This is a list of

programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...

s notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions. All entries must already have associated articles. Some persons notable as

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

s are included here because they work in program as well as research.

A

* Michael Abrash –

program optimization In computer science, program optimization, code optimization, or software optimization is the process of modifying a software system to make some aspect of it work more efficiently or use fewer resources. In general, a computer program may be op ...

and

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

assembly language *

Scott Adams Scott Raymond Adams (born June 8, 1957) is an American author and cartoonist. He is the creator of the ''Dilbert'' comic strip and the author of several nonfiction works of business, commentary, and satire. Adams worked in various corporate r ...

– series of text adventures beginning in the late 1970s * Tarn Adams –

Dwarf Fortress ''Dwarf Fortress'' (previously titled ''Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress'') is a construction and management simulation and roguelike indie video game created by Bay 12 Games. Available as freeware and in development si ...

Leonard Adleman Leonard Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist. He is one of the creators of the RSA encryption algorithm, for which he received the 2002 Turing Award. He is also known for the creation of the field of DNA computin ...

– co-created RSA algorithm (being the ''A'' in that name), coined the term ''computer virus'' *

Alfred Aho Alfred Vaino Aho (born August 9, 1941) is a Canadian computer scientist best known for his work on programming languages, compilers, and related algorithms, and his textbooks on the art and science of computer programming. Aho was elected into ...

– co-created AWK (being the ''A'' in that name), and main author of famous Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (Dragon book) *

Andrei Alexandrescu Tudor Andrei Cristian Alexandrescu (born 1969) is a Romanian-American C++ and D language programmer and author. He is particularly known for his pioneering work on policy-based design implemented via template metaprogramming. These ideas are a ...

– author, expert on languages C++, D *

Paul Allen Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American businessman, computer programmer, and investor. He co-founded Microsoft, Microsoft Corporation with his childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which was followed by the ...

–

Altair BASIC Altair BASIC is a discontinued 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 (as Micro-Soft), distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair B ...

Applesoft BASIC Applesoft BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC, developed by Marc McDonald and Ric Weiland, supplied with Apple II computers. It supersedes Integer BASIC and is the BASIC in Read-only memory, ROM in all Apple II series computers after the ori ...

, cofounded

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Eric Allman Eric Paul Allman (born September 2, 1955) is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson co-founded the company 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 (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet. A descendant of t ...

syslog In computing, syslog () is a standard for message logging. It allows separation of the software that generates messages, the system that stores them, and the software that reports and analyzes them. Each message is labeled with a facility code, ...

Marc Andreessen Marc Lowell Andreessen ( ; born July 9, 1971) is an American businessman and former software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and ...

– co-created

Mosaic A mosaic () is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/Mortar (masonry), mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and ...

, cofounded

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...

Jeremy Ashkenas Jeremy Ashkenas is a computer programmer known for the creation and co-creation of the CoffeeScript and LiveScript programming languages respectively, the Backbone.js JavaScript framework and the Underscore.js JavaScript library. While worki ...

–

CoffeeScript CoffeeScript is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript. It adds syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby, Python, and Haskell in an effort to enhance JavaScript's brevity and readability. Some added features include list comprehension an ...

programming language and Backbone.js *

Bill Atkinson William Dana Atkinson (March 17, 1951 – June 5, 2025) was an American computer engineer, computer programmer, and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990. Some of Atkinson's noteworthy contributions to the field of ...

–

QuickDraw QuickDraw was the 2D graphics library and associated application programming interface (API) which is a core part of classic Mac OS. It was initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. QuickDraw still existed as part of the libraries ...

HyperCard HyperCard is a application software, software application and software development kit, development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard com ...

* Lennart Augustsson – languages (Lazy ML, Cayenne), compilers (HBC

Haskell Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research, and industrial applications, Haskell pioneered several programming language ...

, parallel Haskell front end,

Bluespec Bluespec, Inc. is an American semiconductor device electronic design automation company based in Framingham, Massachusetts, and co-founded in June 2003 by computer scientists Arvind Mithal, professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M ...

SystemVerilog SystemVerilog, standardized as IEEE 1800 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is a hardware description and hardware verification language commonly used to model, design, simulate, test and implement electronic sy ...

early),

LPMud LPMud, abbreviated LP, is a family of multi-user dungeon (MUD) server software. Its first instance, the original LPMud game driver, was developed in 1989 by Lars Pensjö (the LP in LPMud). LPMud was innovative in its separation of the MUD infrastr ...

pioneer,

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was fork (software development), forked. It continues to ...

device driver In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...

B

* Roland Carl Backhouse –

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

construction,

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

ic problem solving,

ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

John Backus John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–N ...

– Fortran, BNF *

Lars Bak Lars Ytting Bak (born 16 January 1980) is a Danish former professional road bicycle racer, who rode professionally between 2002 and 2019 for the Fakta, , , , and squads. Since retiring as a rider, Bak has acted as a directeur sportif for in ...

–

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

specialist *

Richard Bartle Richard Allan Bartle (born 10 January 1960) is a British writer, professor and game researcher in the massively multiplayer online game industry. He co-created ''MUD1'' (the first MUD) in 1978, and is the author of the 2003 book ''Designing Vir ...

–

MUD Mud (, or Middle Dutch) is loam, silt or clay mixed with water. Mud is usually formed after rainfall or near water sources. Ancient mud deposits hardened over geological time to form sedimentary rock such as shale or mudstone (generally cal ...

, with Roy Trubshaw, created MUDs *

Friedrich L. Bauer Friedrich Ludwig "Fritz" Bauer (10 June 1924 – 26 March 2015) was a German pioneer of computer science and professor at the Technical University of Munich. Life Bauer earned his Abitur in 1942 and served in the Wehrmacht during World War ...

–

Stack (data structure) In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements with two main operations: * Push, which adds an element to the collection, and * Pop, which removes the most recently added element. Additionally, ...

, ''Sequential Formula Translation'',

software engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

, Bauer–Fike theorem *

Kent Beck Kent Beck (born 1961) is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 o ...

– created

Extreme programming Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development,"Human Centred Technology Workshop 2006 ", 2006, ...

, cocreated

JUnit JUnit is a test automation framework for the Java programming language. JUnit is often used for unit testing, and is one of the xUnit frameworks. JUnit is linked as a JAR at compile-time. The latest version of the framework, JUnit 5, resides ...

* Donald Becker –

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

drivers,

Beowulf cluster A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed that allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performa ...

ing *

Brian Behlendorf Brian Behlendorf (born March 30, 1973) is an American technologist, executive, computer programmer and leading figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software ...

–

Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source cross-platform web server, released under the terms of Apache License, Apache License 2.0. It is developed and maintained by a community of developers under the ...

* Doug Bell – '' Dungeon Master'' series of

video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

s *

Fabrice Bellard Fabrice Bellard (; born 1972) is a French computer programmer known for writing FFmpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler. He developed Bellard's formula for calculating single digits of pi. In 2012, Bellard co-founded Amarisoft, a telecommunica ...

– created

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing vide ...

open codec library,

QEMU The Quick Emulator (QEMU) is a free and open-source emulator that uses dynamic binary translation to emulate a computer's processor; that is, it translates the emulated binary codes to an equivalent binary format which is executed by the mach ...

virtualization tools *

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

– invented

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

* Daniel J. Bernstein – djbdns,

qmail qmail is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that runs on Unix. It was written, starting December 1995, by Daniel J. Bernstein as a more secure alternative to the popular Sendmail program. Originally license-free software, qmail's source code wa ...

* Eric Bina – cocreated Mosaic web browser * Marc Blank – cocreated ''

Zork ''Zork'' is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson (programmer), Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company ...

'' * Joshua Bloch – core Java language designer, lead the

Java collections framework The Java collections framework is a set of classes and interfaces that implement commonly reusable collection data structures. Although referred to as a framework, it works in a manner of a library. The collections framework provides both inte ...

project *

Jonathan Blow Jonathan Blow (born 1971) is an American video game designer and programmer. He is best known for his work on the independent video games ''Braid'' (2008) and '' The Witness'' (2016). Blow became interested in game programming while at middle ...

–

s: ''

Braid A braid (also referred to as a plait; ) is a complex structure or pattern formed by interlacing three or more strands of flexible material such as textile yarns, wire, or hair. The simplest and most common version is a flat, solid, three-strand ...

'', '' The Witness'' * Susan G. Bond – cocreated

ALGOL 68-R ALGOL 68-R was the first implementation of the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68. In December 1968, the report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68 was published. On 20–24 July 1970 a working conference was arranged by the International Federati ...

Grady Booch Grady Booch (born February 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software archit ...

– cocreated

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. UML provides a standard notation for many types of diagrams which can be roughly ...

* Alan H. Borning –

human–computer interaction Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the process through which people operate and engage with computer systems. Research in HCI covers the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and comp ...

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impl ...

constraint programming Constraint programming (CP) is a paradigm for solving combinatorial problems that draws on a wide range of techniques from artificial intelligence, computer science, and operations research. In constraint programming, users declaratively state t ...

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

s, ThingLab * Bert Bos – authored

Argo In Greek mythology, the ''Argo'' ( ; ) was the ship of Jason and the Argonauts. The ship was built with divine aid, and some ancient sources describe her as the first ship to sail the seas. The ''Argo'' carried the Argonauts on their quest fo ...

web browser, co-authored Cascading Style Sheets * Stephen R. Bourne – cocreated

ALGOL 68C ALGOL 68C is an imperative computer programming language, a dialect of ALGOL 68, that was developed by Stephen R. Bourne and Michael Guy to program the Cambridge Algebra System (CAMAL). The initial compiler was written in the Princeton Synta ...

, created

Bourne shell The Bourne shell (sh) is a shell command-line interpreter for computer operating systems. It first appeared on Version 7 Unix, as its default shell. Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh—which will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic lin ...

