Cray 1925 -1996
Notes:
Cray was the penultimate "tall, thin man"*. I viewed him as being the greatest computer builder that I knew of as demonstrated by his designs and their successors that operated at the highest performance for over 30 years. He created the class of computers we know as supercomputers.
His influence on computing has been enormous and included: circuitry, packaging, plumbing (the flow of heat and bits), architecture, parallelism, and programming of the compilers to exploit parallelism… and the problems themselves.
*Carver Mead: “one who works at every level of integration from circuits to application software”