Ada Lovelace: Lord Byron's only legitimate daughter developed the first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine, leading her to be considered the world's first computer programmer.

Hedy Lemarr: Famous Hollywood actress who co-invented a technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping that is the basis for wireless communications used to this day.

ENIAC Programmers: There were six women programming the U.S. Government funded machine developed during World War II known as ENIAC, which was the first general-purpose Turing-complete computer.

Grace Hopper: This rear admiral of the U.S. Navy not only coined the term "debugging," but also developed the fist computer language compiler. She was also one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer.

Jean E. Sammet: The first female president of ACM developed the programming language FORMAC and was part of the sub-commitee that created the programming language COBOL. She also wrote the first computer languages history book.

Mary Allen Wilkes: She was the first person to use a computer in a private residence, which she hand-built. She also developed the assembly-linker model used in modern programming computers and created the first minicomputer, LINC, and for it she also created the first operating system, LAP.

Karen Spärck Jones: She came up with inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting in information retrieval, which is used in most search engines today.

Carol Shaw: She is credited as the first female programmer, creating games for Atari. She later started working for Activision where she programmed her best-known game, River Raid.

Radia Perlman: She is often known as the "Mother of the Internet" (though she dislikes this title) and is best known for inventing the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which is fundamnetal to the operation of network bridges. She also invented TRILL to correct some of the shortcoming of spanning-trees.

Shafi Goldwasser: She co-invented zero-knowledge proof, which allows one parter to prove to another party that a statement is true without giving out information other than that the statement is true. This is essentially what is used to protect credit card information when entered online.

Anita Borg: Not only was she a successful programmer, but also she huge advocate for women in computing. She founded both the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and the Insititute for Women and Technology (now known as the Anita Borg insititute for Women and Technology).