* David Bradley – coder on the

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the List of IBM Personal Computer models, IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible ''de facto'' standard. Released on ...

project team who wrote the ''Control-Alt-Delete'' keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible

BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization d ...

es * Andrew Braybrook – video games '' Paradroid'' and '' Uridium'' * Larry Breed – implementation of Iverson Notation (APL), co-developed APL\360, Scientific Time Sharing Corporation cofounder *

Jack Elton Bresenham Jack Elton Bresenham (born October 11, 1937, Clovis, New Mexico, US) is a former professor of computer science. Biography Bresenham retired from 27 years of service at IBM as a Senior Technical Staff Member in 1987. He taught for 16 years at W ...

– created

Bresenham's line algorithm Bresenham's line algorithm is a line drawing algorithm that determines the points of an ''n''-dimensional raster that should be selected in order to form a close approximation to a straight line between two points. It is commonly used to draw li ...

Dan Bricklin Daniel Singer Bricklin (born July 16, 1951) is an American businessman and engineer who is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, ...

– cocreated

VisiCalc VisiCalc ("visible calculator") is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for the Apple II by VisiCorp on October 17, 1979. It is considered the killer application for the Apple II, turning the microco ...

, the first personal

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

program * Walter Bright –

Digital Mars Digital Mars is an American computer software company founded by Walter Bright and based in Vienna, Virginia. It makes C, C++, and D compilers, and associated utilities such as an integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows and DO ...

, First C++ compiler, authored

D (programming language) D, also known as dlang, is a multi-paradigm system programming language created by Walter Bright at Digital Mars and released in 2001. Andrei Alexandrescu joined the design and development effort in 2007. Though it originated as a re-engin ...

Sergey Brin Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on D ...

– cofounded

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

Inc. *

Per Brinch Hansen Per Brinch Hansen (13 November 1938 – 31 July 2007) was a Denmark, Danish-United States, American computer scientist known for his work in operating systems, Concurrent computing, concurrent Computer programming, programming and Parallel comput ...

(surname "Brinch Hansen") – RC 4000 multiprogramming system,

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

kernels,

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

s, monitors,

concurrent programming Concurrent means happening at the same time. Concurrency, concurrent, or concurrence may refer to: Law * Concurrence, in jurisprudence, the need to prove both ''actus reus'' and ''mens rea'' * Concurring opinion (also called a "concurrence"), a ...

, Concurrent Pascal,

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

& processes,

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computing, computation in which many calculations or Process (computing), processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. ...

* Richard Brodie –

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

* Andries Brouwer – ''

Hack Hack may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Games * Hack (Unix video game), ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game * .hack (video game series), ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia fran ...

'', former maintainer of

man page A man page (short for manual page) is a form of software documentation found on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. Topics covered include programs, system libraries, system calls, and sometimes local system details. The local host administr ...

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

hacker *

Paul Buchheit Paul T. Buchheit (born November 7, 1977) is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur who created the email service Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested Google's former ...

– created

Gmail Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...

Danielle Bunten Berry Danielle Bunten Berry (February 19, 1949 – July 3, 1998), formerly known as Dan Bunten, was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game '' M.U.L.E.'', one of the first influential multiplayer video games, and 1984's '' ...

(Dani Bunten) – '' M.U.L.E.'', multiplayer video game and other noted video games *

Rod Burstall Rodney Martineau Burstall (11 November 1934 – 13 February 2025) was a British computer scientist who was one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Biography Burstall studied p ...

– languages COWSEL (renamed POP-1), POP-2, NPL,

Hope Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances in one's own life, or the world at large. As a verb, Merriam-Webster defines ''hope'' as "to expect with confid ...

; ACM SIGPLAN 2009 PL Achievement Award *

Dries Buytaert Dries Buytaert (born 19 November 1978)Curriculum Vitae
is ...

– created

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

C

* Steve Capps – cocreated

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

and Newton *

John Carmack John D. Carmack II (born August 21, 1970) is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games ''Commander Keen'', ''Wolfenstein 3D'', ''Do ...

–

first-person shooter A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game genre, video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a First person (video games), first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through t ...

s ''

Doom Doom is another name for damnation. Doom may also refer to: People * Doom (professional wrestling), the tag team of Ron Simmons and Butch Reed * Daniel Doom (1934–2020), Belgian cyclist * Debbie Doom (born 1963), American softball pitche ...

'', '' Quake'' *

Vint Cerf Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Robert Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that inclu ...

–

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

, NCP *

Ward Christensen Ward Leon Christensen (October 23, 1945 – October 11, 2024) was an American computer scientist who was the inventor of the XMODEM file transfer protocol and a co-founder of the CBBS bulletin board, the first bulletin board system (BBS) ever br ...

– wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS *

Edgar F. Codd Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd (19 August 1923 – 18 April 2003) was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases and relational database ...

– principal architect of

relational model The relational model (RM) is an approach to managing data using a structure and language consistent with first-order predicate logic, first described in 1969 by English computer scientist Edgar F. Codd, where all data are represented in terms of t ...

Bram Cohen Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol in 2001, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of ...

–

BitTorrent BitTorrent is a Protocol (computing), communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a Decentralised system, decentralized manner. The protocol is d ...

protocol design and implementation * Alain Colmerauer –

Prolog Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving, and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic. Unlike many other programming language ...

Richard W. Conway Richard Walter Conway (December 12, 1931 – March 19, 2024) was an American industrial engineer and computer scientist who was the Emerson Electric Company Professor of Manufacturing Management, Emeritus in the Johnson Graduate School of Manage ...

– compilers for CORC, CUPL, and

PL/C PL/C is an instructional dialect of the programming language PL/I, developed at the Department of Computer Science of Cornell University in the early 1970s in an effort headed by Professor Richard W. Conway and graduate student Thomas R. Wilcox. ...

; XCELL Factory Modelling System * Alan Cooper –

Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic (.NET), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic (classic), the original Visual Basic suppo ...

Mike Cowlishaw Mike Cowlishaw is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. and sometime visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick. He is a retired IBM Fellow, and was a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and ...

– REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing,

decimal The decimal numeral system (also called the base-ten positional numeral system and denary or decanary) is the standard system for denoting integer and non-integer numbers. It is the extension to non-integer numbers (''decimal fractions'') of th ...

arithmetic packages * Alan Cox – co-developed

kernel *

Brad Cox Brad J. Cox (May 2, 1944 – January 2, 2021) was an American computer scientist who was known mostly for creating the Objective-C programming language with his business partner Tom Love and for his work in software engineering (specifically so ...

–

Objective-C Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style message passing (messaging) to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was ...

Mark Crispin Mark Reed Crispin (July 19, 1956 in Camden, New Jersey – December 28, 2012 in Poulsbo, Washington) is best known as the father of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledg ...

– created

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

, authored UW-IMAP, one of reference implementations of

IMAP4 In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of pe ...

* William Crowther – ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' *

Ward Cunningham Howard G. Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki Excerpt from 2014 book '' The Innovators''. and was a co-author of the '' Manifesto for Agile Software Development''. Called a pioneer, and ...

– created

Wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

concept * Dave Cutler – architected RSX-11M,

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Op ...

VAXELN VAXELN (typically pronounced "VAX-elan") is a discontinued real-time operating system for the VAX family of computers produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts. As with RSX-11 and VMS, Dave Cutler was the pr ...

DEC MICA MICA was the codename of the operating system developed for the DEC PRISM architecture. MICA was designed by a team at Digital Equipment Corporation led by Dave Cutler. MICA's design was driven by Digital's need to provide a migration path to P ...

Windows NT Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...

D

Ole-Johan Dahl Ole-Johan Dahl (12 October 1931 – 29 June 2002) was a Norwegian computer scientist. Dahl was a professor of computer science at the University of Oslo and is considered to be one of the fathers of Simula and object-oriented programming along wi ...

– cocreated

Simula Simula is the name of two simulation 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. Syntactically, it is an approximate superset of AL ...

Ryan Dahl Ryan Dahl (born 1981) is an American software engineer who is best known for creating the Node.js JavaScript runtime as well as the Deno JavaScript/TypeScript runtime. Biography Dahl grew up in San Diego, California. His mother bought him an ...

– created Node.js * Terry A. Davis – developer of TempleOS * Jeff Dean –

Spanner A wrench or spanner is a tool used to provide grip and mechanical advantage in applying torque to turn objects—usually rotary fasteners, such as Nut (hardware), nuts and screw, bolts—or keep them from turning. In the United Kingdom, UK, ...

Bigtable Bigtable is a fully managed wide-column and key-value NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads as part of the Google Cloud portfolio. History Bigtable development began in 2004.. It is now used by a number of Goo ...

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel and distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filte ...

L. Peter Deutsch L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American computer scientist and composer. He is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF int ...

–

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization of documents in these language,, the display or prin ...

, Assembler for

PDP-1 The PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is known for being the most important computer in the creation of hacker culture at the Massachusetts ...

, XDS-940

timesharing In computing, time-sharing is the concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each task or user a small slice of processing time. This quick switch between tasks or users gives the illusion of simultaneous ...

system, QED original co-author * Robert Dewar – IFIP WG 2.1 member, chairperson,

ALGOL 68 ALGOL 68 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1968'') is an imperative programming language member of the ALGOL family that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and ...

; AdaCore cofounder, president, CEO *

Edsger W. Dijkstra Edsger Wybe Dijkstra ( ; ; 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, mathematician, and science essayist. Born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Dijkstra studied mathematics and physics and the ...

– contributions to

Dijkstra's algorithm Dijkstra's algorithm ( ) is an algorithm for finding the shortest paths between nodes in a weighted graph, which may represent, for example, a road network. It was conceived by computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra in 1956 and published three ...

, '' Go To Statement Considered Harmful'', IFIP WG 2.1 member *

Matt Dillon Matthew Raymond Dillon (born February 18, 1964) is an American actor. He has received various accolades, including a Screen Actors Guild Award and two Independent Spirit Awards alongside nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, ...

