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Kristen Nygaard (1926-2002) Ole-Johan Dahl (1931-2002)

Norwegian computer scientists Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl developed the central ideas of object-oriented programming more than 40 years ago as part of their work on the programming language SIMULA. Early versions of SIMULA appeared in the early 1960s, but the stable version of the language that brought these concepts to the attention of the world appeared in 1967. The initial work on SIMULA was carried out at the Norwegian Computing Center, a state-funded research laboratory in Norway focusing on developing better software-engineering techniques. Both later joined the faculty at the University of Oslo. Although their work took several decades to become established in the industry, interest in object-oriented techniques has grown considerably in the last two decades, particularly after the release of modern object-oriented languages like C++ and Java. For their contributions, Nygaard and Dahl received both the 2001 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and the John von Neumann Medal for the same year from the IEEE.

Jay Forrester

After growing up on a Midwestern cattle ranch without electricity, Jay Forrester studied eletrical engineering at the University of Nebraska and MIT, where he became director of the Navy's Project Whirlwind in 1944. Along with the ENIAC system at the Moore School in Philadelphia and the MARK I system at Harvard, Whirlwind played a central role in the early history of computers as they evolved from earlier analog designs to the digital systems that are standard in the industry today. Forrester's most significant contribution to computer hardware design was the development of core memory, in which small ferrite disks could be magnetized in one direction or the other to represent a binary 0 or 1. Magnetic core memory revolutionized hardware designs and was used in essentially all computers until it was replaced by integrated-circuit memory in the late 1970s. In 1956, Forrester joined the faculty of the Sloan School of Management, where he founded the new discipline of system dynamics, which attempts to focus holistically on large-scale systems and their interactions rather than looking only at their individual parts.

Herman Hollerith (1860-1929)

The idea of encoding text in machine-readable from datas back to the nineteenth century and the work of the American inventor Herman Hollerith. After studying engineering at City College of New York and the Columbia School of Mines, Hollerith spent a couple of years working as a staticician for the U.S. Census Bureau before accepting a teaching position at MIT. While at the Census Bureau, Hollerith had become convinced that the data produced by the census could be counted more quickly and accurately by machine. In the late 1880s, he designed and built a tabulating machine that was data produced by the census in record time. The company he founded to commercialize his invention, originally called the Tabulating Machine Company, changed its name in 1924 to International Business Machines(IBM). Hollerith's card-based tabulating system pioneered the technique of textual encoding described in this chapter - a contribution that was reflected in the fact that early versions of the FORTRAN language used the letter H to indicate text data.

Ivan Sutherland

Ivan Sutherland was born in Nebraska and developed a passion for computers while still in high school, when a family friend gave him the opportunity to program a tiny relay-based machine called SIMON. Since computer science was not yet an academic discipline, Sutherland majored in eletrical engineering at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and then went on to get a Master's degree at Caltech and a Ph.D from MIT. His doctoral thesis, "Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communications system," became one of the cornerstones of computer graphics and introduced the idea of the graphical user interface, which has become an essential feature of modern software. After completing his degree, Sutherland held faculty positions at Harvard, the University of Utah, and Caltech before leaving academia to found a couputer-graphics company. Sutherland received the ACM Turing Award in 1988.

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