People from United States

Ray Dolby

Engineer who invented Dolby noise reduction and surround sound

1933 – 2013

Ralph Baer

German-American inventor of the first home video-game console

1922 – 2014

Radia Perlman

Network engineer who invented the spanning-tree protocol, the “mother of the internet”

Born 1951

Paul Otellini

Intel CEO from 2005 to 2013 who moved Apple’s Macs to Intel chips

1950 – 2017

Paul Allen

Co-founder of Microsoft, investor and philanthropist

1953 – 2018

Pat Hanrahan

Graphics researcher who designed Pixar’s RenderMan and co-founded Tableau

Pat Gelsinger

Engineer who led the Intel 486 design and was Intel CEO from 2021 to 2024

Born 1961

Nolan Bushnell

Founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, often called the father of the video-game industry

Born 1943

Noam Shazeer

Co-author of the transformer paper and co-founder of Character.AI

Nikesh Arora

Indian-American CEO of Palo Alto Networks and former Google executive

Born 1968

Nathan Myhrvold

Microsoft’s first CTO, founder of Intellectual Ventures and author of Modernist Cuisine

Born 1959

Mitchell Baker

Lawyer who led the Mozilla project and launched the Firefox browser

Meg Whitman

Executive who built eBay and later led Hewlett-Packard

Born 1956

Mary Meeker

“Queen of the Internet” known for her Internet Trends reports

Mary Lou Jepsen

Display pioneer who co-founded One Laptop per Child and founded Openwater

Born 1965

J. C. R. Licklider

Psychologist who imagined the “Intergalactic Computer Network” and funded the research behind the internet

1915 – 1990

Jay Forrester

MIT engineer who invented magnetic-core memory and founded system dynamics

1918 – 2016

Jay Chaudhry

Indian-American founder and CEO of the cloud-security company Zscaler

Jawed Karim

YouTube co-founder who uploaded its first video, “Me at the zoo”

Born 1979

Jack Kilby

Texas Instruments engineer who invented the integrated circuit

1923 – 2005

Ivan Sutherland

Father of computer graphics, creator of Sketchpad and the first VR headset

Born 1938

Ian Murdock

Founder of Debian, one of the most influential Linux distributions

1973 – 2015

Ian Goodfellow

Inventor of generative adversarial networks (GANs)

Howard Aiken

Harvard physicist who conceived the Harvard Mark I computer

1900 – 1973