The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company. In 1986, it merged with Sperry UNIVAC to form Unisys. The company's history paralleled many of the major developments in computing. At its start, it produced mechanical adding machines, and later moved into programmable ledgers and then computers. It was one of the largest producers of mainframe computers in the world, also producing related equipment including typewriters and printers.
Engineering Research Associates, commonly known as ERA, was a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s. ERA became famous for their numerical computers, but as the market expanded they became better known for their drum memory systems. They were eventually purchased by Remington Rand and merged into their UNIVAC department. Many of the company founders later left to form Control Data Corporation.
The Harvard Mark I, or IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), was a general-purpose electromechanical computer used in the war effort during the last part of World War II.
The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research", was part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.
Gene Myron Amdahl was an American computer architect and high-tech entrepreneur, chiefly known for his work on mainframe computers at IBM and later his own companies, especially Amdahl Corporation. He formulated Amdahl's law, which states a fundamental limitation of parallel computing.
Alan Jay Perlis was an American computer scientist and professor at Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. He is best known for his pioneering work in programming languages and was the first recipient of the Turing Award.
Charles William Bachman III was an American computer scientist, who spent his entire career as an industrial researcher, developer, and manager rather than in academia. He was particularly known for his work in the early development of database management systems. His techniques of layered architecture include his namesake Bachman diagrams.
Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) was a global organization promoting the responsible use of computer technology. CPSR was incorporated in 1983 following discussions and organizing that began in 1981. It educated policymakers and the public on a wide range of issues. CPSR incubated numerous projects such as Privaterra, the Public Sphere Project, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the 21st Century Project, the Civil Society Project, and the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference. Founded by U.S. computer scientists at Stanford University and Xerox PARC, CPSR had members in over 30 countries on six continents. CPSR was a non-profit 501.c.3 organization registered in California.
Robert Stanley "Bob" Barton was the chief architect of the Burroughs B5000 and other computers such as the B1700, a co-inventor of dataflow architecture, and an influential professor at the University of Utah.
Frances Elizabeth Holberton was an American computer scientist who was one of the six original programmers of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC. The other five ENIAC programmers were Jean Bartik, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.
The College of Science and Engineering (CSE) is one of the colleges of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. On July 1, 2010, the college was officially renamed from the Institute of Technology (IT). It was created in 1935 by bringing together the university's programs in engineering, mining, architecture, and chemistry. Today, CSE contains 12 departments and 24 research centers that focus on engineering, the physical sciences, and mathematics.
Dataproducts Corporation was an early manufacturer of computer peripheral equipment.
Donn B. Parker was an information security researcher and consultant and a 2001 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Parker had over 50 years of experience in the computer field in computer programming, computer systems management, consulting, teaching, and research.
Bruce Gilchrist is considered one of the notable figures in modern computing history.
The American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) was an umbrella organization of professional societies established on May 10, 1961, and dissolved in 1990. Its mission was to advance knowledge in the field of information science, and to represent its member societies in international forums.
Erwin Tomash was an American engineer who co-founded Dataproducts Corporation, which specialized in computer technology, specifically printers and core memory units. He is recognized for his early pioneering work with computer equipment peripherals. Tomash led the creation of the Charles Babbage Institute and is responsible for The Adelle and Erwin Tomash Fellowship in the History of Information Technology and The Erwin Tomash Library. He died at age 91 in his home in Soquel, California due to complications from Alzheimer's disease.
Howard George Willis Ware, popularly known as Willis Howard Ware was an American computer pioneer who co-developed the IAS machine that laid down the blueprint of the modern day computer in the late 20th century. He was also a pioneer of privacy rights, social critic of technology policy, and a founder in the field of computer security.
Margaret R. Fox (1916-2006) was an American electronics engineer and computer scientist. She was the Chief of the Office of Computer Information, part of the Institute for Computer Science and Technology of the National Bureau of Standards from 1966 to 1975 and was the first secretary of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies.
Arthur Lawrence Norberg was an American historian of science and technology who had been Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota since 2005. Previously, he held the ERA Land-Grant Chair in History of Technology at the University of Minnesota, where he was a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Charles Babbage Institute. Much of his research is on the history of computing. In June 2006, to commemorate Norberg's retirement as director of the Charles Babbage Institute, a symposium was held at the Institute in his honor; some of the papers presented there were later published in a special issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
