Every computer-literate person should know about the pioneers of this field. Here is a brief list of famous computing people:

-Blaise Pascal: Constructed a mechanical calculating machine which could perform addition and subtraction.

-Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Built a mechanical calculator which could perform the four arithmetic operations and take square roots.

-Charles Babbage: Designed (but was unable to build) the 'difference engine,' which embodied many of the ideas underlying modern computers.

-Ada Augusta Lovelace: Worked with Babbage. She is considered to be the first programmer and the 'inventor' of loops and procedure calls.

-George Boole: Provided many of the mathematical foundations of computer science, including boolean algebra.

-Herman Hollerith: Founded the company which later became IBM.

-Alan Turing: Gave a precise mathematical form to the intuitive notion of algorithm, proved that there are problems which do not have a general algorithm that can be used to solve them, put forward the idea of using the computer to build an Artificial Intelligence, and did all those things before the invention of the electronic computer!

-John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry: Designed (but were unable to build) the first electronic digital computer.

-Konrad Zuse: Built the first electronic digital computer in Germany in 1941. This was kept as a secret for many years, and the machine was destroyed near the end of World War 2. Americans built their first such machine, ENIAC, in 1943-1946.

-John von Neumann: Designed the first computer in which the programs were not implemented in hardware, so the same computer would be able to solve different problems without having to be 'rewired.' Von Neumann's idea is what we use in present-day computers.

-Douglas C. Engelbart: First demonstrated the concepts of the mouse, hypertext, windows and what we now call the cursor in 1968.