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.