1. Early Computer Inventors

Maurice V. Wilkes; Developer of EDSAC
Tom Kilburn; Developer of the "Manchester Baby"
Jay Forrester; Head of the "Whirlwind" project
Sergei A. Lebedev; Developer of the "MESM"
Heinz Nixdorf; Father of decentralized data processing
Heinz Billing; Computer data storage
N. Joachim Lehmann; Numerical analysis
Robert Piloty; PERM
Friedrich L. Bauer; PERM, ALGOL, and the logical relay computer "Stanislaus"

 

2. Chip Pioneers

William B. Shockley Jr.; Germanium transistor
Gordon K. Teal; Semiconductor, Bipolar transistor
Gordon E. Moore; Fairchild, Intel, and Moore's Law
Jack St. Clair Kilby; "Father of the Microchip"
Carver Andress Mead; Gallium arsenide transistor, VLSI technology

 

3. Minicomputer Inventors

Kenneth Harry "Ken" Olsen; Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
An Wang; Wang Laboratories
Otto and Ilse Müller; CTM-Computer

 

4. Supercomputer Pioneers

Seymour Roger Cray; Control Data Corporation, Cray
William Daniel "Danny" Hillis; Thinking Machines Corporation, "Connection Machine"
Thomas L. Sterling; "Beowulf Clusters"
Gene Myron Amdahl; Amdahl Corporation, Amdahl 470 V6

 

5. PC Revolutionaries

Steve Jobs; Apple Inc.
Stephen G. "Steve" Wozniak; Apple Inc.
H. Edward Roberts; Altair 8800

 

6. Internet Pioneers

Larry Roberts; ARPANET and packet switching
Raymond S. Tomlinson; Email communication
Tim Berners-Lee; Inventor of the World Wide Web

 

7. Programming Masters

Donald Ervin "Don" Knuth; "The Art of Computer Programming"
Niklaus Emil Wirth; Pascal, Modula, Oberon, and Wirth's Law
John Warner Backus; FORTRAN and the Backus-Naur Form (BNF)
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper; COBOL and Mark I

 

8. Software Gurus

Bill Gates; Microsoft and BASIC
Linus Torvalds; (Linux) Open Source Software
Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr.; IBM System/360

 

9. Creative Designers

Alan C. Kay; Dynabook and Smalltalk
Susan Kare; Menu Icons
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann; MIRALab, virtual Marilyn and Social Robot Nadine

 

10. AI Pioneers

Geoffrey Hinton; Machine Learning
Edward A. Feigenbaum; Expert Systems and "Computers and Thought"
Noam Chomsky; Formal Languages

 

11. Robotics Experts

Isaac Asimov; Science Fiction "I, Robot"
Hiroshi Ishiguro; Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, Androids
Masahiro Mori; "Uncanny Valley"

 

12. Cybersecurity

Whitfield Diffie und Martin Hellman; Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange
Ronald L. Rivest; Public-Key Cryptography
Philip R. Zimmermann; "Pretty Good Privacy"
Herwart (Wau) Holland-Moritz; Chaos Computer Club (CCC)

 

13. Visionary Entrepreneurs

Steve Jobs; Apple Inc.
Elon Musk; Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Open AI
Bill Gates; Co-founder of Microsoft
Jeff Bezos; Founder of Amazon
Heinz Nixdorf; Father of decentralized data processing

 

14. Social Media Trendsetters

Mark Zuckerberg; Founder of Facebook
Jack Dorsey; Twitter and Square
Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen; Founders of YouTube

 

15. Games

Nolan K. Bushnell; Atari and Pong
PlayStation; Sony Interactive Entertainment
Lara Croft; Tomb Raider by Core Design
League of Legends (LoL); Riot Games
Minecraft; Mojang Studios
Roblox; Online Gaming Platform