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.