Early Computing Machines and Historical Pioneers

This group gathers pioneers of computer systems organization whose primary contribution was building, designing or leading the earliest computing machines themselves, from nineteenth century mechanical calculating devices through the vacuum tube and relay computers of the 1940s and 1950s to the first personal computers and workstations of the 1970s and 1980s. It follows the historical strand of the ACM Computing Classification System's Computer systems organization area, gathering the founding builders whose work established that a machine, not only a method, opens this atlas's story. The group is split into four child groups by era and geography since it holds more than one hundred members: mechanical and pre-electronic pioneers, American and British early electronic computer builders, international early electronic computer builders outside the United States and United Kingdom, and personal and workstation computing pioneers. A member without a more specific systems specialization such as architecture, processors, hardware, distributed systems, fault tolerance or embedded systems belongs here rather than in one of the other six groups.