On October 4, 1903, American physicist and inventor John Vincent Atanasoff was born. He is best known for being considered as one of the inventors of the electronic digital computer. Even computer scientists most probably haven't heard anything of this computer pioneer. Of course you will have heard about Alan Turing or John von Neumann, which are traditionally references as being the father of the computer. Maybe, when you are European or even German, then you will have heard of Konrad Zuse, who in near total intellectual isolation constructed the first universal computer Z3, which became operational in May 1941. So why is it, we havent heard of John Atanasoff? Although, he came up with the idea of a binary digit universal computer in the late 1930s and constructed his ingenious device little later on, he never secured a patent for his device and lots of the concepts he pioneered were incorporated into the breakthrough ENIAC computer that evolved into the legendary UNIVAC.
On April 1, 1976, the original Apple Computer, also known retroactively as the Apple I was demonstrated for the first time in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California. The Apple I was a personal computer released by the Apple Computer Company designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. Actually it was Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs, who had the idea of selling the computer. Thus, the Apple I was Apple's first product, and to finance its creation, Jobs sold his only means of transportation, a VW Microbus and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500.
On February 15, 1934, Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Emil Wirth was born. He is best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. If there is (or better 'was') one programming language that I really loved in the same way I hated it, then it was Pascal. On the one hand it was a rather easy to understand beginners programming language, but when trying to build 'real world' software projects based on Pascal, most of them in my experience were doomed to fail. The largest project based on Pascal that I was involved with was a 2 mio lines of code near realtime application for the military back in the 1990s. Everybody knew, we better should have chosen Ada or C++, but it was not our decision to use Pascal. Believe me, you wouldn't like to maintain 2 mio lines of Pascal code. Nevertheless, the concept of the language designed by Niklaus Wirth was a great achievement for computer science!
On February 13, 1946, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly introduced Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, the first general purpose, electronic computer. ENIAC was a giant step forward in computing technology.
On January 10, 1938, computer scientist Donald Knuth, developer of the seminal computer science textbooks 'The Art of Computer Programming', was born. He is also widely known for his development of the TeX typesetting framework and the Metafont font definition language. Actually, Donald Knuth is one of my personal heroes in computer science. The very day I started to study this subject, his textbooks had already become a sort of 'holy bible' when it comes to algorithms and esp. the analysis of algorithms, i.e. the very heart of computer science. About the person behind the book, I almost knew next to nothing...
On December 18, 1995, German engineer and computer pioneer Konrad Zuse passed away. He is renowned to have constructed the very functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941.