Portraits In Silicon

Robert Slater, 1987, MIT Press

Multco Central 004.092 S631p


Short biographical chapters about 31 innovators in computer hardware and software, and three silicon innovators ( Shockley, Noyce, and Kilby ). Not much startlingly new to me, with more focus on priority and less focus on discovery processes than I would like.

Chapters

01 Charles Babbage

02 Alan Turing

03 John von Neumann

04 Claude Shannon

05 Konrad Zuse

06 John Atanasoff

07 Mauchly & Eckert

08 Howard Aiken

09 Jay Forrester

10 Thomas J. Watson Sr.

11 William Norris CDC

12 H. Ross Perot

13 William Shockley

14 Robert Noyce

15 Jack Kilby

16 Marcian (Ted) Hoff

17 Gene Amdahl

18 Seymore Cray

19 Gordon Bell

20 Grace Hopper

21 John Backus

22 Kemeny & Kurtz

23 Gary Kildall

24 Bill Gates

25 Ritchie & Thompson

26 Daniel Bricklin

27 Nolan Bushnell

28 Steve Jobs

29 Adam Osborne

30 William Millard

31 Donald Knuth

Konrad Zuse made vacuum tube computers in Berlin during WW2. 20 employees, tiny compared to efforts at IBM and elsewhere. He fled through Göttigen and eventually to Zurich. In 1949, he started Zuse KG, which manufactured scientific computers and employed 1000 people.

PortraitsInSilicon (last edited 2018-05-22 17:27:25 by KeithLofstrom)