Please study the 22 vocabulary terms below and press the Mark Complete button to continue.
- Ada Lovelace
- (December 10, 1815 - November 27, 1852) British mathematician known for being the world's first computer programmer as well as envisioning computers as more than just military number crunchers
- Alan Mathison Turing
- (June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954) English computer scientist known as the "father of computer science"; inventor of a famous test, which is used as an empirical basis for what makes a computer a computer
- Bill Gates
- (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
- Brendan Eich
- (born July 4, 1961) American computer programmer and technology executive who invented the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla Foundation and Brave browser project
- Charles Babbage
- (December 26, 1791 - October 18, 1871) English mathematician and analytical philosopher who drew up plans for the first programmable computer called the Difference Engine
- Dennis Ritchie
- (born September 9, 1941) American inventor of the C programming language
- Edgar Frank Codd
- (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
- George Boole
- (November 2, 1815 - December 8, 1864) English mathematician and philosopher who invented the boolean value
- Gordon Moore
- (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
- Grace Hopper
- (December 9, 1906 - January 1, 1992) American computer scientist credited with inventing the first high-level programming language, FLOW-MATIC, which heavily inspired COBOL
- Guido van Rossum
- (born Jan 31, 1956) Dutch inventor of the Python programming language
- James Gosling
- (born May 19, 1955) Canadian computer scientist known as the father of the Java language
- John Warner Backus
- (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
- Ken Thompson
- (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
- Linus Torvalds
- (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"
- Margaret Hamilton
- (born August 17, 1936) American computer scientist who wrote the guidance system for NASA's Apollo moon missions and whose "priority display" innovation is credited with saving the mission from disaster
- Rasmus Lerdorf
- (born November 22, 1968) Danish inventor of the PHP programming language, currently the world's most popular web programming language
- Steve Jobs
- (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 Wozniak
- (born August 11, 1950) American co-founder of Apple Computer, fifth grade math teacher, famous for designing the first commercially successful home computer (Apple II)
- Tim Berners-Lee
- (born June 8, 1955) Englishman known as the father of the World Wide Web; in 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project based on URIs, HTTP and HTML; he also founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994
- Vannevar Bush
- (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
- Yukihiro Matsumoto
- (born April 14, 1965) Japanese creator of the Ruby programming language, considered to be the most object-oriented language ever created
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Ada Lovelace was actually born Augusta Ada Byron, the only child of poet Lord Byron and mathematician Lady Byron.
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Alan Turing helped invent the 'Tunny' machine, which cracked the Germans' 'Enigma machine' encryption code during World War II.
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The boy told his mother he wanted to be as rich as Bill Gates.
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Some IT projects seem to take forever, but legendary programmer Brendan Eich coded the first version of JavaScript in just 10 days.
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Charles Babbage would likely be overwhelmed at the power of a typical desktop computer today.
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Dennis Ritchie did a really good job when writing the C programming language in 1969, because it's still widely used today.
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Edgar Frank Codd was known for pressuring IBM to introduce RBDMs to its customers, which later provided huge benefits to everyone.
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All modern computers owe a debt to George Boole's algebraic calculations.
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Gordon Moore donated $600 million to Caltech in 2001, which is perhaps the largest gift ever to an institution of higher education.
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In 1947 while working away on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, a moth got stuck in the circuitry and thus the term "computer bug" was coined.
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Guido van Rossum has been working at Google since 2005, where he is allowed to spend half his day improving the Python language.
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James Gosling earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University with a doctoral thesis entitled, "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints".
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John Warner Backus was famous in computer circles for inventing FORTRAN, as well as his formal language definition called the Backus-Naur form (BNF).
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Ken Thompson wrote many books including 1995's 'Plan 9 from Bell Labs'.
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Linus Torvalds will go down in history as the father of Linux, the 'Unix for the masses'.
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Among her other notable accomplishments, Margaret Hamilton is credited with inventing the term "software engineer".
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Rasmus Lerdorf is known for inflaming object-oriented gurus by stating that procedural code is sometimes a better and faster approach for speed and scalability on the web.
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Steve Jobs was known for making high quality computers which were fashionable and extremely usable.
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Steve Wozniak is a well-respected figure in the history of computing because of his love of people and technology over money.
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Tim Berners-Lee was knighted because of his remarkable invention, the World Wide Web.
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in 1949 Vannevar Bush wrote the important article 'As We May Think', which laid out the fundamental properties and vision for multimedia and hypertext.
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Yukihiro Matsumoto usually releases new versions of Ruby on Christmas Day and many programmers consider it "the gift that keeps on giving".