Jobs, Woz lead Class of 2000

Dell, Engelbart, Turing round out top vote-getters; Bushnell, Hoff, Kilby, Lovelace and Roberts selected by Committee

Steve Wozniak (left) and Steve Jobs, circa 1975

The Computer Museum of America's Hall of Fame Committee is proud to introduce this year's inductees. Between them, they founded dynasties Apple and Atari; invented the integrated circuit, the CPU and the mouse; developed the first popular home kit computer; came up with the very idea of programming; figured out a way to sell computers without a store; and cracked the Nazis' secret Enigma code.

The class of 2000 -- our third round of inductees -- is a distinguised list of pioneers and innovators, without whose contributions today's computer industry would be unrecognizable.

Doug Engelbart

Leading the class are the two computer whiz kids who set corporate America on its ear when they founded Apple Computing a quarter-century ago. It's only appropriate that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are being inducted together, voted No. 1 and 3 by the public, respectively, in online voting over the summer.

Alan Mathison Turing

Doug Engelbart, who invented both the computer mouse and using windows on a computer desktop for displaying information, came in No. 2. Engelbart's mouse and windows both were developed in the 1960s, a full decade and a half before they would see widespread acceptance.

Michael Dell, who developed the concept of selling personal computers via mail-order and revolutionized the way computers are sold (while also helping to drive the price of PCs down), was selected fourth by voters.

Michael Dell

Rounding out this year's publicly selected inductees is the late Alan Mathison Turing, who designed the Turing Machine in the years before World War II and then helped crack the Nazis' Enigma code during the war, saving untold lives and hastening the war's end.

Selected by the Computer Museum of America's Hall of Fame Committee were Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace, Nolan Bushnell, Marcian E. "Ted" Hoff, Jack St. Clair Kilby and Ed Roberts.

Jack St. Clair Kilby

Lady Lovelace was the sponsor of pioneer Charles Babbage (inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1998), the 19th century inventor of the Difference and Analytical Engines, the earliest direct progenitors of modern computers. It was Lovelace who first realized that by using punch cards (then popular with the Jacquard looms of the day), Babbage could program his machines to perform different tasks.

Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace

Jack St. Clair Kilby is best known for his 1958 development of the integrated circuit -- a single board with two transistors on it -- at Texas Instruments. But he was also leader of the team that built the first ever hand-held electronic calculator in 1967.

M.E. "Ted" Hoff was an engineer at Intel in 1971 when he developed the first ever programmable integrated circuit, or CPU (for central processing unit). The Intel 4004 was the direct ancestor of the PowerPC and Pentium III chips powering today's personal computers.

M.E. "Ted" Hoff

Nolan Bushnell quit his job as an engineer at Ampex, a stereo and electronics giant, in 1970 to design Computer Space, the first commercial videogame. While Computer Space was a flop, Bushnell's next game, PONG, took the world by storm. Soon there was a home version to rival the Magnavox Odyssey, and Bushnell founded a new company, Atari, to market his new family of videogames.

Nolan Bushnell

If it weren't for Ed Roberts, one of our 1998 inductees might never have made it into the Computer Hall of Fame. It was Roberts' Altair home computer, launched in December 1974, that led to the personal computer revolution that continues today. Roberts' Altair wasn't the first PC, but it was the first to capture the public's fancy. And a young man studying at Harvard by the name of Bill Gates was inspired by Roberts' new computer to go into programming. Gates wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair, and started a new company with boyhood friend Paul Allen to market it: Microsoft.

The Computer Hall of Fame and Computer Museum of America congratulate this year's distinguished and accomplished list of inductees.  The Computer Hall of Fame is located at the Computer Museum of America at Coleman College in La Mesa, California (near San Diego).