The following table illustrates the names of major innovators with their works and year −
| Person |
Achievement |
Period/Year |
| Pāṇini |
Pāṇini, the ancient Indian Sanskrit linguist, grammarian, and honorable scholar had systematized and mentioned the technical use of metarules, transformations, and recursions, in his book 'Ashtadhyayi.' It is considred as the forerunner to the computer programming language. |
5th Century BC (about) |
| Al-Khwārizmī |
Al-Khwarizmi had the technique of performing arithmetic with Hindu-Arabic numerals developed. |
830 AD (about) |
| Al-Jazari |
Al-Jazari had invented the programmable machines, namely programmable humanoid robots, and an astronomical clock, which is considered as the first programmable analog computer. |
1206 AD (about) |
| Ramon Llull |
Ramon Llull had designed multiple symbolic representations machines. |
1300 AD (about) |
| Blaise Pascal |
Pascal had invented the mechanical calculator. |
1642 AD (about) |
| Gottfried Leibniz |
Leibniz had developed the first-order predicate calculus, which were very important for the theoretical foundations of computer science. |
1670 AD (about) |
| Charles Babbage |
Babbage, who was popular as mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, designed the Analytical Engine and developed a prototype for a less powerful mechanical calculator. Likewise, he originated the concept of digital programmable computer. Babbage is popular as “father of the computer”. |
1822 AD (about) |
| George Boole |
Boole conceptualized the Boolean algebra, which became the basis for digital logic and computer science. |
1847 AD (about) |
| Gottlob Frege |
Frege developed the first-order predicate calculus, which later became a crucial precursor requirement in developing the computation theory. |
1879 AD (about) |
| Herman Hollerith |
Hollerith invented the punched card evaluating machine and hence, he is popularly considered as the father of modern machine data processing. |
1889 AD (about) |
| Vannevar Bush |
Bush developed the Memex concept, which later led to the development of Hypertext. |
1930 AD (about) |
| Alonzo Church |
Church had developed the lambda calculus and found the un-decidability problem within it. |
1936 AD (about) |
| Stephen Cole Kleene |
Founded the computation theory. |
1936 AD (about) |
| Claude Shannon |
Founded practical digital circuit design. |
1937 AD |
| Konrad Zuse |
Built the first digital freely programmable computer of Z series. |
1938 AD |
| Tommy Flowers |
Designed and built the Mark Colossus computers, the world's first programmable, digital, electronic, and computing devices. |
1943 AD |
| Max Newman |
Newman founded the Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester. It was the place where world's first stored-program computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine was invented. |
1943 AD |
| John Mauchly & J. Presper Ecker |
Designed and built the ENIAC, the first modern computer, and the UNIVAC I, the first commercially available computer. |
1943 AD |
| Yoshiro Nakamatsu |
Invented the first floppy disk at Tokyo Imperial University. |
1950 AD |
| David Caminer & John Pinkerton |
Developed the LEO computer i.e. the first business computer |
1951 AD |
| Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev |
Independently designed the first electronic computer in the Soviet Union (i.e. Ukraine). |
1951 AD |
| Grace Hopper |
Hopper wrote the A-O compiler (a sort of automatic programming language), which heavily influenced the COBOL language. |
1952 AD |
| Cuthbert Hurd |
Worked for the International Business Machines Corporation and developed first general-purpose computer, the IBM 701. |
1952 AD |
| Alan Perlis et al |
Developed the ALGOL programming language, and the first recipient of the Turing Award. |
1952 AD |
| Noam Chomsky |
Chomsky developed Chomsky hierarchy. He made contributions to computer science with his work in linguistics. |
1956 AD |
| Douglas Engelbart and Bill English |
Best known for inventing the computer mouse. |
1963 AD |
| Tadashi Sasaki |
Sasaki was an engineer at Sharp company and he conceived a single-chip microprocessor CPU. He also developed LCD calculators at Sharp. |
1963 AD |
| Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson |
Pioneered the C programming language and the Unix computer operating system at Bell Labs. |
1967 AD |
| Ken Thompson |
Thompson developed the Unix operating system, the B programming language, Plan 9 operating system, the first computer chess game and the UTF-8 encoding at Bell Labs. Further, he developed 'Go' programming language at Google. |
1967 AD |
| Adriaan van Wijngaarden |
Wijngaarden developed the W-grammar first used in the definition of ALGOL 68 |
1968 AD |
| Masatoshi Shima |
Designed the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor. |
1968 AD |
| Leslie Lamport |
Formulated algorithms to solve different fundamental problems in distributed systems (e.g. the bakery algorithm). |
1974 AD |
| Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn |
Designed the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP and IP), the primary data communication protocols of the Internet and other computer networks. |
1978 AD |
| Tim Berners-Lee |
Invented worldwide web. |
1989 AD |
| Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau |
Sent first HTTP communication between client and server. |
1989 AD |
