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C Names: Famous People in Technology

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 8:00 am

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C

Canion, Rod

Co-founded Compaq Computers in 1982 and served as its CEO for a decade. Canion and the co-founders were determined to recreate the success of IBM by reverse engineering a product that IBM held a patent on, the ROM-BIOS chip. Canion is credited with innovating the first IBM-compatible portable PC, the LTE, leading to the development of the modern laptop computer. Through the development of extended industry standard architecture (EISA), Compaq introduced the world to the idea of a server in its Systempro PC.

Case, Steve

Chairman, CEO and founder of America Online; Chairman of AOL Time Warner. In 1985, Case and business partner Jim Kimsey started Quantum Computer Services, which evolved in America Online, one of the country’s largest Internet service providers reaching a vast Internet community. The proliferation of AOL’s services helped define developing trends in Internet communication.

Cerf, Vint

Co-invented the TCP/IP Internet protocol with Robert Kahn in 1973. Prior to that, Cerf worked on the ARPANET at UCLA from 1968-72. He is currently Senior Vice President for Internet Architecture and Technology at MCI WorldCom. Before joining MCI in 1994, Cerf was vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). Prior to that, as vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986 he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. In 1992, Cerf founded the Internet Society and served as its president for three years. He also is currently the only U.S. board member of ICANN.

Chen, Peter

The originator of the Entity-Relationship Model (ER Model), which serves as the foundation of many systems analysis and design methodologies, computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, and repository systems including IBM’s Repository Manager/MVS and DEC’s CDD/Plus. The UML modeling language has its roots in the ER model. Dr. Chen is a Fellow of the IEEE, the ACM, and the AAAS. Since 1994, Dr. Chen has been doing research and teaching on Internet/Web, Java, XML, data warehousing, e-commerce (B2B and B2C), and Internet security. He currently holds the position of M. J. Foster Distinguished Chair Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University.

Clark, Jim

Co-founder of Netscape Communications; founder of Silicon Graphics and Healtheon; founder and chairman of MyCFO. Silicon Graphics’ three-dimensional imaging software has changed the shape of Hollywood moviemaking and such industries as bridge building and aircraft technology. Healtheon has been responsible for linking doctors, pharmacies, insurers and patients via the Internet. Clark was also responsible for triggering the federal government’s antitrust investigation of Microsoft. Recently, Clark has started Shutterfly.com, an online photo processing and delivery service.

Codd, Edgar

Codd originated the relational approach to database management in a series of research papers he began in 1970. His paper, “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” was a seminal paper in a continuing series of papers. Codd built upon this, and in doing so has provided the impetus for widespread research into numerous related areas, including database languages, query subsystems, database semantics, locking and recovery, and inferential subsystems.

Cox, Alan

Building on the work of Linus Torvalds for the Linux operating system, Cox is responsible for much of the code in the Linux kernel, including networking and SMP. He has handled the latter-day 2.0 releases, and serves as one of the primary conduits for patches into the current development kernels. Cox is also responsible for bringing Linux to the Macintosh 68K.

Cray, Seymour

1925(b.)-1996(d.) Regarded as the father of supercomputing. He began his career as a computer scientist working on UNIVAC I. In 1957 Cray helped found Control Data Corp., where he designed the CDC 6600 and the CDC 7600, large-scale computers notable for their high processing speeds. Cray left the company in 1972 to begin Cray Research Inc., where he designed multiprocessor computers allowing simultaneous (parallel) processing. His company’s first supercomputer, the Cray-1, came out in 1976 and could perform 240 million calculations per second. Cray also developed an innovative cooling system, using Freon to combat the intense heat of the Cray 1. The Cray Y-MP, introduced in 1988, was capable of 2.6 billion calculations per second.

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This article was originally published on June 24, 2010