Robert Noyce.

Co-founder of Intel Corp.

Robert Noyce founded two companies that would largely shape today’s computer industry—Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Co inventor of Microchip.

Robert Norton Noyce was born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa. He received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Grinnell College in 1949 and a doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. Bob Noyce's nickname was the "Mayor of Silicon Valley."

In 1957 Noyce co-founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. in Mountain View, CA. On April 25, 1960, Dr. Noyce was granted a patent for his invention of a ``Semiconductor Device-and-Lead Structure'' -- an integrated circuit. This discovery made the microchip possible and launched the modern electronics revolution. In July 1968 he co-founded Intel Corp. with Gordon E. Moore. Robert Noyce was also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip.

He served for many years as a trustee of Grinnell College and as chair of the Board of Trustees.Noyce died from heart failure in 1990, at the age of 62.

Ted Nelson.

The term "hypertext" was coined by Ted Nelson
United States of America.


Ted Nelson is best known for: coining terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia," 1963 (first published 1965).

Theodor Holm Nelson, born 1937, obtained his BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College. In 1960, he was a masters student in sociology at Harvard. Shortly after enrolling in a computer course for the humanities, he was struck by a vision of what could be. For his term project, he attempted to devise a text-handling system which would allow writers to revise, compare, and undo their work easily. Considering that he was writing in Assembler language on a mainframe, in the days before "word processing" had been invented, it was not surprising that his attempt fell short of completion.

In 1965, he presented a paper at the Association for Computing Machineryin which he coined the term hypertext. Nelson later popularized the hypertext concept in his book Literary Machines. Nelson's conception of hypertext is a rich one. Dream Machines describes hypergrams (branching pictures), hypermaps (with transparent overlays), and branching movies.

Hypertext is the presentation of information as a linked network of nodes which readers are free to navigate in a non-linear fashion. It allows for multiple authors, a blurring of the author and reader functions, extended works with diffuse boundaries, and multiple reading paths.

Vinod K Dham

"Father of the Pentium"

India.

Vinod Dham is known as the father of the Pentium processor.

Vinod was born in Pune in 1950. He completed his initial education in pune.For his bachelor’s degree, Vinod went to the Delhi College of Engineering. In 1971, he graduated from the college with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. After graduation, he worked briefly in Delhi for Continental Devices – a semiconductor company. In 1975, he went to the US. There, he joined the University of Cincinnati to pursue a Masters in Electrical Engineering (Solid State). While he was making a presentation at the IEEE conference in Monterrey, California on re-programmable memory, he received an offer from the Intel to work with them.

In January 1990, Intel has made Vinod the in-charge of developing the 586 or Pentium processor. When the Pentium processor was ready, the market was not ready to accept it. The Pentium processor handled the task of providing graphics, audio and video as well as games on a home computer with aplomb. Soon, it became a big hit and the hardware manufacturers switched over to the Pentium processor. Dham was also the co-inventor of Intel's Flash memory technology. After 16 years at Intel, Vinod joined Nexgen Inc., a start up. In 1996 Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) acquired Nexgen. He quit AMD to join a start up – Silicon Spice Inc.

This time - the electrical engineer who in 1999 was named as one of the top 100 most influential Asian Americans of the decade makes a concession.