Ask HN: Who are the most influential computer scientists in history?

1 point·MarcellusDrum··3 comments

While this field was built by the efforts of countless brilliant people, who are, in your opinion, the ones who had the most influence? People who worked on the "computer" side of the field, and not just mathematicians.

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Start with C. Shannon and A. Turing for the CS, and E. Dijkstra and N. Wirth for software engineering (and also to understand the difference between CS, SE, and programming. Spoiler: CS is mathematics. SE is engineering. Programming is a craft.)

Please read "the dream machine" and decide for yourself :-)

Yes! That would point to J.C.R. Licklider [1] and Robert Taylor [2] as two of the most influential scientists in computing.

Their role was providing vision and getting people and labs funded. Licklider worked at MIT, BBN, and ARPA most prominently in the 1950s and 60s. Taylor worked at ARPA and Xerox PARC in the 1960s and 70s. Both promoted and funded key projects that got interactive computing, personal computing, computer graphics, and computer networking going.

Both were trained in psychology, not computing -- there was no such field as 'computer science' when they were getting started. In fact Licklider played a big part in creating 'computer science' as a field and an academic specialty in the US, by getting ARPA funding for departments at MIT, CMU, and elsewhere that did influential work and trained scientists who became faculty elsewhere.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scient...

PS - "dream machine" is the book, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by Mitchell Waldrop

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