Eminent Personalities of Computer science

Father of Computers-Charles Babbage.


Charles Babbage, (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum. In 1991, a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked. Nine years later, the Science Museum completed the printer Babbage had designed for the difference engine, an astonishingly complex device for the 19th century. Considered a "father of the computer". Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs. The birthplace of Charles Babbage is still disputed, but he was most likely born in 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, England. A blue plaque on the junction of Larcom Street and Walworth Road commemorates the event. Babbage's date of birth was given in his obituary in The Times as 25 December 1792. However after the obituary appeared, a nephew wrote to say that Charles Babbage actually was born one year earlier, in 1791. The parish register of St. Mary's Newington, London, shows that Babbage was baptized on 6 January 1792, supporting a birth year of 1791.

Founder of 'C' language and Unix Operating systems.



Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (username: dmr, born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on C and other programming languages, and on operating systems such as Multics and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated from Harvard with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs' Computing Sciences Research Center. Ritchie is best known as the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, and as co-author of the definitive book on C, The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as 'K/R' or K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).

Ritchie's invention of C and his role in the development of Unix alongside Ken Thompson have placed him as an important pioneer of modern computing. The C language is still widely used today in application and operating system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. Unix has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now well-established precepts of computing.

Ken Thompson Co-partner in Unix OS
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply ken in hacker circles),^[1] is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding of the Unix and Plan 9 operating systems. Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp. In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language. The two left the Multics project when Bell Labs withdrew from it, but they used the experience from the project, and in 1969, Thompson and Ritchie became the principal creators of the Unix operating system. At this time, Thompson decided that Unix needed a system programming language and created B, a precursor to Ritchie's C.

Father of JAVA--->James Gosling
James A. Gosling, O.C., Ph.D. (born May 19, 1955 near Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is a famous software developer, best known as the father of the Java programming language. In 1977, James Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. In 1983, he earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his doctoral thesis was titled "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints". While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of emacs (gosmacs), and before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix while at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several compilers and mail systems. Since 1984, Gosling has been with Sun Microsystems, and is generally known best as the father of the Java programming language. He is generally credited as the inventor of the Java programming language in 1991. He created the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. He also cowrote the "bundle" program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment.

Father of RDMS---->Edgar.F.Codd
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd (August 23, 1923 – April 18, 2003) was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most memorable achievement. Edgar Frank Codd was born on the Isle of Portland in England. After attending Poole Grammar School, he studied mathematics and chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford, before serving as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. In 1948, he moved to New York to work for IBM as a mathematical programmer. In 1953, angered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Codd moved to Ottawa, Canada. A decade later he returned to the U.S. and received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Two years later he moved to San Jose, California, to work at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory, where he continued to work until the 1980s. During the 1990s, his health deteriorated and he ceased work.^[1] Codd received the Turing Award in 1981, and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Codd died of heart failure at his home in Williams Island, Florida, at the age of 79 on April 18, 2003. In the 1960s and 1970s he worked out his theories of data arrangement, issuing his paper "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" in 1970, after an internal IBM paper one year earlier.^[4] To his disappointment, IBM proved slow to exploit his suggestions until commercial rivals started implementing them. Initially, IBM refused to implement the relational model in order to preserve revenue from IMS/DB. Codd then showed IBM customers the potential of the implementation of its model, and they in turn pressured IBM. Then IBM included in its Future Systems project a System R subproject — but put in charge of it developers who were not thoroughly familiar with Codd's ideas, and isolated the team from Codd^{[citation needed]}. As a result, they did not use Codd's own Alpha language but created a non-relational one, SEQUEL. Even so, SEQUEL was so superior to pre-relational systems that it was copied, based on pre-launch papers presented at conferences, by Larry Ellison in his Oracle Database, which actually reached market before SQL/DS — due to the then-already proprietary status of the original name, SEQUEL had been renamed SQL. Codd continued to develop and extend his relational model, sometimes in collaboration with Chris Date. One of the normalized forms, the Boyce-Codd normal form, is named after him. Codd's theorem, a result proven in his seminal work on the relational model, equates the expressive power of relational algebra and relational calculus (which, in essence, is equivalent to first-order logic). As the relational model started to become fashionable in the early 1980s, Codd fought a sometimes bitter campaign to prevent the term being misused by database vendors who had merely added a relational veneer to older technology. As part of this campaign, he published his 12 rules to define what constituted a relational database. This made his position in IBM increasingly difficult, so he left to form his own consulting company with Chris Date and others. Edgar Codd coined the term OLAP and wrote the twelve laws of online analytical processing, although these were never truly accepted after it came out that his white paper on the subject was paid for by a software vendor. His last work, a book named The Relational Model for Database Management, version 2, was not so well received^{[citation needed]}. On the other hand, his extension of the ideas in the relational model to cover database design issues, in his RM/T, have proved important^{[citation needed]} . Codd also contributed knowledge in the area of cellular automata. In 2004, SIGMOD renamed its highest prize, the SIGMOD Innovations Award, in his honor.

Author of Turbo Pascal and Architect of C# languages--->Anders Hejlsberg.

Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960) is a prominent Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal, the chief architect of Delphi, and currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of the C# programming language. Hejlsberg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark but did not . While at the university in 1980 he began writing programs for the Nascom microcomputer, including a Pascal compiler which was initially marketed as the Blue Label Pascal compiler for the Nascom-2. However, he soon rewrote it for CP/M and MS-DOS, marketing it first as Compas Pascal and later as PolyPascal. Later the product was licensed to Borland, and integrated into an IDE to become the Turbo Pascal system. Turbo Pascal competed with PolyPascal. The compiler itself was largely inspired by the "Tiny Pascal" compiler in Niklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", one of the most influential computer science books of the time. Anders and his partners ran a computer store in Copenhagen and marketed accounting systems. Their company, PolyData, was the distributor for Microsoft products in Denmark which put them at odds with Borland. Philippe Kahn and Anders first met in 1986, for all those years, Niels Jensen, one of Borland's founders and its majority shareholder, had successfully handled the relationship between Borland and PolyData. In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined archrival Microsoft. One of his first achievements was the J++ programming language and the Windows Foundation Classes; he also became a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow. Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the C# programming language.