Unit #7 Objectives: People in IT

The objective of unit People in IT is to learn to recognize and understand the 25 key unit vocabulary terms. This is accomplished by completing the readings and other activities.

Unit Vocabulary

Below is a list of key vocabulary terms in this unit. You can also Print out the vocabulary list.

(23 June 1912 - 7 June 1954) English computer scientist known as the "father of computer science"; inventor of a famous test, which is used as a empirical basis for what makes a computer a computer

Alan Turing helped invent the "Tunny" machine which cracked the Germans "Enigma machine" encryption code during World War II.

(born 2 September 1936) Hungarian-American Chairman of Intel Corporation during much of its rapid financial growth in the 1980's and 1990's

The Wall Street spokesman said that Andy Grove is not just a great scientist, but a financial genius as well.

(born October 28, 1955) American founder of Microsoft Corporation and developer of Windows; he was the richest man in the world for many years before he gave away a lot of his wealth to charity.

The boy told his mother he wanted to be as rich as Bill Gates.

(born December 30, 1950) Danish inventor of the C++ programming language

Bjarne Stroustrup's non-research interests include general history, light literature, photography, hiking and running, travel, and music.

(December 26, 1791 - October 18, 1871) English mathematician, analytical philosopher who drew up plans for the first programmable computer called the Difference Engine

Charles Babbage would likely be overwhelmed at the power of a typical desktop computer today.

(born September 9, 1941) American inventor of the C programming language

Without the C programming language being as good as it was, it is likely that Unix would have not gained such widespread popularity.

(August 23, 1923 - April 18, 2003) English computer scientist known for his work in inventing the "relational model" for databases, which is still in use today

Edgar Frank Codd was known for pressuring IBM to introduce RBDMs to its customers, which later provided huge benefits to everyone.

(2 November 1815 - 8 December 1864) English mathematician and philosopher who invented the boolen value

All modern computers owe a debt to George Boole's algebraic calculations.

(born January 3, 1929) American co-founder of Intel Corporation and the author of a law later named after him which predicts the speed increase of integrated circuits over time

In 2001, Gordon Moore donated $600 million to Caltech, the largest gift ever to an institution of higher education.

(born Jan 31, 1956) Dutch inventor of the Python programming language

Guido van Rossum has been working at Google since 2005, where he is allowed to spend half his day improving the Python language.

(born May 19, 1955) Canadian computer scientist known as the father of the Java langage.

James Gosling earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University with a doctoral thesis entitled, "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints"

(December 3, 1924 - March 17, 2007) American computer scientist known for leading the team who invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language

John Warner Backus was famous in computer circles for inventing FORTRAN, as well as his formal language definition called the Backus-Naur form (BNF).

(born February 4, 1943) American co-inventor of the Unix Operating system in 1969 while working for AT&T; he also invented the 'B' programming language and worked on the UTF-8 character set

Ken Thompson wrote many books including 1995's "Plan 9 from Bell Labs."

(born September 27, 1954) American programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.

Larry Wall oversees development of Perl and serves as the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Perl project.

(born December 28, 1969) Finnish creator of the Linux operating system in 1991; his motivation was to create a Unix-like Operating System for the x86 processor as an alternative to Windows, which he described as a "broken toy"

Linus Torvalds will go down in history as the father of Linux, or "Unix for the masses."

(born March 8, 1922) German-American who was instrumental in inventing the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console

In the late 1970's Ralph Baer invented Simon, a very popular electronic game, which looks suspiciously like the Google Chrome logo.

(born November 22, 1968) Danish inventor of the PHP programming language, currently the world's most popular web programming language.

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for inflaming object-oriented gurus by stating that procedural code is a better and faster approach for speed and scalability on the web.

(born March 16, 1953) American freedom activist and founder of the free software movement, the GNU project, and the Free Software Foundation

Richard Stallman is a renowned programmer, whose major accomplishments include copyleft, GNU Emacs, and the GNU C Compiler.

(December 12, 1927 - June 3, 1990) American engineer and businessman nicknamed "The Mayor of Silicon Valley", he co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968

There is a book about Robert Noyce called, "The man behind the microchip."

(September 28, 1925 - October 5, 1996) American supercomputer architect who founded the company named after himself; he quickly became known as manufacturing the world's fastest computers for over 30 years

Before he died in a car accident, Seymour Cray predicted the decline of the supercomputer because of the tremendous growth in speed of the PC.

(February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011) American founder and former CEO of Apple Computer in 1976 and a leading figure in the computer industry; he helped popularize the concept of the home computer and was one of the first to see the commercial potential of the GUI and mouse

Steve Jobs was known for making high quality computers which were fashionable and extremely usable.

(born August 11, 1950) American co-founder of Apple Computer, fifth grade math teacher, and famous for being a great programmer and early home computer pioneer

The professor told us that Steve Wozniak is a much-loved figure in the history of computers, because of his love of people and technology over money.

(born 8 June 1955) Englishman known as the father of the World Wide Web; in 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project based based on URIs, HTTP and HTML; he also founded the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C )in 1994

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted because of his remarkable inventions including the World Wide Web.

(March 11, 1890 - June 28, 1974) American Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare; he also came up with an idea called the 'memex' which was a forefather to hypertext.

in 1949 Vannevar Bush wrote the important article, "As We May Think," which laid out the fundamental properties and vision for multimedia and hypertext.

(born April 14th, 1965) Japanese creator of the Ruby programming language, considered to be the most object-oriented language ever created

Yukihiro Matsumoto is a member of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has served on missions.