This article is a list of individuals that helped create, develop, and imagine what computers and electronics could do.
| Person | Achievement | Ach. Date |
| John Atanasoff | Built the first electronic digital computer, the ABC, though it was neither programmable nor Turing-complete. | 1939 |
| Charles Babbage | Designed the Analytical Engine and built a prototype for a less powerful mechanical calculator. | 1822
1837 |
| John Backus | Invented FORTRAN (Formula Translation), the first practical high-level programming language, and he formulated the Backus-Naur form that described the formal language syntax. | 1954
1963 |
| George Boole | Formalized boolean algebra, the basis for digital logic and computer science. |
| Alonzo Church | Founded contributions to theoretical computer science, specifically for the development of the lambda calculus and the discovery of the undecidable problem within it. | 1936 |
| Wesley A. Clark | Designed LINC, the first functional computer scaled down and priced for the individual user. Put in service in 1963, many of its features are seen as prototypes of what were to be essential elements of personal computers. | 1962 |
| James Cooley | With John W. Tukey, created the Fast Fourier Transform. |
| Ole-Johan Dahl | With Kristen Nygaard, invented the proto-object oriented language SIMULA. | 1962 |
| Edsger Dijkstra | For algorithms, Goto considered harmful, the semaphore (programming), rigor, and pedagogy. |
| J. Presper Eckert | With John Mauchly, designed and built the ENIAC, the first modern (all electronic, Turing-complete) computer, and the UNIVAC I, the first commercially available computer. | 1943
1951 |
| Douglas Engelbart | Best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English); as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose Augment team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs. |
| Gottlob Frege | Whose development of first-order predicate calculus was a crucial precursor requirement to develop computation theory. | 1879 |
| C.A.R. Hoare | Developed the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) and Quicksort. |
| Kurt Gödel | Proved that Peano axiomatized arithmetic could not be both logically consistent and complete in first-order predicate calculus. Church, Kleene, and Turing developed the foundations of computation theory based on corollaries to Gödel's work. | 1931 |
| James Gosling | Developed the Java programming language, the most wide-spread portable computing language ever developed. | |
| Grace Hopper | Pioneered work on the necessity for high-level programming languages, which she termed automatic programming, and wrote the A-O compiler, which heavily influenced the COBOL language. |
| Kenneth Iverson | Invented the APL and for his contribution to interactive computing. |
| Jacek Karpinski | Developed the first differential analyzer that used transistors, and he developed one of the first machine learning algorithms for character and image recognition. Also the inventor of one of the first minicomputers, the K-202. |
| Stephen Cole Kleene | Pioneered work with Alonzo Church in Lambda Calculus that first laid down the foundations of computation theory. | 1936 |
| Donald Knuth | For The Art of Computer Programming and TeX. | 1968
1989 |
| Gottfried Leibniz | Whose huge advances in symbolic logic, such as the Calculus ratiocinator, were heavily influential on Gottlob Frege, whose development of first-order predicate calculus was crucial for the theoretical foundations of computer science. He was greatly influenced by Ramon Llull |
| Ramon Llull | For his multiple symbolic representations machines, his "Ars Combinatoria", and his pioneering notions of symbolic representation and manipulation to produce knowledge. He was a huge influence on Leibniz. He is often considered a kind of founding father for computer science. |
| Ada Lovelace | Began the study of scientific computation, specifically for her "Sketch of the Analytical Engine", an analysis of Babbage's work and for the namesake for the modern computer language, Ada. |
| John Mauchly | With J. Presper Eckert, designed and built the ENIAC, the first modern (all electronic, Turing-complete) computer, and the UNIVAC I, the first commercially available computer. | 1943
1951 |
| John McCarthy | Invented LISP, a functional programming language. | 1955 |
| John von Neumann | Devised the von Neumann architecture upon which most modern computers are based. | 1945 |
| Kristen Nygaard | With Ole-Johan Dahl, invented the proto-object oriented language SIMULA. | 1962 |
| Emil L. Post | Developed the Post machine as a model of computation, independently of Turing. Known also for developing truth tables, the Post correspondence problem used in recursion theory as well as proving what is knows as Post's theorem. |
| Dennis Ritchie | Pioneered the C programming language and the UNIX computer operating system at Bell Labs. |
| Claude Shannon | Founded information theory and practical digital circuit design. |
| Herbert Simon | A political scientist and economist who pioneered artificial intelligence. Co-creator of the Logic Theory Machine and the General Problem Solver programs. | 1956
1957 |
| John W. Tukey | With James Cooley, created the Fast Fourier Transform. |
| Alan Turing | For founding contributions to computer science, for the formulation of the Turing machine computational model, and for the design of the Pilot ACE. |
| Maurice Wilkes | Built the first practical stored program computer (EDSAC) to be completed and for being credited with the ideas of several high-level programming language constructs. |
| Niklaus Wirth | Programming language designer, including Pascal and Modula-2. | 1970
1978 |
| Konrad Zuse | Built the first functional tape-stored-program-controlled computer, the Z3. The Z3 was proven to be Turing-complete in 1998. | 1941 |
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