Ada Lovelace: Wrote notes in 1843 with what is often called the first computer program, for Babbage's Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage: Designed the Analytical Engine, an early mechanical computer idea, in the 1830s
Alan Turing: British mathematician who defined the Turing machine and helped break the Enigma code
Turing machine: An abstract model of computation described by Turing in 1936
Grace Hopper: American Navy officer who helped create the first compiler and the COBOL language
John von Neumann: Described the stored-program computer architecture
Claude Shannon: Founded information theory in 1948 and popularized the word bit
Katherine Johnson: NASA mathematician whose calculations helped astronauts reach orbit and the Moon
Margaret Hamilton: Led software development for Apollo's guidance computers
Dorothy Vaughan: NASA mathematician who became a leader in programming (FORTRAN) at Langley
Tim Berners-Lee: Invented the World Wide Web in 1989
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn: Designed the TCP/IP protocols of the internet
Dennis Ritchie: Created the C language and co-created Unix
Ken Thompson: Co-creator of Unix
Linus Torvalds: Created the Linux kernel (1991) and Git (2005)
Guido van Rossum: Created Python
Brendan Eich: Created JavaScript in 1995
James Gosling: Led the creation of Java
Bjarne Stroustrup: Created C++
Yukihiro Matsumoto: Created Ruby
Bill Gates: Co-founded Microsoft in 1975
Paul Allen: Co-founded Microsoft
Steve Jobs: Co-founded Apple in 1976
Steve Wozniak: Designed the Apple I and II computers
Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Founded Google in 1998
Mark Zuckerberg: Co-founded Facebook in 2004
Jeff Bezos: Founded Amazon in 1994
Douglas Engelbart: Invented the computer mouse; demonstrated it in 1968
Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo: Called the Mother of All Demos; showed the mouse, video calls and hypertext
Ivan Sutherland: Created Sketchpad (1963), an early graphics program
Alan Kay: Pioneer of object-oriented programming and the personal computer
Donald Knuth: Wrote The Art of Computer Programming
Edsger Dijkstra: Created a famous shortest-path algorithm
Barbara Liskov: Computer scientist who won the Turing Award for work on data abstraction
Radia Perlman: Invented the spanning-tree protocol for networks
Fei-Fei Li: Computer scientist who helped create ImageNet
Geoffrey Hinton: Pioneer of neural networks and deep learning
Yann LeCun: Pioneer of convolutional neural networks
Yoshua Bengio: Pioneer of deep learning
Turing Award: The top prize in computer science, named for Alan Turing
ENIAC: One of the first general-purpose electronic computers, completed in 1945
Colossus: British code-breaking computer used in World War II
Transistor: Invented in 1947 at Bell Labs
Integrated circuit: Chip with many components, invented in the late 1950s
Microprocessor: A whole CPU on one chip; Intel 4004 came out in 1971
ARPANET: Early network that sent its first message in 1969
First email: Sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971
Personal computer: Home computers became popular in the late 1970s and 1980s
Apple II: A popular early personal computer from 1977
IBM PC: Introduced in 1981
Macintosh: Apple computer launched in 1984 with a graphical interface
Windows 95: Microsoft system that made the Start menu famous
World Wide Web goes public: 1991
Mosaic browser: Early graphical web browser from 1993
Google founded: 1998
Wikipedia launched: 2001
YouTube founded: 2005
iPhone introduced: 2007
Smartphone age: Phones became pocket computers after 2007
Cloud computing: Rented online computing, which grew in the late 2000s
Bitcoin created: 2009 by a person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto
ChatGPT released: November 2022
Moore's law: The observation that chip transistor counts double about every two years
Gordon Moore: Co-founder of Intel who described Moore's law in 1965
Hedy Lamarr: Actress and inventor who co-developed frequency hopping, an idea used in modern wireless
Mary Allen Wilkes: Programmer of the LINC, an early personal computer, in the 1960s
Jean Bartik: One of the six original ENIAC programmers
Annie Easley: NASA computer scientist who worked on rocket software
Mark Dean: IBM engineer who helped design the original IBM PC and holds key patents in PC technology
Gladys West: Mathematician whose work contributed to GPS

Free flashcards from Peabody at peabody.kids/flashcards/tech-computer-scientists-and-history