Charles Simonyi

Charles Simonyi is a Hungarian-American software architect, businessman and space tourist, born in Budapest on 10 September 1948. As a teenager in Hungary he learned to program on a Soviet Ural II mainframe, developed compilers and sold one to a government department. He later became a researcher at Xerox PARC, where he helped pioneer graphical user interfaces, and he introduced object-oriented programming and Hungarian notation to Microsoft. He led the development of the first application software at Microsoft, including early versions of Microsoft Office, and later co-founded Intentional Software, a company built around his concept of intentional programming. He flew to the International Space Station twice as a private citizen and was the fifth space tourist.