Items24The creator’s order
  1. 1Ken OlsenKen OlsenDigital Equipment Corporation. Olsen was an engineer at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked on the Whirlwind and TX-0 transistor computers. In 1957 he and Harlan Anderson left to found DEC, and its PDP minicomputers brought interactive computing out of military labs and into university…0i
  2. 2Robert NoyceRobert NoyceBorn 12 Dec 1927Integrated circuits. At Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959 Noyce worked out how to build a whole circuit on one piece of silicon, using Jean Hoerni's planar process; Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments reached a similar idea months earlier. In 1968 he co-founded Intel with Gordon Moore, turning chip…0i
  3. 3Amar BoseAmar BoseBose. An MIT electrical engineering professor, Bose was disappointed by an expensive hi-fi and began studying how people actually hear sound in a room. He founded the Bose Corporation in 1964 to turn that psychoacoustic research into speakers, and the company later pioneered noise-cancelling…0i
  4. 4Andrew ViterbiAndrew ViterbiBorn 9 Mar 1935Viterbi algorithm, Linkabit and Qualcomm. As a UCLA academic in 1967 Viterbi devised the decoding method that bears his name, now used in satellite links, mobile phones and speech recognition, and chose not to patent it. He co-founded the consultancy Linkabit with Irwin Jacobs and Leonard Kleinrock…0i
  5. 5Irwin M. JacobsIrwin M. JacobsQualcomm. Jacobs taught communications theory at MIT and the University of California, San Diego, and co-wrote a standard textbook on it before co-founding Linkabit and then, in 1985, Qualcomm. He pushed code-division multiple access, a technique from military radio research, into commercial mobile…0i
  6. 6Robert MetcalfeRobert MetcalfeBorn 7 Apr 1946Ethernet and 3Com. At Xerox PARC in 1973 Metcalfe and David Boggs designed Ethernet to link the lab's experimental computers and printers. Xerox did little with it, so in 1979 Metcalfe founded 3Com to sell network cards, and persuaded Digital, Intel and Xerox to publish Ethernet as an open standard…0i
  7. 7Michael StonebrakerMichael StonebrakerBorn 11 Oct 1943Relational databases. At Berkeley Stonebraker led Ingres in the 1970s and Postgres in the 1980s, academic prototypes whose freely available code seeded a generation of database products, PostgreSQL among them. He has repeatedly turned his research into companies, including Ingres, Illustra,…0i
  8. 8James H. ClarkJames H. ClarkBorn 23 Mar 1944Silicon Graphics. As a Stanford associate professor Clark designed the Geometry Engine with his students, a chip that did the heavy maths of three-dimensional graphics in hardware. In 1982 he left with several of those students to found Silicon Graphics, whose workstations rendered film effects and…0i
  9. 9Andy BechtolsheimAndy BechtolsheimBorn 30 Sept 1955Sun Microsystems. As a Stanford graduate student Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation board for the university network, and Stanford licensed the design to several companies. When none made much of it he co-founded Sun in 1982 with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy, selling networked…0i
  10. 10Cleve MolerCleve MolerBorn 17 Aug 1939MATLAB and MathWorks. Moler helped write the LINPACK and EISPACK numerical libraries and in the late 1970s created MATLAB so his students at the University of New Mexico could use them without writing Fortran. The engineer Jack Little saw its value, rewrote it in C, and in 1984 the two founded…0i