Tag: Pioneers in Tech
Pioneers in Tech: Happy birthday to code-breaker W.W. Chandler
This month marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of W.W. Chandler. In this edition of Pioneers in Tech, we will look into his impact on technology. Chandler was responsible for installation and maintenance of the World War II-era code-breaking...
Pioneers in Tech: Gene Amdahl, “father” of mainframe computing
When you walk around with a computer in your hand or on your wrist, it’s easy to forget how much of the world still runs on mainframe computers. In this Pioneers in Tech, we look at how an estimated 10,000...
Pioneers in Tech: Logging birthday greetings to Gordon Bell
In this month’s edition of Pioneers in Tech, we wish a happy birthday to technology visionary Gordon Bell, who turns 89 August 19. Born in Kirksville, Missouri, Bell is a co-founder of what is today the Computer History Museum in...
Pioneers in Tech: Joan L. Mitchell, co-inventor of the JPEG
This week’s Pioneers in Tech looks at how today’s social media influencers owe much to Joan L. Mitchell, a self-professed “Sputnik baby” who came of age during the space race and ended up co-creating one of the file formats most...
Pioneers in Tech: LGBTQ+ activist Edith Windsor’s first career
The late Edith Windsor is best known as the plaintiff in the 2013 Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor, which struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and helped paved the way for the legalization of same-sex...
Pioneers in Tech: Kao Chung-chin and Lois Lew, who brought IBM’s typewriter to China
In today’s globalized, always-connected society, another innovation we take for granted is the universality of computers despite language differences. And some of us in English-speaking countries will even go a step further and assume computers all over the world have...
Pioneers in Tech: Taher Elgamal, father of SSL
Since 2017, April has been recognized as Arab American Heritage Month, with the Biden administration recognizing the heritage month for the first time at the federal level in 2022. Chances are you have purchased something online in the past week....
Pioneers in Tech: Adele Goldberg, graphical user interface guru
“Behind every great man is a great woman.” No conversation about the success of Apple would be complete without a nod to the work of Adele Goldberg, a computer scientist and early pioneer in the world of graphical user interfaces...
Pioneers in Tech: Roy L. Clay, the black godfather of Silicon Valley
The technology chapter of any Black history textbook would have to start with the life story of this week’s “Pioneers in Tech”, Roy L. Clay. After, he has more than earned the moniker the “Black Godfather of Silicon Valley.”