David Noble (floppy disk)
In the 1960s, the engineers at IBM who had developed the RAMAC computer and the early disk drives understood the significance of small, removable disk memory. In 1967, IBM gave their San Jose, California storage development center a task to develop a simple and inexpensive system for loading microcode into..Read More
Gary Starkweather (laser printer)
In 1938 the American physicist and inventor Chester Carlson (1906-1968) (see the nearby image) invented a dry printing process, called later Xerography (the word comes from the Greek for dry writing), the foundation technology for copiers and laser printers to come. Carlson applied for a patent in 1939 and in..Read More
Harold McFarland (PDP-11)
After the famous PDP-1 in 1960, DEC established a successful business and during the middle 1960s launched its remarkable 12-bit PDP-8 series of minicomputers. During the late 1960s however, the time had come for the introduction of a 16-bit machine to replace the PDP-8. In 1967, one of DEC’s key..Read More
Ken Thompson (Unix)
At the end of the 1960s, the young engineer at AT&T Bell Labs Kenneth (Ken) Lane Thompson (born 4 February 1943) worked on the project of the Multics operating system. Multics (Multiplexing Information and Computer Services) was an experimental operating system for the GE-645 mainframe, developed in the 1960s by..Read More
Charles Goldfarb
The idea of markup languages was apparently first publicly presented by the engineer William W. Tunnicliffe (1922-1996) from Washington, D.C. In September of 1967, during a meeting at the Canadian Government Printing Office, Tunnicliffe gave a presentation on the separation of the information content of documents from their format. In..Read More
Harry Pyle and Victor Poor
It was during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1969 when the engineer Victor Dale Poor (1933-2012) and his fellow amateur radio colleague Harry Starck Pyle (1949-2013) produced the underlying architecture of the modern microprocessor on a living room floor. Several months ago, Pyle, still a student, was hired for a computer-related summer..Read More
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on computers, object-oriented programming, and windowing graphical user interface design. He was born on 17 May 1940, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology at the University of Colorado at..Read More
Edgar Codd
The English computer scientist Edgar Codd is the creator of the relational databases model, an extremely influential general theory of data management, the foundation of RDBMS (Relational Databases Management Systems), used everywhere nowadays. n the early 1940s Edgar studied mathematics and chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford, before serving as a..Read More
Charles Rosen
Shakey, the first mobile robot with the ability to perceive and reason about its surroundings, was created in the late 1960s at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by a group of engineers, managed by Charles Rosen (1917-2002), as the project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). n..Read More