– programmed various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD *

Jack Dorsey Jack Patrick Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American businessperson, who is a co-founder of Twitter, Inc. and its CEO during 2007–2008 and 2015–2021, as well as co-founder, principal executive officer and chairman of Block, Inc. (deve ...

– created

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

Martin Dougiamas Moodle ( ) is a free and open-source learning management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other online learning projects in ...

– creator and lead developed

Moodle Moodle ( ) is a free and open-source learning management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other online learning project ...

Adam Dunkels Adam Dunkels (born 28 May 1978) is a Swedish computer scientist, software engineer, entrepreneur, and founder of Thingsquare, an Internet of things (IoT) product development business. His father was professor of mathematics Andrejs Dunkels. His ...

– authored

Contiki Contiki is an operating system for networked, memory-constrained systems with a focus on low-power wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Contiki is used for systems for street lighting, sound monitoring for smart cities, radiation monitori ...

operating system, the lwIP and uIP embedded TCP/IP stacks, invented protothreads

E

* Les Earnest – authored

finger A finger is a prominent digit (anatomy), digit on the forelimbs of most tetrapod vertebrate animals, especially those with prehensile extremities (i.e. hands) such as humans and other primates. Most tetrapods have five digits (dactyly, pentadact ...

program *

Alan Edelman Alan Stuart Edelman (born June 1963) is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Ar ...

– Edelman's Law, stochastic operator, Interactive Supercomputing,

Julia (programming language) Julia is a high-level programming language, high-level, general-purpose programming language, general-purpose dynamic programming language, dynamic programming language, designed to be fast and productive, for e.g. data science, artificial intel ...

cocreator, high performance computing, numerical computing *

Brendan Eich Brendan Eich ( ; born July 4, 1961) is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He serve ...

– created

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

Larry Ellison Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman and entrepreneur who co-founded software company Oracle Corporation. He was Oracle's chief executive officer from 1977 to 2014 and is now its chief technology officer a ...

– co-created

Oracle Database Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a proprietary multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for ru ...

, cofounded

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

Andrey Ershov Andrey Petrovich Yershov (; 19 April 1931, Moscow – 8 December 1988, Moscow) was a Soviet computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in systems programming and programming language research. Donald Knuth considers him to have independently co ...

– languages ''ALPHA'', '' Rapira''; first Soviet

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the Concurrency (computer science), concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each Process (computing), task or User (computing), user a small slice of CPU time, processing time. ...

system ''AIST-0'', electronic publishing system ''RUBIN'',

multiprocessing Multiprocessing (MP) is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. The ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

''MRAMOR'', IFIP WG 2.1 member, ''Aesthetics and the Human Factor in Programming'' *

Marc Ewing Marc Ewing is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur. He 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 ...

– created

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release ...

F

Scott Fahlman Scott Elliott Fahlman (born March 21, 1948) is an American computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department. He is notable for early work on automated pla ...

– created smiley face emoticon :-) * Dan Farmer – created COPS and Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) Security Scanners * Steve Fawkner – created ''

Warlords Warlords are individuals who exercise military, economic, and political control over a region, often one without a strong central or national government, typically through informal control over local armed forces. Warlords have existed throug ...

'' and '' Puzzle Quest'' * Stuart Feldman – created make, authored Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

David Filo David Robert Filo (born April 20, 1966) is an American billionaire businessman and the co-founder of Yahoo! with classmate Jerry Yang. His Filo Server Program, written in the C programming language, was the server-side software used to dynamica ...

– cocreated

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

Brad Fitzpatrick Bradley Joseph Fitzpatrick (born February 5, 1980) 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, PubSubHubbub, OpenID, and Perkeep. Personal l ...

– created

memcached Memcached (pronounced variously /mɛmkæʃˈdiː/ ''mem-cash-dee'' or /ˈmɛmkæʃt/ ''mem-cashed'') is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and object ...

Livejournal LiveJournal (), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school ...

and

OpenID OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provi ...

Andrew Fluegelman Andrew Cardozo Fluegelman (November 27, 1943 – July 6, 1985) was a publisher, photographer, programmer and attorney best known as a pioneer of what is now known as the shareware business model for software marketing. He was also the founding ...

– author

PC-Talk PC-Talk is 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. It was written by Andrew Fluegelman in late 1982, and helped created sharew ...

communications software; considered a cocreated

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

* Mahmoud Samir Fayed – created PWCT and

Ring (The) Ring(s) may refer to: * Ring (jewellery), a round band, usually made of metal, worn as ornamental jewelry * To make a sound with a bell, and the sound made by a bell Arts, entertainment, and media Film and TV * ''The Ring'' (franchise), a ...

* Martin Fowler – created the

dependency injection In software engineering, dependency injection is a programming technique in which an object or function receives other objects or functions that it requires, as opposed to creating them internally. Dependency injection aims to separate the con ...

pattern of software engineering, a form of inversion of control * Brian Fox – created Bash, Readline,

GNU GNU ( ) is an extensive collection of free software (394 packages ), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popu ...

Finger A finger is a prominent digit (anatomy), digit on the forelimbs of most tetrapod vertebrate animals, especially those with prehensile extremities (i.e. hands) such as humans and other primates. Most tetrapods have five digits (dactyly, pentadact ...

G

* Elon Gasper – cofounded Bright Star Technology, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech; HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc. *

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend ...

–

, cofounded

Jim Gettys Jim Gettys (born 15 October 1953) is an American computer programmer. Activity Gettys worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC's Cambridge Research Laboratory. He is one of the original developers of the X Window System at MIT and worked ...

–

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

/1.1, One Laptop per Child,

Bufferbloat Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too many data packets. Bufferbloat can also cause packet delay variation (also known as jitter), as well as reduce the overall network thro ...

* Steve Gibson – created SpinRite * John Gilmore –

GNU Debugger The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, Assembly, C, C++, D, Fortran, Haskell, Go, Objective-C, OpenCL C, Modula-2, Pascal, Rust, and par ...

(GDB) * Adele Goldberg – cocreated

Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learni ...

* Robert Griesemer – cocreated Go * Ryan C. Gordon (a.k.a. Icculus) – Lokigames,

ioquake3 id Tech 3, popularly known as the ''Quake III Arena'' engine, is a game engine developed by id Software for its 1999 game ''Quake III Arena''. It has subsequently been used in numerous games. Commercially, id Tech 3 competed with early version ...

James Gosling James Arthur Gosling (born 19 May 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java (programming language), Java programming language. Gosling was elected a member of the National Academy of E ...

–

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

, Gosling Emacs,

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the te ...

* Bill Gosper –

Macsyma Macsyma (; "Project MAC's SYmbolic MAnipulator") is one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems still in wide use. It was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT's Project MAC. In 1982, Macsyma was licensed to Symbolics and ...

, Lisp machine, hashlife, helped

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of comp ...

on Vol.2 of

The Art of Computer Programming ''The Art of Computer Programming'' (''TAOCP'') is a comprehensive multi-volume monograph written by the computer scientist Donald Knuth presenting programming algorithms and their analysis. it consists of published volumes 1, 2, 3, 4A, and 4 ...

(Semi-numerical algorithms) * Paul Graham – Yahoo! Store,

On Lisp ''On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp'' is a book by Paul Graham on macro programming in Common Lisp. Published in 1993, it is currently out of print, but can be freely downloaded as a PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardiz ...

, ANSI

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S2018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperli ...

John Graham-Cumming John Graham-Cumming is a British software engineer and writer best known for starting a successful petition to the Government of the United Kingdom asking for an apology for its persecution of Alan Turing. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued ...

– authored POPFile, a

Bayesian filter In probability theory, statistics, and machine learning, recursive Bayesian estimation, also known as a Bayes filter, is a general probabilistic approach for estimating an unknown probability density function (PDF) recursively over time using in ...

-based e-mail classifier * David Gries – The book ''The Science of Programming'', Interference freedom, Member Emeritus, IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology *

Ralph Griswold Ralph E. Griswold (May 19, 1934, Modesto, CA – October 4, 2006, Tucson, AZ) was a computer scientist known for his research into high-level programming languages and symbolic computation. His language credits include the string processing la ...

– cocreated

SNOBOL SNOBOL ("StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language") is a series of programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of a ...

, created

Icon (programming language) Icon is a very high-level programming language based on the concept of "goal-directed execution" in which an Expression (computer science), expression in code returns "success" along with a result, or a "failure", indicating that there is no vali ...

* Richard Greenblatt – Lisp machine,

Incompatible Timesharing System Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) is a time-sharing operating system developed principally by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with help from Project MAC. The name is the jocular complement of the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing Syste ...

, MacHack * Neil J. Gunther – authored Pretty Damn Quick (PDQ) performance modeling program * Scott Guthrie (a.k.a. ScottGu) – ASP.NET creator * Jürg Gutknecht – with

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth ( IPA: ) (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist. He designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Tu ...

Lilith Lilith (; ), also spelled Lilit, Lilitu, or Lilis, is a feminine figure in Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology, theorized to be the first wife of Adam and a primordial she-demon. Lilith is cited as having been "banished" from the Garden of Eden ...

computer;

Modula-2 Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It w ...

Oberon Oberon () is a king of the fairy, fairies in Middle Ages, medieval and Renaissance literature. He is best known as a character in William Shakespeare's play ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'', in which he is King of the Fairies and spouse of Titania ...

Zonnon Zonnon is a general purpose programming language in the line or family of the preceding languages Pascal, Modula, and Oberon. Jürg Gutknecht is the author. Its conceptual model is based on objects, definitions, implementations, and modules. I ...

* Andi Gutmans – cocreated

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

programming language * Michael Guy – Phoenix, work on

number theory Number theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic functions. Number theorists study prime numbers as well as the properties of mathematical objects constructed from integers (for example ...

computer algebra In mathematics and computer science, computer algebra, also called symbolic computation or algebraic computation, is a scientific area that refers to the study and development of algorithms and software for manipulating expression (mathematics), ...

