1999 Fellows Ceremony & Dinner

For over a decade, The Computer Museum (and now Computer History Museum), has been publicly recognizing individuals of outstanding merit and accomplishment who have contributed to the development of computing broadly-defined. Past Fellows have included: Grace Murray Hopper (1987), Jay Forrester (1995), Ken Olsen (1996), John Backus, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak (1997), and, most recently, Gordon Moore, Gene Amdahl, and Donald Knuth (1998).

 

Fellows are chosen on the basis of accomplishment--formal education is not a factor--and are nominated by a panel comprising History Center staff, industry peers, and previous Fellows. In order to properly assess the historical importance of a possible Fellow's achievements, one criterion is that at least 10 years must have elapsed between a specific contribution and that individual's nomination.

 

The contribution must thus be of a foundational nature, one that has strongly influenced the intellectual, disciplinary, or industrial underpinnings of computing. There is no preference given to accomplishments in software or hardware, to computer science over electrical engineering or any other formal discipline, to commercial success, or to the nominee's age.

 

The event typically comprises 250 people--largely from industry and academia--and is of approximately 3 hours duration. Many of Silicon Valley's most prominent businesspeople, academics, and supporters of computer history attend this event to honor those who have changed the theory or practice of computing and who have thus shaped the world in which we live.

 

We hope you will join us this year for this historic, and historical, event as Computer History Museum continues its mission of building an international resource for research in the history of computing.

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1999 Computer Museum History Center Fellows

Audacia certe laus erit. (My boldness will be a title of honor.)   Propertius, 1st century B.C.

Alan Kay, personal computing and interface visionary, co-founder, Xerox PARC.   Introduced by Doug Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute.

John McCarthy, creator of LISP, timesharing pioneer, co-founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.   Introduced by Edward Feigenbaum, Stanford University.

Konrad Zuse (posthumous), inventor of world's first general-purpose, program-controlled, electromechanical computer.   Award accepted by his son, Horst Zuse, Technical University of Berlin.

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