Jay Weinberger is a computer scientist best known for his early work at Bell Labs. He now works at Google.Weinberger was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1964...

     - co-creator of AWK (the W in the name stands for Weinberger)
  • Andrew Welch - author of Maelstrom
    Maelstrom (computer game)
    Maelstrom is a 1992 clone of Asteroids with an improved interface and better graphics. Many of Ambrosia's subsequent shareware titles followed in a similar formula....

    , Snapz Pro; founder of Ambrosia Software
    Ambrosia Software
    Ambrosia Software is a predominantly Macintosh software company located in Rochester, New York. Ambrosia produces utilities and games. Its products are distributed as shareware; demo versions can be downloaded and used for up to 30 days....

  • David Wheeler - co-creator of subroutine
    Subroutine
    In computer science, a subroutine is a portion of code within a larger program that performs a specific task and is relatively independent of the remaining code....

    ; designer of WAKE; co-designer of Tiny Encryption Algorithm
    Tiny Encryption Algorithm
    In cryptography, the Tiny Encryption Algorithm is a block cipher notable for its simplicity of description and implementation, typically a few lines of code...

    , XTEA
    XTEA
    In cryptography, XTEA is a block cipher designed to correct weaknesses in TEA. The cipher's designers were David Wheeler and Roger Needham of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and the algorithm was presented in an unpublished technical report in 1997...

    , Burrows-Wheeler transform
    Burrows-Wheeler transform
    The Burrows–Wheeler transform , is an algorithm used in data compression techniques such as bzip2. It was invented by Michael Burrows and David Wheeler in 1994 while working at DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California...

    .
  • Arthur Whitney - A+
    A+ (programming language)
    A+ is an array programming language descendent from the programming language A, which in turn was created to replace APL in 1988. Arthur Whitney developed the "A" portion of A+, while other developers at Morgan Stanley extended it, adding a graphical user interface and other language features...

    , K
    K (programming language)
    K is a proprietary array processing language developed by Arthur Whitney and commercialized by Kx Systems. The language serves as the foundation for kdb, an in-memory, column-based database, and other related financial products. The language, originally developed in 1993, is a variant of APL and...

  • Bruce Wilcox
    Bruce Wilcox
    -MTS/LISP and Computer Go:Wilcox wrote the MTS/LISP interpreter back in the early 70's, in order to be able to write a Go program for Dr. Walter Reitman...

     - creator of Computer Go, programmed NEMESIS Go Master.
  • Evan Williams
    Evan Williams (blogger)
    Evan Williams is an American entrepreneur who has founded several Internet companies. Two of the internet's top ten websites have been created by Evan Williams' companies: Blogger, weblog-authoring software of Pyra Labs, and Twitter, where he was previously CEO.-Early life and education:Williams...

     Creator and co-founder of Twitter
  • Roberta
    Roberta Williams
    Roberta Williams is an American video game designer. She is most famous for her pioneering work in graphical adventure games, particularly the King's Quest series.-Career:...

     and Ken Williams
    Ken Williams (gaming)
    Ken Williams is an American game programmer and co-founded On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra On-Line, together with his wife Roberta Williams. Roberta and Ken married at the age of 19 and have two children...

     -- Sierra Entertainment
    Sierra Entertainment
    Sierra Entertainment Inc. was an American video-game developer and publisher founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems by Ken and Roberta Williams...

    , King's Quest
    King's Quest
    King's Quest is an adventure game series created by the American software company Sierra Entertainment. It is widely considered a classic series from the golden era of adventure games. Following the success of its first installment, the series was primarily responsible for building the reputation...

    , graphic adventure game
  • Sophie Wilson
    Sophie Wilson
    Sophie Wilson is a British computer scientist. She is known for designing the Acorn Micro-Computer, the first of a long line of computers sold by Acorn Computers Ltd, as well as the instruction set of the highly successful ARM processor.- Life and career :...

     - Designer of instruction set for Acorn RISC Machine
    ARM architecture
    ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...

    , author of BBC BASIC
    BBC BASIC
    BBC BASIC is a programming language, developed in 1981 as a native programming language for the MOS Technology 6502 based Acorn BBC Micro home/personal computer, mainly by Sophie Wilson. It is a version of the BASIC programming language adapted for a U.K...

