Items24The creator’s order
  1. 1Douglas EngelbartDouglas EngelbartBorn 30 Jan 1925The mouse and interactive computing. At the Stanford Research Institute Engelbart's team built the oN-Line System, and in a 1968 San Francisco demonstration he showed a mouse, windows of text, hypertext links, shared editing and video calls, all at once. He conceived the mouse and holds its patent;…0i
  2. 2Bill English (computer engineer)Bill English (computer engineer)Born 27 Jan 1929Building the mouse. English, Engelbart's chief engineer, turned his sketch into the first working mouse in 1964, a wooden box with two wheels, and engineered the cameras, links and screens that made the 1968 demonstration possible. He moved to Xerox PARC in 1971, where his team replaced the wheels…0i
  3. 3Marcian HoffMarcian HoffBorn 28 Oct 1937The microprocessor architecture. When the Japanese calculator maker Busicom asked Intel in 1969 for a set of custom chips, Hoff proposed instead a general-purpose processor that software could adapt to any task, and worked out its architecture with Stan Mazor. That became the 4004 of 1971, the…0i
  4. 4Federico FagginFederico FagginBorn 1 Dec 1941Making the microprocessor real. Faggin had developed silicon-gate chip technology at Fairchild, and at Intel he led the logic and circuit design that turned Hoff's 4004 architecture into working silicon in 1971, with Busicom's Masatoshi Shima; he etched his initials on the chip. He went on to lead…0i
  5. 5Alan KayAlan KayBorn 17 May 1940The Dynabook idea and overlapping windows. In 1972 Kay described the Dynabook, a book-sized computer for children, years before such hardware was possible. At Xerox PARC his Learning Research Group built Smalltalk, an object-oriented language whose graphical environment on the Alto introduced…0i
  6. 6Adele Goldberg (computer scientist)Adele Goldberg (computer scientist)Born 22 Jul 1945Smalltalk-80. Goldberg joined Kay's group at PARC in 1973, ran its experiments teaching children to program and co-developed Smalltalk with Dan Ingalls and others. She led the work that released Smalltalk-80 beyond Xerox and co-wrote the books that defined it, and in 1979 she was among those who…0i
  7. 7Charles P. ThackerCharles P. ThackerBorn 26 Feb 1943The Alto. Thacker designed the hardware of the Xerox Alto in 1973, a computer meant for one person with a bitmapped portrait screen, a mouse and a network connection, and he contributed to Ethernet alongside it. About two thousand were built for research rather than sale, but the Alto showed what a…0i
  8. 8Butler LampsonButler LampsonBorn 23 Dec 1943Why Alto. Lampson's 1972 memo made the case for giving every researcher a computer of their own, and he designed much of the Alto's system software. With Charles Simonyi he built Bravo, the first editor to show text on screen as it would print, and he worked on the software for PARC's laser…0i
  9. 9Charles SimonyiCharles SimonyiBorn 10 Sept 1948WYSIWYG word processing. A Hungarian-born programmer, Simonyi wrote Bravo with Butler Lampson at PARC in 1974, the editor that first showed formatted text on screen exactly as it would print. Recruited to Microsoft in 1981, he carried the idea into Multiplan and Microsoft Word, leading their…0i
  10. 10Gary KildallGary KildallBorn 19 May 1942CP/M and the BIOS. Kildall wrote CP/M in 1974 to run a floppy disk drive on an Intel-based machine, and split out the small hardware-specific part into a separate layer he called the BIOS. That meant one operating system, and the programs written for it, could run on hundreds of different makers'…0i