, higher dimension

polyhedra In geometry, a polyhedron (: polyhedra or polyhedrons; ) is a three-dimensional figure with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. The term "polyhedron" may refer either to a solid figure or to its boundary su ...

theory,

; work with

John Horton Conway John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician. He was active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many b ...

H

* Daniel Ha – cofounder and CEO of blog comment platform Disqus *

Nico Habermann Arie Nicolaas Habermann (26 June 1932 – 8 August 1993), often known as A.N. Habermann or Nico Habermann, was a Dutch computer scientist. Habermann was born in Groningen, Netherlands, and earned his B.S. in mathematics and physics and M.S. in ...

– work on

inter-process communication In computer science, interprocess communication (IPC) is the sharing of data between running Process (computing), processes in a computer system. Mechanisms for IPC may be provided by an operating system. Applications which use IPC are often cat ...

, process synchronization,

deadlock Deadlock commonly refers to: * Deadlock (computer science), a situation where two processes are each waiting for the other to finish * Deadlock (locksmithing) or deadbolt, a physical door locking mechanism * Political deadlock or gridlock, a si ...

avoidance,

software verification Software verification is a discipline of software engineering, programming languages, and theory of computation whose goal is to assure that software satisfies the expected requirements. Broad scope and classification A broad definition of verif ...

ALGOL 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a ...

BLISS BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. It was perhaps the best known system language until C debuted a few years later. Since then, C ...

, Pascal, Ada * Jim Hall – started the

FreeDOS FreeDOS (formerly PD-DOS) is a free software operating system for IBM PC compatible computers. It intends to provide a complete MS-DOS-compatible environment for running Legacy system, legacy software and supporting embedded systems. FreeDOS ca ...

project * Margaret Hamilton – Director of Software Engineering Division of MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the space

Apollo program The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the United States human spaceflight program led by NASA, which Moon landing, landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969. Apollo followed Project Mercury that put the first Americans in sp ...

* Brian Harris –

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

research, Canada's first

computer-assisted translation Computer-aided translation (CAT), also referred to as computer-assisted translation or computer-aided human translation (CAHT), is the use of software, also known as a translator, to assist a human translator in the translation process. The tr ...

course, natural translation theory, community interpreting (Critical Link) * Eric Hehner – predicative programming,

formal methods In computer science, formal methods are mathematics, mathematically rigorous techniques for the formal specification, specification, development, Program analysis, analysis, and formal verification, verification of software and computer hardware, ...

, quote notation,

David Heinemeier Hansson David Heinemeier Hansson, also known by his initials DHH, is a Danish software engineer, programmer, writer, entrepreneur, and racing driver. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a web framework written in Ruby. He is also a partner and chief t ...

– created the

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pa ...

framework for developing web applications * Rebecca Heineman – authored '' Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate'' and '' Dragon Wars'' *

Gernot Heiser Gernot Heiser (born 1957) is a Scientia Professor and the John Lions Chair for operating systems at UNSW Sydney, where he leads thTrustworthy Systemsgroup (TS). Life In 1991, Heiser joined the School of Computer Science and Engineering of ...

–

teaching, research, commercialising, Open Kernel Labs, OKL4, Wombat *

Anders Hejlsberg Anders Hejlsberg (; ; born 2 December 1960) is a Denmark, Danish software engineer who co-designed several programming languages and development tools. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi (programming lang ...

–

Turbo Pascal Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment (IDE) for the programming language Pascal (programming language), Pascal running on the operating systems CP/M, CP/M-86, and MS-DOS. ...

Delphi Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), was an ancient sacred precinct and the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient Classical antiquity, classical world. The A ...

, C#,

TypeScript TypeScript (abbreviated as TS) is a high-level programming language that adds static typing with optional type annotations to JavaScript. It is designed for developing large applications and transpiles to JavaScript. It is developed by Micr ...

* Ted Henter – founded Henter-Joyce (now part of

Freedom Scientific Freedom Scientific is a company that makes accessibility products for computer users with low vision and blindness. The software they create enables screen magnification, screen reading, and use of refreshable braille displays with modern compu ...

) created JAWS screen reader software for blind people *

Andy Hertzfeld Andrew Jay Hertzfeld (born April 6, 1953) is an American software engineer who was a member of Apple Computer's original Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer fr ...

– co-created

, cofounded

General Magic General Magic was an American software and electronics company co-founded by Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Marc Porat. Based in Mountain View, California, the company developed precursors to "USB, software modems, small touchscreens, to ...

, cofounded Eazel * D. Richard Hipp – created

SQLite SQLite ( "S-Q-L-ite", "sequel-ite") is a free and open-source relational database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it ...

* C. A. R. Hoare – first implementation of

quicksort Quicksort is an efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm. Quicksort was developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 and published in 1961. It is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. Overall, it is slightly faster than ...

compiler,

Communicating sequential processes In computer science, communicating sequential processes (CSP) 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 p ...

* Louis Hodes –

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...

logic programming Logic programming is a programming, database and knowledge representation paradigm based on formal logic. A logic program is a set of sentences in logical form, representing knowledge about some problem domain. Computation is performed by applyin ...

cancer research Cancer research is research into cancer to identify causes and develop strategies for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and cure. Cancer research ranges from epidemiology, molecular bioscience to the performance of clinical trials to evaluate ...

John Henry Holland John Henry Holland (February 2, 1929 – August 9, 2015) was an American scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan. He was a pioneer in what became known as genetic algorithms. Biograph ...

– pioneer in what became known as

genetic algorithms In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to g ...

, developed Holland's schema theorem, Learning Classifier Systems * Allen Holub – author and public speaker,

Agile Manifesto Agile software development is an umbrella term for approaches to developing software that reflect the values and principles agreed upon by ''The Agile Alliance'', a group of 17 software practitioners, in 2001. As documented in their ''Manifesto ...

signatory * Bri Holt - founder of Vidmeter and

Engrade Engrade was an educational technology company that provides online learning management system and educational assessment products to K-12 school districts. Engrade was founded in 2003 and later acquired by McGraw-Hill Education in January 2014.Emp ...

Grace Hopper Grace Brewster Hopper (; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of mach ...

–

Harvard Mark I The Harvard Mark I, or IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), was one of the earliest general-purpose electromechanical computers used in the war effort during the last part of World War II. One of the first programs to run on th ...

computer,

FLOW-MATIC FLOW-MATIC, originally known as B-0 (Business Language version 0), was the first English-like data processing language. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand Remington Rand, Inc. was an early American business machine manufactu ...

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural, and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily ...

* Paul Hudak –

language design, textbooks on it and

computer music Computer music is the application of computing technology in music composition, to help human composers create new music or to have computers independently create music, such as with algorithmic composition programs. It includes the theory and ...

* David A. Huffman – created the

Huffman coding In computer science and information theory, a Huffman code is a particular type of optimal prefix code that is commonly used for lossless data compression. The process of finding or using such a code is Huffman coding, an algorithm developed by ...

; a compression algorithm * Roger Hui – co-authored J * Dave Hyatt – co-authored

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

* P. J. Hyett – cofounded

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

I

Miguel de Icaza Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972) is a Mexican-American programmer and activist, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. Biography Early years De Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied Mathematics at the Nation ...

–

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

project leader, initiated Mono project * Roberto Ierusalimschy – Lua leading architect *

Dan Ingalls Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr. (born 1944) is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementer of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the bytecoded virtual machine that m ...

– cocreated

and Bitblt *

Geir Ivarsøy Geir Ivarsøy (June 27, 1957 – March 9, 2006) was the lead programmer at Opera Software. He and Jon von Tetzchner were part of a research group at the Norwegian state phone company (now known as Telenor) where they developed browsing software ...

– cocreated

Opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...

web browser * Ken Iverson – APL, J * Toru Iwatani – created ''

Pac-Man ''Pac-Man,'' originally called in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and published by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The pla ...

J

* Bo Jangeborg –

ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer developed and marketed by Sinclair Research. One of the most influential computers ever made and one of the all-time bestselling British computers, over five million units were sold. ...

games * Paul Jardetzky – authored server program for the first webcam * Rod Johnson – created Spring Framework, founded

SpringSource Spring (previously known as SpringSource) was a software company founded by Rod Johnson, who also created the Spring Framework, an open-source application framework for enterprise Java applications. VMware purchased Spring for $420 million in ...

Stephen C. Johnson Stephen Curtis Johnson (born 1944) is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs and AT&T for nearly 20 years. He is best known for Yacc, Lint, spell, and the Portable C Compiler, which contributed to the spread of Unix and C. He has also c ...

–

yacc Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler) is a computer program for the Unix operating system developed by Stephen C. Johnson. It is a lookahead left-to-right rightmost derivation (LALR) parser generator, generating a LALR parser (the part of a co ...

* Lynne Jolitz –

386BSD 386BSD (also known as "Jolix") is a Unix-like operating system that was developed by couple Lynne and William "Bill" Jolitz. Released as free and open source in 1992, it was the first fully operational Unix built to run on IBM PC-compatible s ...

* William Jolitz –

Bill Joy William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO ...

–

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

, csh, vi, cofounded

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

* Robert K. Jung – created ARJ

K

Poul-Henning Kamp Poul-Henning Kamp () is a Danish computer software developer known for work on various projects including FreeBSD and Varnish cache, Varnish. He currently resides in Slagelse, Denmark. Involvement in the FreeBSD project Poul-Henning Kamp has bee ...

–

MD5 The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4, and was specified in 1992 as Request for Comments, RFC 1321. MD5 ...

password hash algorithm, FreeBSD GEOM and

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 K ...

, part of UFS2,

FreeBSD Jail The jail mechanism is an implementation of FreeBSD's OS-level virtualisation that allows system administrators to partition a FreeBSD-derived computer system into several independent mini-systems called ''jails'', all sharing the same kernel, with ...

malloc C dynamic memory allocation refers to performing manual memory management for dynamic memory allocation in the C programming language via a group of functions in the C standard library, namely , , , and . The C++ programming language includ ...

and the

Beerware Beerware is a tongue-in-cheek software license with permissive terms, which grants the right to do anything with the source code, assuming the license notice is preserved. Description Should the user of the code consider the software usefu ...

license *

Mitch Kapor Mitchell David Kapor ( ; born November 1, 1950) is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus Software, Lotus, where he was instr ...

–

Lotus 1-2-3 Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles ...

, founded

Lotus Development Corporation Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was sold to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 sprea ...

Phil Katz Phillip Walter Katz (November 3, 1962 – April 14, 2000) 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 that ran under DOS. ...

– created

Zip (file format) ZIP is an archive file format that supports lossless compression, lossless data compression. A ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed. The ZIP file format permits a number of Data compression, compr ...

, authored

PKZIP PKZIP is a file archiving computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes softwar ...

Ted Kaehler Ted Kaehler (born 1950) is an American computer scientist known for his role in the development of several System software, system Method (computer programming), methods. He is most noted for his contributions to the programming languages Smallta ...

– contributions to

Squeak Squeak is an object-oriented, class-based, and reflective programming language. It was derived from Smalltalk-80 by a group that included some of Smalltalk-80's original developers, initially at Apple Computer, then at Walt Disney Imaginee ...

Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist who pioneered work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox ...

–

Dynabook The KiddiComp concept, envisioned by Alan Kay in 1968 while a PhD candidate, and later developed and described as the Dynabook in his 1972 proposal "A personal computer for children of all ages", outlines the requirements for a conceptual porta ...

Object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impl ...

* Mel Kaye –

LGP-30 The LGP-30, standing for Librascope General Purpose and then Librascope General Precision, is an early off-the-shelf computer. It was manufactured by the Librascope company of Glendale, California (a division of General Precision Inc.), and so ...

and RPC-4000 machine code programmer at

Royal McBee Royal Consumer Information Products, Inc. (formerly The Royal Typewriter Company) is an American technology company founded in January 1904 as a manufacturer of typewriters. Royal’s product line has evolved to include cash registers, shredders, ...

in the 1950s, famed as " Real Programmer" in

the Story of Mel The Story of Mel is an archetypical piece of computer programming folklore. Its subject, Melvin Kaye, is an exemplary " Real Programmer" whose subtle techniques fascinate his colleagues. Story Ed Nather's ''The Story of Mel'' details the extrao ...

* Stan Kelly-Bootle –

Manchester Mark 1 The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operat ...

, '' The Devil's DP Dictionary'' * John Kemeny – cocreated

BASIC Basic or BASIC may refer to: Science and technology * BASIC, a computer programming language * Basic (chemistry), having the properties of a base * Basic access authentication, in HTTP Entertainment * Basic (film), ''Basic'' (film), a 2003 film ...

Brian Kernighan Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born January 30, 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known ...

– cocreated AWK (being the ''K'' in that name), authored ditroff text-formatting tool *

Gary Kildall Gary Arlen Kildall (; May 19, 1942 – July 11, 1994) was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur. During the 1970s, Kildall created the CP/M operating system among other operating systems and programming tools, and s ...

–

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/Intel 8085, 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Dig ...

MP/M MP/M (Multi-Programming Monitor Control Program) is a discontinued multi-user version of the CP/M operating system, created by Digital Research developer Tom Rolander in 1979. It allowed multiple users to connect to a single computer, each u ...

, PL/M, also known for work on

data-flow analysis Data-flow analysis is a technique for gathering information about the possible set of values calculated at various points in a computer program. It forms the foundation for a wide variety of compiler optimizations and program verification techn ...

, binary recompilers, multitasking operating systems, graphical user interfaces, disk caching,

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

file system and data structures, early multi-media technologies, founded

Digital Research Digital Research, Inc. (DR or DRI) was a privately held American software company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser ...

(DRI) * Tom Knight –

* Jim Knopf – a.k.a. Jim Button, author PC-File flatfile database; cocreated

* Donald E. Knuth –

TeX Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...

, CWEB,

Metafont Metafont is a page description language, description language used to define raster fonts. It is also the name of the interpreter (computer software), interpreter that executes Metafont code, generating the bitmap fonts that can be embedded into ...

, ''

'', Concrete Mathematics * Andrew R. Koenig – co-authored books on C and C++ and former Project Editor of ISO/ANSI standards committee for C++ *

Gennady Korotkevich Gennady Korotkevich (, Hienadź Karatkievič, ; born 25 September 1994) is a Belarusian competitive sport programmer who has won major international competitions since the age of 11, as well as numerous national competitions. Widely regarded ...

- Competitive programmer, first to break the 3900 barrier on Codeforces * Cornelis H. A. Koster – ''Report on the Algorithmic Language

'', ALGOL 68 transput

L

* Andre LaMothe – created XGameStation, one of world's first video game console development kits * Leslie Lamport –

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

Butler Lampson Butler W. Lampson (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the Lawrencev ...

– QED original co-author *

Peter Landin Peter John Landin (5 June 1930 – 3 June 2009) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the first to realise that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to the development of both ...

–

ISWIM ISWIM (If You See What I Mean) is an abstract computer programming language (or a family of languages) devised by Peter Landin and first described in his article "The Next 700 Programming Languages", published in the ''Communications of the ACM ...

J operator In computer science, Peter Landin's J operator is a programming construct that post-composes a lambda expression with the continuation to the current lambda-context. The resulting “function” is first-class and can be passed on to subsequent ...

SECD machine The SECD machine is a highly influential (see: '' Landin's contribution'') virtual machine and abstract machine intended as a target for compilers of functional programming languages. The letters stand for stack, environment, control, dump, respe ...

off-side rule The off-side rule describes syntax of a computer programming language that defines the bounds of a code block via indentation. The term was coined by Peter Landin, possibly as a pun on the offside law in association football. An off-side ...

syntactic sugar In computer science, syntactic sugar is syntax within a programming language that is designed to make things easier to read or to express. It makes the language "sweeter" for human use: things can be expressed more clearly, more concisely, or in an ...

, IFIP WG 2.1 member * Tom Lane – main author of libjpeg, major developer of

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

Sam Lantinga Sam Oscar Lantinga is a computer programmer. He used to be the lead software engineer at Blizzard Entertainment, where he was known to the community as Slouken. He is best known as the creator of the Simple DirectMedia Layer, a very popular open ...

– created Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) * Dick Lathwell – codeveloped APL\360 *

Chris Lattner Christopher Arthur Lattner (born 1978) is an American software engineer and creator of LLVM, the Clang compiler, the Swift (programming language), Swift programming language and the MLIR (software), MLIR compiler infrastructure. After his PhD ...

– main author of

LLVM LLVM, also called LLVM Core, is a target-independent optimizer and code generator. It can be used to develop a Compiler#Front end, frontend for any programming language and a Compiler#Back end, backend for any instruction set architecture. LLVM i ...

project * Samuel J. Leffler –

, FlexFAX, LibTIFF, FreeBSD Wireless Device Drivers *

Rasmus Lerdorf Rasmus Lerdorf (; born 22 November 1968) is a Danish-Canadian programmer. He co-authored and inspired the PHP scripting language, authoring the first two versions of the language and participating in the development of later versions led by a g ...

– original created

* Michael Lesk – Lex * Gordon Letwin – architected

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

, authored High Performance File System (HPFS) *

Jochen Liedtke Jochen Liedtke (26 May 1953 – 10 June 2001) was a German computer scientist, noted for his work on microkernel operating systems, especially in creating the L4 microkernel family. Career Education In the mid-1970s Liedtke studied for a d ...

–

s Eumel, L3, L4 * Charles H. Lindsey – IFIP WG 2.1 member, ''Revised Report on

'' *

Håkon Wium Lie Håkon Wium Lie (born July 26, 1965) is a Norwegian web pioneer, a standards activist, and the chairman of YesLogic, developers of Prince CSS-based PDF rendering software. He is best known for developing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) while work ...

– co-authored Cascading Style Sheets *

Mike Little Mike Little (born 12 May 1962) is an English web developer and writer. He is the co-founder of the free and open source web publishing software WordPress. Biography Mike Little was born in Manchester, England in 1962 to a Nigerian father, who ...

- co-authored

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

* Yanhong Annie Liu –

s, program design,

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

systems, optimizing, analysis, and transformations, intelligent systems,

computer security Computer security (also cybersecurity, digital security, or information technology (IT) security) is a subdiscipline within the field of information security. It consists of the protection of computer software, systems and computer network, n ...

, IFIP WG 2.1 member * Robert Love –

developer *

Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-pur ...

– first programmer (of

Charles Babbage Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Babbage is considered ...

s' Analytical Engine) * Al Lowe – created '' Leisure Suit Larry'' series * David Luckham –

Automated theorem proving Automated theorem proving (also known as ATP or automated deduction) is a subfield of automated reasoning and mathematical logic dealing with proving mathematical theorems by computer programs. Automated reasoning over mathematical proof was a majo ...

, Stanford Pascal Verifier,

Complex event processing Event processing is a method of tracking and analyzing (processing) streams of information (data) about things that happen (events), and deriving a conclusion from them. Complex event processing (CEP) consists of a set of concepts and techniques de ...

Rational Software Rational Machines is an enterprise founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981 to provide tools to expand the use of modern software engineering practices, particularly explicit modular architecture and iterative development. It changed its n ...

cofounder ( Ada

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

) *

Hans Peter Luhn Hans Peter Luhn (July 1, 1896 – August 19, 1964) was a German-American researcher in the field of computer science and Library & Information Science for IBM, and creator of the Luhn algorithm, KWIC (Key Words In Context) indexing, and s ...

– hash-coding, linked list, searching and sorting binary tree

M

* Khaled Mardam-Bey – created mIRC (Internet Relay Chat Client) *

Simon Marlow Simon Marlow is a British computer scientist, programmer, author, and co-developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) for the programming language Haskell. He and Simon Peyton Jones won the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award in 201 ...

–

developer, book author; co-developer:

Glasgow Haskell Compiler The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) is a native or machine code compiler for the functional programming language Haskell. It provides a cross-platform software environment for writing and testing Haskell code and supports many extensions, libra ...

, Haxl remote data access

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

* Robert C. Martin – authored ''Clean Code'', ''The Clean Coder'', leader of Clean Code movement, signatory on the

John Mashey John R. Mashey (born 1946) is an American computer scientist, director and entrepreneur. He is a consultant for Techviser, a boutique consulting firm. Career Mashey holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Pennsylvania State University, where he de ...

– authored

PWB shell The PWB shell (also known as the Mashey shell) was a Unix shell. History The PWB shell was a modified (and generally constrained to be upward-compatible) version of the Thompson shell with additional features to increase usability for programmi ...

, also called Mashey shell * Yukihiro Matsumoto "Matz" –

Ruby Ruby is a pinkish-red-to-blood-red-colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapph ...

language * Conor McBride – researches

type theory In mathematics and theoretical computer science, a type theory is the formal presentation of a specific type system. Type theory is the academic study of type systems. Some type theories serve as alternatives to set theory as a foundation of ...

functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by Function application, applying and Function composition (computer science), composing Function (computer science), functions. It is a declarat ...

; cocreated

Epigram (programming language) Epigram is a functional programming language with dependent types, and the integrated development environment (IDE) usually packaged with the language. Epigram's type system is strong enough to express program specifications. The goal is to supp ...

with James McKinna; member IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi * John McCarthy –

, IFIP WG 2.1 member,

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

* Craig McClanahan – original author

Jakarta Struts Apache Struts 2 is an open-source web application framework for developing Java EE web applications. It uses and extends the Java Servlet API to encourage developers to adopt a model–view–controller (MVC) architecture. The WebWork framework s ...

, architect of

Tomcat Catalina Apache Tomcat (called "Tomcat" for short) is a free and open-source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies. It provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can also ...

servlet container * Daniel D. McCracken – professor at City College and authored ''Guide to

Algol ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

Programming'', ''Guide to

Cobol COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural, and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily ...

Programming'', ''Guide to Fortran Programming'' (1957) * Scott A. McGregor – architect and development team lead of

Windows 1.0, co-authored

version 11, and developed Cedar Viewers Windows System at

Xerox PARC Future Concepts division (formerly Palo Alto Research Center, PARC and Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a div ...

Douglas McIlroy Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932) is an American mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and de ...

– macros,

pipes and filters In software engineering, a pipeline consists of a chain of processing elements ( processes, threads, coroutines, functions, ''etc.''), arranged so that the output of each element is the input of the next. The concept is analogous to a physical ...

, concept of

software componentry Component-based software engineering (CBSE), also called component-based development (CBD), is a style of software engineering that aims to construct a software system from components that are loosely-coupled and reusable. This emphasizes the sep ...

tools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.) *

Marshall Kirk McKusick Marshall Kirk McKusick (born January 19, 1954) is an American computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He served on the board of the USENIX Association from 1986 to 1992 and aga ...

–

Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginn ...

(BSD), work on FFS, implemented

soft updates Soft updates is an approach to maintaining file system metadata integrity in the event of a crash or power outage. Soft updates work by tracking and enforcing dependencies among updates to file system metadata. Soft updates are an alternative t ...

* Sid Meier – author, ''

Civilization A civilization (also spelled civilisation in British English) is any complex society characterized by the development of state (polity), the state, social stratification, urban area, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyon ...

'' and '' Railroad Tycoon'', cofounded

MicroProse MicroProse is an American video game publisher and video game developer, developer founded by Bill Stealey, Sid Meier, and Andy Hollis in 1982. It developed and published numerous games, including starting the ''Civilization (series), Civilizat ...

Bertrand Meyer Bertrand Meyer (; ; born 21 November 1950) is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He created the Eiffel programming language and the concept of design by contract. Education and academic career Meyer ...

– Eiffel, ''

Object-oriented Software Construction ''Object-Oriented Software Construction'', also called OOSC, is a book by Bertrand Meyer, widely considered a foundational text of object-oriented programming. The first edition was published in 1988; the second edition, extensively revised and e ...

'',

design by contract Design by contract (DbC), also known as contract programming, programming by contract and design-by-contract programming, is an approach for designing software. It prescribes that software designers should define formal, precise and verifiable ...

Bob Miner Robert Nimrod Miner (December 23, 1941 – November 11, 1994) was an American businessman. He was the co-founder of Oracle Corporation and the producer of Oracle's relational database management system. From 1977 until 1992, Miner led product de ...

– co-created

, cofounded

* Jeff Minter – psychedelic, and often

llama The llama (; or ) (''Lama glama'') is a domesticated South American camelid, widely used as a List of meat animals, meat and pack animal by Inca empire, Andean cultures since the pre-Columbian era. Llamas are social animals and live with ...

-related

s * James G. Mitchell – WATFOR compiler,

Mesa (programming language) Mesa is a programming language developed in the mid 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California, United States. The language name was a pun based upon the programming language catchphrases of the time, because Mesa is a ...

, Spring (operating system),

ARM architecture ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer, RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for central processing unit, com ...

* Arvind Mithal –

formal verification In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics. Formal ver ...

of large digital systems, developing dynamic

dataflow architecture Dataflow architecture is a dataflow-based computer architecture that directly contrasts the traditional von Neumann architecture or control flow architecture. Dataflow architectures have no program counter, in concept: the executability and ex ...

s (Id, pH), compiling on parallel machines *

Petr Mitrichev Petr Mitrichev (born 19 March 1985) is a Russian Competitive programming, competitive programmer who has won multiple major international competitions. His accomplishments include gold (2000, 2002) and silver (2001) medals in the International Ol ...

– competitive programmer *

Cleve Moler Cleve Barry Moler (born August 17, 1939) is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical compu ...

– co-authored

LINPACK LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and e ...

EISPACK EISPACK is a software library for numerical computation of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices, written in FORTRAN. It contains subroutines for calculating the eigenvalues of nine classes of matrices: complex general, complex Hermitian, real ...

, and

MATLAB MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementat ...

Lou Montulli Louis J. Montulli II (best known as Lou Montulli) is a computer 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 (web browser), Lynx, with Michael Grobe and Charle ...

– created

Lynx A lynx ( ; : lynx or lynxes) is any of the four wikt:extant, extant species (the Canada lynx, Iberian lynx, Eurasian lynx and the bobcat) within the medium-sized wild Felidae, cat genus ''Lynx''. The name originated in Middle Engl ...

browser,

cookies A cookie is a sweet biscuit with high sugar and fat content. Cookie dough is softer than that used for other types of biscuit, and they are cooked longer at lower temperatures. The dough typically contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of ...

, 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 The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

* Bram Moolenaar – authored text-editor Vim * David A. Moon –

Maclisp Maclisp (or MACLISP, sometimes styled MacLisp or MacLISP) is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp. It originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Project MAC (from which it derived its prefix) in the late 19 ...

, ZetaLisp * Charles H. Moore – created Forth language *

Roger Moore Sir Roger George Moore (14 October 192723 May 2017) was an English actor. He was the actor to portray Ian Fleming's fictional secret agent James Bond (literary character), James Bond in the Eon Productions/MGM Studios film series, playing the ...

– co-developed APL\360, created IPSANET, cofounded I. P. Sharp Associates *

Matt Mullenweg Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is known as a co-founder of the free and open-source web publishing software WordPress, and the founder of Automattic. Early life and education Mu ...

– co-authored

* Boyd Munro – Australian developed

GRASP A grasp is an act of taking, holding or seizing firmly with (or as if with) the hand. An example of a grasp is the handshake, wherein two people grasp one of each other's like hands. In zoology Zoology ( , ) is the scientific study of an ...

, owns SDI, one of earliest software development companies *

Mike Muuss Michael John Muuss (October 16, 1958 – November 20, 2000) was the American author of the freeware network tool Ping (networking utility), ping, as well as the first interactive ray tracing program. Career A graduate of Johns Hopkins Universit ...

– authored ping, network tool to detect hosts

N

* Patrick Naughton – early

designer, HotJava *

Peter Naur Peter Naur (25 October 1928 – 3 January 2016) was a Danish computer science pioneer and 2005 Turing Award winner. He is best remembered as a contributor, with John Backus, to the Backus–Naur form (BNF) notation used in describing the syntax ...

(1928–2016) –

Backus–Naur form In computer science, Backus–Naur form (BNF, pronounced ), also known as Backus normal form, is a notation system for defining the Syntax (programming languages), syntax of Programming language, programming languages and other Formal language, for ...

(BNF),

, IFIP WG 2.1 member *

Fredrik Neij Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij (born 27 April 1978), alias TiAMO, is the co-founder of The Pirate Bay, and the Swedish Internet service provider and web hosting company PRQ. Neij was one of the defendants in The Pirate Bay trial which began on 16 Fe ...

– cocreated

The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of Film, movies, music, video games, Pornographic film, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank , The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection ...

Graham Nelson Graham A. Nelson (born 1968) is a British mathematician, poet, and the creator of the Inform, Inform design system for creating interactive fiction (IF) games. He has authored several IF games, including ''Curses (computer game), Curses'' (1993) ...

– created

Inform Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-machine, Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released ...

authoring system for

interactive fiction Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text Command (computing), commands to control Player character, characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narrati ...

* Greg Nelson (1953–2015) –

satisfiability modulo theories In computer science and mathematical logic, satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) is the problem of determining whether a mathematical formula is satisfiable. It generalizes the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) to more complex formulas involv ...

, extended static checking,

program verification In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics. Formal ver ...

Modula-3 Modula-3 is a programming language conceived as a successor to an upgraded version of Modula-2 known as Modula-2+. It has been influential in research circles (influencing the designs of languages such as Java, C#, Python and Nim), but it ha ...

committee, ''Simplify'' theorem prover in

ESC/Java ESC/Java (and more recently ESC/Java2), the "Extended Static Checker for Java," is a programming tool that attempts to find common run-time errors in Java programs at compile time. The underlying approach used in ESC/Java is referred to as exten ...

Klára Dán von Neumann Klára Dán von Neumann (née Dán; 18 August 1911 – 10 November 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, self-taught engineer and computer scientist, noted as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first woman to execute m ...

(1911–1963) – principal programmer for the

MANIAC I __NOTOC__ The MANIAC I (Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model I) was an early computer built under the direction of Nicholas Metropolis at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. It ...

* Maurice Nivat (1937–2017) –

theoretical computer science Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the Abstraction, abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The Associati ...

, ''

Theoretical Computer Science Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the Abstraction, abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The Associati ...

'' journal,

, IFIP WG 2.1 member *

Peter Norton Peter Norton (born November 14, 1943) is an American programmer, software publisher, author, and philanthropist. He is best known for the computer programs and books that bear his name and portrait. Norton sold his software business to Symante ...

– programmed

Norton Utilities Norton Utilities is a utility software suite designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and maintain a computer. The latest version of the original series of Norton Utilities is Norton Utilities 16 for Windows XP/Vista/7/8, released 26 Octob ...

Kristen Nygaard Kristen Nygaard (27 August 1926 – 10 August 2002) was a Norwegian computer scientist, programming language pioneer, and politician. Internationally, Nygaard is acknowledged as the co-inventor of object-oriented programming and the programming ...

(1926–2002) –

O

* Ed Oates – cocreated

, cofounded

* Martin Odersky – Scala * Peter O'Hearn –

separation logic In computer science, separation logic is an extension of Hoare logic, a way of reasoning about programs. It was developed by John C. Reynolds, Peter O'Hearn, Samin Ishtiaq and Hongseok Yang, drawing upon early work by Rod Burstall. The assertio ...

, bunched logic, Infer Static Analyzer *

Jarkko Oikarinen Jarkko Oikarinen (born 16 August 1967) is a Finnish IT professional and the inventor of the first Internet chat network, called Internet Relay Chat (IRC), where he is known as WiZ. Biography and career Oikarinen was born in Kuusamo. While worki ...

– created

Internet Relay Chat IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for Many-to-many, group communication in discussion forums, called ''#Channels, channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via instant mess ...

(IRC) * Andrew and Philip Oliver, the Oliver Twins – many

games including '' Dizzy'' *

John Ousterhout John Kenneth Ousterhout (, born October 15, 1954) is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He founded Electric Cloud with John Graham-Cumming. Ousterhout was previously a professor of com ...

– created

Tcl TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to: Business * TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company ** TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology * Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league * Trade Centre Limited ...

/ Tk

P

* Keith Packard –

Larry Page Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...

– cofounded Google, Inc. *

Alexey Pajitnov Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (born April 16, 1955) is a Russian-American computer engineer and video game designer. He is best known for creating, designing, and developing ''Tetris'' in 1985 while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre un ...

– created game

Tetris ''Tetris'' () is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. In ''Tetris'', falling tetromino shapes must be neatly sorted into a pile; once a horizontal line of the game board is filled in, it disa ...

on Electronika 60 *

Seymour Papert Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artif ...

–

Logo (programming language) Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. The name was coined by Feurzeig while he was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and derives from the Greek ''logos'', meaning 'word ...

* David Park (1935–1990) – first

implementation, expert in fairness, program schemas,

bisimulation In theoretical computer science a bisimulation is a binary relation between state transition systems, associating systems that behave in the same way in that one system simulates the other and vice versa. Intuitively two systems are bisimilar if ...

concurrent computing Concurrent computing is a form of computing in which several computations are executed '' concurrently''—during overlapping time periods—instead of ''sequentially—''with one completing before the next starts. This is a property of a syst ...

* Mike Paterson –

analysis of algorithms In computer science, the analysis of algorithms is the process of finding the computational complexity of algorithms—the amount of time, storage, or other resources needed to execute them. Usually, this involves determining a function that r ...

(complexity) *

Tim Paterson Tim Paterson (born 1 June 1956) is an American computer programmer, best known for creating 86-DOS, an operating system for the Intel 8086. This system emulated the application programming interface (API) of CP/M, which was created by Gary Kilda ...

– authored

86-DOS 86-DOS (known internally as QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System) is a discontinued operating system developed and marketed by Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for its Intel 8086-based computer kit. 86-DOS shared a few of its commands wi ...

(QDOS) *

Markus Persson Markus Alexej Persson ( , ; born 1 June 1979), known by the pseudonym Notch, is a Swedish video game programmer and Video game designer, designer. He is the creator of ''Minecraft'', which is the List of best-selling video games, best-selling ...

– created Minecraft * Jeffrey Peterson – key

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

architect, created Quepasa * Charles Petzold – authored many

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

programming books *

Simon Peyton Jones Simon Peyton Jones (born 18 January 1958) is a British computer scientist who researches the implementation and applications of functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional programming. Education Peyton Jones graduated fro ...

–

, C-- *

Rob Pike Robert Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. He is best known for his work on the Go programming language while working at Google and the Plan 9 operating system while working at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix t ...

– wrote first bitmapped window system for Unix, cocreated

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

character encoding, authored text editor sam and programming environment

acme Acme is Ancient Greek (ἀκμή; English transliteration: ''akmē'') for "the peak", "zenith" or "prime". It may refer to: Arts, entertainment and games * ''Acme'' (album), an album by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion * Acme and Septimius, a fic ...

, main author of Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, co-authored

Go (programming language) Go is a high-level programming language, high-level general purpose programming language that is static typing, statically typed and compiled language, compiled. It is known for the simplicity of its syntax and the efficiency of development th ...

Kent Pitman Kent M. Pitman (KMP) is a programmer who has been involved for many years in the design, implementation, and use of systems based on the programming languages Lisp and Scheme. , he has been President of HyperMeta Inc. Pitman was chair of the ad h ...

– technical contributor to the ANSI

standard * Robin Popplestone – COWSEL (renamed POP-1), POP-2,

POP-11 POP-11 is a Reflective programming, reflective, Dynamic compilation, incrementally compiled programming language with many of the features of an interpreted language. It is the core language of the Poplog Computer programming, programming system ...

languages, Poplog IDE;

Freddy II Freddy (1969–1971) and Freddy II (1973–1976) were experimental robots built in the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception (later Department of Artificial Intelligence, now part of the School of Informatics at the University of Edin ...

robot *

Tom Preston-Werner Thomas Preston-Werner (born May 27, 1979) is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the free and open-source software community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he l ...

– cofounded

R

* Theo de Raadt – founding member of

, founded

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system, security-focused, free software, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by fork (software development), forking NetBSD ...

and OpenSSH *

Brian Randell Brian Randell (born 1936) is a British computer scientist, and emeritus professor at the School of Computing, Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He specialises in research into software fault tolerance and dependability, and is a noted ...

–

, software

fault tolerance Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to maintain proper operation despite failures or faults in one or more of its components. This capability is essential for high-availability, mission-critical, or even life-critical systems. Fault t ...

dependability In systems engineering, dependability is a measure of a system's availability, reliability, maintainability, and in some cases, other characteristics such as durability, safety and security. In real-time computing, dependability is the ability to ...

, pre-1950

history of computing hardware The history of computing hardware spans the developments from early devices used for simple calculations to today's complex computers, encompassing advancements in both analog and digital technology. The first aids to computation were purely mec ...

* T. V. Raman – specializes in accessibility research ( Emacspeak, ChromeVox (screen reader for

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...

) *

Jef Raskin Jef Raskin (born Jeff Raskin; March 9, 1943 – February 26, 2005) was an American human–computer interface expert who conceived and began leading the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s. Early life and education Jef Raskin was bo ...

– started the

project in

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

, designed

Canon Cat The Canon Cat is a task-dedicated microcomputer released by Canon Inc. in 1987 for . Its appearance resembles dedicated word processors of the late 1970s to early 1980s, but it is far more powerful, and has many unique ideas for data manipulatio ...

computer, developed Archy (The Humane Environment) program *

Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the R ...

–

Open Source movement The open-source software movement is a social movement that supports the use of open-source licenses for some or all software, as part of the broader notion of open collaboration. The open-source movement was started to spread the concept/idea ...

, authored fetchmail *

Hans Reiser Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 19, 1963) is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. In April 2008, Reiser was convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, who disappeared in September 2006. He ...

– created

ReiserFS ReiserFS is a general-purpose, journaling file system initially designed and implemented by a team at Namesys led by Hans Reiser and licensed under GPLv2. Introduced in version 2.4.1 of the Linux kernel, it was the first journaling file syst ...

file system * John Resig – creator and lead developed jQuery JavaScript library * Craig Reynolds – created

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

computer graphics simulation *

John C. Reynolds John Charles Reynolds (June 1, 1935 – April 28, 2013) was an American computer scientist. Education and affiliations John Reynolds studied at Purdue University and then earned a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in theoretical physics from Harvard U ...

–

continuation In computer science, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation implements ( reifies) the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computat ...

s, definitional interpreters, defunctionalization, Forsythe, Gedanken language, intersection types, polymorphic lambda calculus, relational

parametricity In programming language theory, parametricity is an abstract uniformity property enjoyed by parametrically polymorphic functions, which captures the intuition that all instances of a polymorphic function act the same way. Idea Consider this ex ...

* Reinder van de Riet – Editor: ''Europe of Data and Knowledge Engineering'', COLOR-X event modeling language *

Dennis Ritchie Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and the Unix operating system and B language with long-time colleague Ken Thompson. Ritchie and Thomp ...

– C,

Plan 9 from Bell Labs Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has ...

, Inferno *

Ron Rivest Ronald Linn Rivest (; born May 6, 1947) is an American cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Profess ...

– cocreated RSA algorithm (being the ''R'' in that name). created RC4 and MD5 *

John Romero Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967) is an American video game developer. He co-founded id Software and designed their early games, including ''Wolfenstein 3D'' (1992), ''Doom (1993 video game), Doom'' (1993), ''Doom II'' (1994), ''Hexen ...