    .
  • Dave Winer
    Dave Winer
    Dave Winer is an American software developer, entrepreneur and writer in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting...

     - developed XML-RPC
    XML-RPC
    XML-RPC is a remote procedure call protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism. "XML-RPC" also refers generically to the use of XML for remote procedure call, independently of the specific protocol...

    , Frontier scripting language
  • Niklaus Wirth
    Niklaus Wirth
    Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.-Biography:Wirth...

     - Pascal
    Pascal (programming language)
    Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...

    , Modula-2
    Modula-2
    Modula-2 is a computer programming language designed and developed between 1977 and 1980 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich as a revision of Pascal to serve as the sole programming language for the operating system and application software for the personal workstation Lilith...

    , Oberon
    Oberon (programming language)
    Oberon is a programming language created in 1986 by Professor Niklaus Wirth and his associates at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. It was developed as part of the implementation of the Oberon operating system...

  • Stephen Wolfram
    Stephen Wolfram
    Stephen Wolfram is a British scientist and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.- Biography :...

     - creator of Mathematica
    Mathematica
    Mathematica is a computational software program used in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields and other areas of technical computing...

  • Don Woods - INTERCAL
    INTERCAL
    INTERCAL, a programming language parody, is an esoteric programming language that was created by Don Woods and James M. Lyon, two Princeton University students, in 1972. It satirizes aspects of the various programming languages at the time, as well as the proliferation of proposed language...

    , Colossal Cave Adventure
    Colossal Cave Adventure
    Colossal Cave Adventure gave its name to the computer adventure game genre . It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky...

  • Steve Wozniak
    Steve Wozniak
    Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak is an American computer engineer and programmer who founded Apple Computer, Co. with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne...

     - Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC
    Integer BASIC
    Integer BASIC, written by Steve Wozniak, was the BASIC interpreter of the Apple I and original Apple II computers. Originally available on cassette, then included in ROM on the original Apple II computer at release in 1977, it was the first version of BASIC used by many early home computer owners...

    , co-founder of Apple Inc.
  • Will Wright - Created the Sim City series and co-founded Maxis


Y

  • Jerry Yang - co-creator of Yahoo!
    Yahoo!
    Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

  • Victor Yngve
    Victor Yngve
    Victor Yngve is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages...

     - author of first string processing language, COMIT
    COMIT
    COMIT was the first string processing language , developed on the IBM 700/7000 series computers by Dr. Victor Yngve and collaborators at MIT from 1957-1965. Yngve created the language for supporting computerized research in the field of linguistics, and more specifically, the area of machine...



Z

  • Jamie Zawinski
    Jamie Zawinski
    Jamie Zawinski , commonly known as jwz, is a former professional American computer programmer responsible for significant contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, and early versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser...

     - Lucid Emacs
    XEmacs
    XEmacs is a graphical- and console-based text editor which runs on almost any Unix-like operating system as well as Microsoft Windows. XEmacs is a fork, based on a version of GNU Emacs from the late 1980s...

    , Netscape
    Netscape Navigator
    Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...

    , Mozilla
    Mozilla
    Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....

    , XScreenSaver
    XScreenSaver
    XScreenSaver is a collection of about two hundred free screensavers for Unix and Mac OS X computers. It was created by Jamie Zawinski in 1992 and is still maintained by him....

  • Philip Zimmermann - creator of encryption software PGP
    Pretty Good Privacy
    Pretty Good Privacy is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, E-mails, files, directories and whole disk partitions to increase the security...

    , the ZRTP
    ZRTP
    ZRTP is a cryptographic key-agreement protocol to negotiate the keys for encryption between two end points in a Voice over Internet Protocol phone telephony call based on the Real-time Transport Protocol. It uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange and the Secure Real-time Transport Protocol for...

     protocol, and Zfone
    Zfone
    Zfone is software for secure voice communication over the Internet , using the ZRTP protocol. It is created by Phil Zimmermann, the creator of the PGP encryption software. Zfone works on top of existing SIP- and RTP-programs, but should work with any SIP- and RTP-compliant VoIP-program.Zfone turns...

  • Mark Zuckerberg
    Mark Zuckerberg
    Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...

     - Creator of Facebook
    Facebook
    Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...



See also

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK