People from United States

Kevin Mitnick

Once America’s most-wanted hacker, later a security consultant

1963 – 2023

Kent Beck

Creator of extreme programming and pioneer of test-driven development

Born 1961

Juris Hartmanis

Latvian-born computer scientist who founded computational complexity theory

1928 – 2022

Jon Postel

Internet pioneer who managed IANA and edited the RFC series

1943 – 1998

John von Neumann

Hungarian-American mathematician who defined the architecture of modern computers

1903 – 1957

John Romero

Game designer who co-created Doom and Quake at id Software

Born 1967

John Resig

Creator of the jQuery JavaScript library

Born 1984

John McAfee

Founder of McAfee antivirus and a controversial public figure

1945 – 2021

John Doerr

Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist who backed Google and Amazon and popularised OKRs

Born 1951

John Bardeen

Only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice — for the transistor and superconductivity

1908 – 1991

John Backus

IBM engineer who led the creation of Fortran, the first widely used high-level language

1924 – 2007

Jim Keller

Chip architect behind AMD’s Zen, Apple’s A-series and Tesla’s self-driving chip

Jeffrey Ullman

Stanford computer scientist and textbook author on compilers, databases and algorithms

Born 1942

Jeff Bezos

Founder of Amazon and the spaceflight company Blue Origin

Born 1964

Whitfield Diffie

Co-inventor of public-key cryptography

Born 1944

Ward Cunningham

Programmer who invented the wiki

Born 1949

Travis Kalanick

Co-founder and former CEO of Uber

Born 1976

Tony Hsieh

CEO of Zappos known for customer service and company culture

1973 – 2020

Timnit Gebru

AI ethics researcher who founded the DAIR Institute

Tim O'Reilly

Tech publisher who popularised the terms “open source” and “Web 2.0”

Born 1954

Tim Cook

Apple executive chairman and its CEO from 2011 to 2026

Born 1960

Thomas J. Watson

Salesman who built IBM into a business-machine giant

1874 – 1956

Ted Hoff

Intel engineer who conceived the architecture of the first microprocessor

Born 1937

Steve Wozniak

Engineer who designed the Apple I and Apple II and co-founded Apple

Born 1950