A to Z of Computer Scientists, Updated Edition

Harry Henderson

Description

Praise for the previous edition:

"Entries are written with enough clarity and simplicity to appeal to general audiences. The additional readings that end each profile give excellent pointers for more detailed information...Recommended."—Choice

"This well-written collection of biographies of the most important contributors to the computer world...is a valuable resource for those interested in the men and women who were instrumental in making the world we live in today. This is a recommended purchase for reference collections."—American Reference Books Annual

"...this one is recommended for high-school, public, and undergraduate libraries."—Booklist

The significant role that the computer plays in the business world, schools, and homes speaks to the impact it has on our daily lives. While many people are familiar with the Internet, online shopping, and basic computer technology, the scientists who pioneered this digital age are generally less well-known.

A to Z of Computer Scientists, Updated Edition features 136 computer pioneers and shows the ways in which these individuals developed their ideas, overcame technical and institutional challenges, collaborated with colleagues, and created products or institutions of lasting importance. The cutting-edge, contemporary entries explore a diverse group of inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, and visionaries in the computer science field.

People covered include:

• Grace Hopper (1906–1992)


• Dennis Ritchie (1941–2011)


• Brian Kernighan (1942–present)


• Howard Rheingold (1947–present)


• Bjarne Stroustrup (1950–present)


• Esther Dyson (1951–present)


• Silvio Micali (1954–present)


• Jeff Bezos (1964–present)


• Pierre Omidyar (1967–present)


• Jerry Yang (1968–present)

Sujets

• Computer Science
• Computers
• Young Adult Nonfiction
• Informatique
• Biography
• Visionary
• Technology
• Technologie
• History
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438183275
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A to Z of Computer Scientists, Updated Edition
Copyright © 2020 by Harry Henderson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
Facts On File An imprint of Infobase 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
ISBN 978-1-4381-8327-5
You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Entries Aiken, Howard Allen, Frances Amdahl, Gene M. Andreessen, Marc Atanasoff, John Vincent Babbage, Charles Backus, John Baran, Paul Barlow, John Perry Bartik, Jean Bell, Chester Gordon Berners-Lee, Tim Bezos, Jeffrey P. Boole, George Bricklin, Daniel Brooks, Frederick P. Burroughs, William S. Bush, Vannevar Bushnell, Nolan Case, Steve Cerf, Vinton Church, Alonzo Codd, Edgar F. Corbat , Fernando Crawford, Chris Cray, Seymour Davies, Donald Watts Dell, Michael Dertouzos, Michael L. Diffie, Bailey Whitfield Dijkstra, Edsger W. Drexler, K. Eric Dreyfus, Hubert Dyson, Esther Eckert, J. Presper Eckert, Wallace J. Ellison, Larry Engelbart, Douglas Estridge, Philip Donald Eubanks, Gordon Fanning, Shawn Feigenbaum, Edward Felsenstein, Lee Forrester, Jay W. Gates, Bill Gelernter, David Hillel Gibson, William Goldstine, Adele Goldstine, Herman Heine Goldwasser, Shafi Gosling, James Grove, Andrew S. Hamming, Richard Wesley Hassabis, Demis Hellman, Martin Hennessy, John L. Hewlett, William Redington Hillis, W. Daniel Holberton, Frances Elizabeth Hollerith, Herman Hopper, Grace Murray Ive, Jonathon Jobs, Steve Joy, Bill Kahn, Philippe Kahn, Robert Kapor, Mitchell Kay, Alan C. Kemeny, John G. Kernighan, Brian Kilburn, Thomas M. Kilby, Jack Kildall, Gary Kleinrock, Leonard Knuth, Donald E. Kurzweil, Raymond C. Lamport, Leslie Lanier, Jaron Lenat, Douglas B. Licklider, J. C. R. Liskov, Barbara Lovelace, Augusta Ada Byron Maes, Pattie Mauchly, John McCarthy, John McNealy, Scott G. Metcalfe, Robert M. Micali, Silvio Minsky, Marvin Moore, Gordon E. Nelson, Ted von Neumann, John Newell, Allen Noyce, Robert Nygaard, Kristen Olsen, Kenneth H. Omidyar, Pierre Packard, David Papert, Seymour Patterson, David Pearl, Judea Perlis, Alan J. Postel, Jonathan B. Rabin, Michael O. Raymond, Eric S. Rees, Mina Spiegel Rheingold, Howard Ritchie, Dennis Roberts, Lawrence Sammet, Jean E. Samuel, Arthur Lee Shannon, Claude E. Simon, Herbert A. Stallman, Richard Stibitz, George Stoll, Clifford Stonebraker, Michael Stroustrup, Bjarne Sutherland, Ivan Thacker, Charles Thompson, Kenneth Tomlinson, Ray Torres Quevedo, Leonardo Torvalds, Linus Turing, Alan Turkle, Sherry Valiant, Leslie Gabriel Wang, An Watson, Thomas J., Sr. Watson, Thomas, Jr. Weizenbaum, Joseph Wiener, Norbert Wirth, Niklaus Wozniak, Steve Yang, Jerry Zuse, Konrad Support Materials Chronology Bibliography
Entries
Aiken, Howard
(b. 1900–d. 1973)
inventor, computer engineer

