Items13The creator’s order
  1. 1Steve ShirleySteve ShirleyBorn 16 Sept 1933Software services from home, 1962. Shirley, who arrived in Britain as a child refugee on the Kindertransport, founded Freelance Programmers from her dining table in 1962, employing mainly women programmers working part-time from home, an early model of remote work. It wrote software for clients…0i
  2. 2Sandra KurtzigSandra KurtzigBorn 21 Oct 1947Manufacturing software. Kurtzig started ASK Computer Systems in a spare bedroom in 1972 with $2,000, writing programs for companies, then built MANMAN, software that let factories plan materials and production on minicomputers rather than expensive mainframes. ASK's 1981 listing made her one of the…0i
  3. 3Judith FaulknerJudith FaulknerElectronic health records. Faulkner founded the company that became Epic Systems in a Madison basement in 1979, writing patient-record software, and built it into the dominant supplier of electronic records to large American hospitals, run from a campus in Verona, Wisconsin. Epic stayed private,…0i
  4. 4Judith EstrinJudith EstrinNetworking companies. Estrin worked on early internet protocols in Vint Cerf's group at Stanford, then co-founded Bridge Communications in 1981 with her husband Bill Carrico, an early maker of equipment linking office computer networks, followed by Network Computing Devices and Precept Software,…0
  5. 5Sandy LernerSandy LernerRouters for the internet. Lerner and her then husband Leonard Bosack, who ran computer networks in different Stanford departments, co-founded Cisco in 1984 to sell multi-protocol routers that let incompatible networks talk to each other. Cisco's routers became the backbone equipment of the growing…0
  6. 6Kim PoleseKim PoleseJava and software distribution. Polese was the product manager at Sun Microsystems who led the launch of Java in 1995, working with James Gosling's team. In 1996 she co-founded Marimba with three Java engineers to build Castanet, software that pushed applications and updates automatically to many…0i
  7. 7Diane GreeneDiane GreeneBorn 9 Jun 1955Virtualisation. Greene co-founded VMware in 1998 with Mendel Rosenblum, her husband, and Stanford colleagues Ed Bugnion, Scott Devine and Edward Wang, and served as chief executive. Their software let one x86 server run many separate virtual machines, which cut data-centre costs and became the…0i
  8. 8Martha Lane FoxMartha Lane FoxBorn 10 Feb 1973Online travel in Britain. Lane Fox co-founded lastminute.com in 1998 with Brent Hoberman, selling unsold flights, hotel rooms and theatre seats at short notice, which matched airlines' need to fill empty capacity with customers' wish for bargains. Its 2000 listing at the peak of the dot-com boom…0i
  9. 9Anne WojcickiAnne WojcickiBorn 28 Jul 1973Consumer genetics. Wojcicki co-founded 23andMe in 2006 with Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza, selling saliva-based genetic tests directly to the public for ancestry and health reports, and building one of the world's largest genetic databases for research. American regulators halted its health reports…0i
  10. 10Daphne KollerDaphne KollerBorn 27 Aug 1968Online courses at scale. Koller, a Stanford machine learning professor, co-founded Coursera in 2012 with Andrew Ng, partnering with universities to put full courses online with video lectures, automatically graded exercises and peer review. Millions enrolled, though completion rates were low and…0i