Computing has a history behind the strenuous developments and innovations of professionals. These are some of my favourite African American Innovators that helped launch computing to what it is today.
Jerry Lawson.
Dubbed ‘the father of the video game cartridge’, Lawson has left a mark with his advancement of game consoles. Lawson was an electric engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor, and even able to create a working arcade game in his own garage. At the time, companies built games inside of their consoles, meaning users could not add or remove games. Lawson then led the design for the Fairchild Channel F console, and developed removable game cartridges, building the foundation for console gaming today.
Katherine Johnson
From her 33-year career working at NASA, the agency praised her “historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist”. Johnson had incredible mathematical abilities, and her calculations were essential to NASA’s projects. These projects included the Apollo Lunar Module, the Mercury Project, and also helped initialize the Space Shuttle Program. Johnson did most of these calculations manually, and later helped kickstart the use of computers for the tasks surrounding orbital mechanics. In 2021, The National Women’s Hall of Fame marked Johnson’s successes into their Hall. She’s acquired a host of other honours as well.
Annie Easley
Also an impressive NASA employee, Easley held a 34-year career at the agency. Her most known work is on the Centaur, which is part of a rocket that is still actively used today. Easley primarily worked in computer programming, specifically within power and energy. During funding cuts and financial ‘crisis,’ Easley studied and optimized energy use systems, beneficial for both Industry and commercial use.
Clarence “Skip” Ellis
Ellis was the first African American to both acquire a Ph.D. in Computer Science and join the Association for Computer Machinery. He primarily held a professor position, desiring to “encourage students of all ethnicities to expand their horizons.” For a period within his career where he worked at XEROX Parc and Stanford, where Ellis was on the team that developed the first Personal Computer.
These are just four of the many Black innovators and impressive minds rooted in Black History. They each had visible impacts on intercultural relations, especially in the fields of Computing and Engineering.