–

s ''

'', '' Quake'' * Blake Ross – co-authored

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

Douglas T. Ross Douglas Taylor "Doug" Ross (21 December 1929 – 31 January 2007) was an American computer scientist pioneer, and chairman of SofTech, Inc. He is most famous for originating the term CAD for computer-aided design, and is considered to be the fat ...

– Automatically Programmed Tools ( APT),

Computer-aided design Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve c ...

structured analysis and design technique Structured analysis and design technique (SADT) is a systems engineering and software engineering methodology for describing systems as a hierarchy of functions. SADT is a structured analysis modelling language, which uses two types of diagrams: ...

, ALGOL X *

Guido van Rossum Guido van Rossum (; born 31 January 1956) is a Dutch programmer. He is the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the " benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position on 12 July 2018. He ...

– Python * Philip Rubin –

articulatory synthesis Articulatory synthesis refers to computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of the human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there. The shape of the vocal tract can be controlled in a number of ways which us ...

(ASY), sinewave synthesis (SWS), and

HADES Hades (; , , later ), in the ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology, is the god of the dead and the king of the Greek underworld, underworld, with which his name became synonymous. Hades was the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea ...

signal processing system. *

Jeff Rulifson Johns Frederick (Jeff) Rulifson (born August 20, 1941) is an American computer scientist. Early life and education Johns Frederick Rulifson was born August 20, 1941, in Bellefontaine, Ohio. His father was Erwin Charles Rulifson and mother was Vir ...

– lead programmer on the NLS (computer system), NLS project *Rusty Russell – created iptables for linux *Steve Russell (computer scientist), Steve Russell – first

interpreter; original ''Spacewar!'' graphic video game *Mark Russinovich – Sysinternals.com, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView and RootkitRevealer

S

*Bob Sabiston – Rotoshop, interpolating rotoscope animation software *Muni Sakya – Nepalese software *Chris Sawyer – developed ''RollerCoaster Tycoon (video game), RollerCoaster Tycoon'' and the ''Transport Tycoon'' series *Cher Scarlett – Apple Inc., Apple, Webflow, Blizzard Entertainment, World Wide Technology, and USA Today *Bob Scheifler –

, Jini *Isai Scheinberg – IBM engineer, founded PokerStars *Bill Schelter – GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp *John M. Scholes, John Scholes – Direct functions *Randal L. Schwartz – Just another Perl hacker *Adi Shamir – cocreated RSA algorithm (being the ''S'' in that name) *Mike Shaver – founding member of Mozilla Organization *Cliff Shaw – Information Processing Language (IPL), the first AI language *Zed Shaw – wrote the Mongrel (web server), Mongrel Web Server, for Ruby web applications *Emily Short – prolific writer of Interactive fiction and co-developed

version 7 *Jacek Sieka – developed DC++ an open-source software, open-source, peer-to-peer file sharing, file-sharing client (computing), client *Daniel Siewiorek – electronic design automation, Reliability (computer networking), reliability computing, Context awareness, context aware mobile computing, Wearable computer, wearable computing, computer-aided design, rapid prototyping,

*Ken Silverman – created ''Duke Nukem 3D''{{'s graphics engine *Charles Simonyi – Hungarian notation, Bravo (software), Bravo (the first WYSIWYG text editor),

*Colin Simpson (Canadian author), Colin Simpson – developed CircuitLogix simulation software *Rich Skrenta – cofounded DMOZ *David Canfield Smith – invented Icon (computing), interface icons, programming by demonstration, developed graphical user interface, Xerox Star;

researcher, cofounded Dest Systems, Cognition *Matthew Smith (games programmer), Matthew Smith –

games, including ''Manic Miner'' and ''Jet Set Willy'' *Henry Spencer – C News, Regex *Joel Spolsky – cofounded Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow *Quentin Stafford-Fraser – authored original Virtual Network Computing, VNC viewer, first Windows VNC server, client program for the first webcam *Richard Stallman – Emacs, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GDB, founder and pioneer of

Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on

(ITS), Lisp machine manual *Guy L. Steele Jr. –

, Scheme (programming language), Scheme,

*Alexander Stepanov – created Standard Template Library *Christopher Strachey – draughts playing program *Ludvig Strigeus – created μTorrent, OpenTTD, ScummVM and the technology behind Spotify *Bjarne Stroustrup – created C++ *Zeev Suraski – cocreated

language *Gerald Jay Sussman – Scheme (programming language), Scheme *Bert Sutherland – computer graphics, Internet *Ivan Sutherland – computer graphics: Sketchpad, Evans & Sutherland *Herb Sutter – chair of ISO C++ standards committee and C++ expert *Gottfrid Svartholm – cocreated

*Aaron Swartz – software developer, writer, Internet activist *Tim Sweeney (game developer), Tim Sweeney – Unreal (1998 video game), The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ''ZZT''

T

*Amir Taaki – leading developer of Bitcoin project *Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Andrew Tanenbaum – Minix *Audrey Tang, Audrey "Autrijus" Tang – designed Pugs (compiler), Pugs

–Interpreter (computing), interpreter for Perl 6 (now Raku (programming language), Raku); Digital Affairs Minister, Taiwan 2022–2024 *Simon Tatham – Netwide Assembler (NASM), PuTTY *Larry Tesler – the

code browser, debugger and object inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy (software), Gypsy word processor *Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner – cocreated

web browser *Avie Tevanian – authored Mach (kernel), Mach kernel *Ken Thompson – mainly designed and authored

, Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, B (programming language), B and Bon languages (precursors of C), created

character encoding, introduced regular expressions in QED and co-authored Go (programming language), Go language *Simon Thompson (professor), Simon Thompson –

research, textbooks; Cardano (blockchain platform), Cardano domain-specific languages: Cardano (blockchain platform)#Decentralized finance, Marlowe *Michael Tiemann – G++, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) *Linus Torvalds – original author and current maintainer of

kernel and created Git, a source code management system *Andrew Tridgell – Samba (software), Samba, Rsync * Roy Trubshaw –

– together with

, created MUDs *Bob Truel – cofounded DMOZ *Alan Turing – mathematician, computer scientist and Cryptanalysis, cryptanalyst *David Turner (computer scientist), David Turner – SASL (programming language), SASL, Kent Recursive Calculator, Miranda (programming language), Miranda, IFIP WG 2.1 member

V

*Wietse Venema – Postfix (software), Postfix, Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN), TCP Wrapper *Bernard Vauquois – pioneered computer science in France,

(MT) theory and practice including ''Bernard Vauquois#Vauquois triangle, Vauquois triangle'',

*Pat Villani – original author

/DOS-C kernel, maintainer of defunct ''Linux for Windows 9x'' distribution *Paul Vixie – BIND, Cron *Patrick Volkerding – original author and current maintainer of Slackware Linux Distribution

W

*Eiiti Wada – ALGOL N, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) X 0208, 0212, Happy Hacking Keyboard *John Walker (programmer), John Walker – cofounded Autodesk *Larry Wall – Warp (1980s space-war game), rn (newsreader), rn, patch (Unix), patch, Perl *Bob Wallace (computer scientist), Bob Wallace – author PC-Write word processor; considered

cocreator *Chris Wanstrath – cofounded

, created the Atom (text editor) and the Mustache (template system), Mustache template system *John Warnock – created PostScript *Robert Watson (computer scientist), Robert Watson – FreeBSD network stack parallelism, TrustedBSD project and OpenBSM *Joseph Henry Wegstein – ALGOL 58,

, IFIP WG 2.1 member, data processing technical standards, fingerprint analysis *Pei-Yuan Wei – authored ViolaWWW, one of earliest graphical browsers *Peter J. Weinberger – cocreated AWK (being the ''W'' in that name) *Jim Weirich – created Rake, Builder, and RubyGems for

; popular teacher and conference speaker *Joseph Weizenbaum – created ELIZA *David Wheeler (computer scientist), David Wheeler – cocreated subroutine; designed WAKE (cipher), WAKE; co-designed Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows–Wheeler transform *Molly White (writer), Molly White – HubSpot; creator of ''Web3 Is Going Just Great'' *Arthur Whitney (computer scientist), Arthur Whitney – A+ (programming language), A+, K (programming language), K *why the lucky stiff – created libraries and writing for

, including quirky, popular ''Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby'' to teach programming *Adriaan van Wijngaarden – Dutch pioneer; ARRA,

, IFIP WG 2.1 member *Bruce Wilcox – created Computer Go, programmed NEMESIS Go Master *Evan Williams (Internet entrepreneur), Evan Williams – created and cofounded language Logo (programming language), Logo *Roberta Williams, Roberta and Ken Williams (game developer), Ken Williams – Sierra Entertainment, ''King's Quest'', graphic adventure game *Sophie Wilson – designed instruction set for ARM architecture family, Acorn RISC Machine, authored BBC BASIC *Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language *

– ALGOL W, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Pascal,

*Stephen Wolfram – created Mathematica *Don Woods (programmer), Don Woods – INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure *Philip Woodward – ambiguity function, sinc function, Dirac comb, comb operator, rep operator,

*Steve Wozniak – ''Breakout (video game), Breakout'', Apple Integer BASIC, cofounded Apple Inc. *Will Wright (game designer), Will Wright – created the Sim City series, cofounded Maxis *William Wulf –

system programming language + optimizing compiler, Hydra (operating system), Hydra

, Tartan Laboratories

Y

*Jerry Yang – co-created

*Victor Yngve – authored first string processing language, COMIT *Nobuo Yoneda – Yoneda lemma, Yoneda product,

, IFIP WG 2.1 member

Z

*Matei Zaharia – created Apache Spark *Jamie Zawinski – XEmacs, Lucid Emacs, Netscape Navigator,

, XScreenSaver *Phil Zimmermann – created encryption software Pretty Good Privacy, PGP, the ZRTP protocol, and Zfone *Mark Zuckerberg – created Facebook

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

V

W

Y

Z

See also