Howard Hathaway Aiken was a pioneer in the development of automatic calculating machines. Born on March 8, 1900, in Hoboken, New Jersey, he grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He pursued his interest in electrical engineering by working at a utility company while in high school. Aiken then earned a B.A. degree in electrical engineering in 1923 at the University of Wisconsin.
By 1935, Aiken was working on the physics of how electric charges were conducted in vacuum tubes —an important question for the new technology of electronics. This work required tedious, error-prone hand calculation. Aiken therefore began to investigate the possibility of building a large-scale, programmable, automatic computing device. As a doctoral student at Harvard, Aiken aroused considerable interest in his ideas, particularly from Thomas J. Watson Sr., head of International Business Machines (IBM). In 1939, IBM agreed to underwrite the building of Aiken's first calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), which became known as the Harvard Mark I.
Mechanical and electromechanical calculators were nothing new: indeed, machines from IBM, Burroughs, and others were being increasingly used in business settings. However, ordinary calculators required that operators manually set up and run each operation step by step in the complete sequence needed to solve a problem. Aiken wanted a calculator that could be programmed to carry out the sequence automatically, storing the results of each calculation for use by the next. He wanted a general-purpose programmable machine rather than an assembly of special-purpose arithmetic units.
Earlier complex calculators (such as the Analytical Engine which Charles Babbage had proposed a century earlier) were very difficult to implement because of the precise tolerances needed for the intricate assembly of mechanical parts. Aiken, however, had access to a variety of tested, reliable components, including card punches, readers, and electric typewriters from IBM and the mechanical electromagnetic relays used for automatic switching in the telephone industry.
Aiken's Mark I calculator used decimal numbers (23 digits and a sign) rather than the binary numbers of the majority of later computers. Sixty registers held whatever constant data numbers were needed to solve a particular problem. The operator turned a rotary dial to enter each digit of each constant number required for the calculation. Variable data and program instructions were entered from punched paper tape. Calculations had to be broken down into specific instruction codes similar to those in later low-level programming languages such as "store this number in this register" or "add this number to the number in that register." The results (usually tables of mathematical function values) could be printed by an electric typewriter or output on punched cards.
The Mark I was built at IBM's factory in Endicott, New York. It underwent its first full-scale test on Christmas Day 1943, illustrating the urgency of work under wartime conditions. The bus-sized machine (about eight feet high by 51 feet long) was then painstakingly disassembled and shipped to Harvard University, where it was up and running by March 1944. Relatively slow by comparison with the vacuum tube-based computers that would soon be designed, the Mark I was a very reliable machine. A New York Times article enthused, "At the dictation of a mathematician, it will solve in a matter of hours equations never before solved because of their intricacy and the enormous time and personnel which would be required to work them out on ordinary office calculators."
Aiken then went to work for the U.S. Navy (and was given the rank of commander), where his team included another famous computer pioneer, the future admiral Grace Murray Hopper. The Mark I worked 24 hours a day on a variety of problems, ranging from solving equations used in lens design and radar to the ultrasecret design for the implosive core of the atomic bomb. Unlike many engineers, Aiken was comfortable managing fast-paced projects. He once quipped, "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you'll have to ram it down their throats."
Aiken completed an improved model, the Mark II, in 1947. The Mark III of 1950 and Mark IV of 1952 were electronic rather than electromechanical, replacing relays with vacuum tubes. The Mark III used a magnetic core memory (analogous to modern RAM, or random-access memory) that could store and retrieve numbers relatively quickly, as well as a magnetic drum that served the function of a modern hard disk.
Compared to slightly later digital computers such as ENIAC and Univac, the sequential calculator, as its name suggests, could only perform operations in the order specified, rather than, for example, being able to loop repeatedly. (After all, the program as a whole was not stored in any sort of memory, and so previous instructions could not be reaccessed.) Yet although Aiken's machines soon slipped out of the mainstream of computer development, they did include the modern feature of parallel processing, because different calculation units could work on different instructions at the same time. Further, Aiken recognized the value of maintaining a library of frequently needed routines that could be reused in new programs—another fundamental of modern software engineering.
Aiken's work demonstrated the value of large-scale automatic computation and the use of reliable, available technology. Computer pioneers from around the world came to Aiken's Harvard computation lab to debate many issues that would become staples of the new discipline of computer science. By the early 1950s Aiken had retired from computer work and became a Florida business entrepreneur, enjoying the challenge of rescuing ailing businesses.
The recipient of many awards, including the Edison Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Franklin Institute's John Price Award, Howard Aiken died on March 14, 1973, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Further Information
Cohen, I. B. Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Cohen, I. B., R. V. D. Campbell, and G. Welch, eds. Makin' Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Ferguson, Cassie. "Howard Aiken: Makin' a Computer Wonder." Harvard University Gazette . Available on-line. URL: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/ 1998/04.09/HowardAikenMaki.html. Posted on April 9, 1998.
Entry Author: Henderson, Harry.
Allen, Frances
(b. 1932–)
computer scientist
Frances “Fran” Elizabeth Allen led the field of computer science by improving compiler techniques; compilers are programs that decode source code produced in a specific programming language into machine code that can be used by a common computer. Her work provided a foundation for modern optimizing compilers. Allen became the first female IBM Fe