I took the limitation to mean those involved in the hardware development, not software.

I am not sure that “Pascal” qualifies as “commonly used” anymore. I think that its last bastion — as a teaching language — fell to Java a decade ago.

I was ready to guess “boole“and “algorithm” — but the etymology of “Winchester drives” is cool to know.

I was surprised at the number of comments that ignored your second qualification.

Nick

Also, the Tandy name, applied to a series of computers in the mid 80s through RadioShack, was from Dave L Tandy, who started the Tandy Corporation, which was originally a leather-goods company.

Songwriter famous for writing “Up, Up and Away”, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Wichita Lineman”, “Galveston” and “MacArthur Park”

I’m still not entirely sure why they named the internet after him....

Mark N.: Getting to somewhat more obscure terms, Apple contributed yet another one, the programming language “Dylan”, which might be the leading example of a computer-programming term named after a musician.

I think this is beat by Django, a widespread Python web serving framework named after jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.

David: I used punch cards in the late 1970s, but I don’t think I ever heard them called Hollerith cards; I think the term had probably fallen out of use back then, even before the cards themselves fell out of use.

I started using them in the ‘60s and into the early ‘70s. They were occasionally called Hollerith cards.

Pascal was given its name to honor Blaise Pascal. Pascal, a French born mathematician and physicist, helped to pioneer computer development. He is credited with designing the first arithmetical machine in 1641, often considered the first ancestor of modern computers.

Recap: Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī / George Boole / John McIntosh / Harald Bluetooth Gormson.

Not too many people use Pascal any more, I think. As an educational language I believe Java has superseded it.

Eugene Volokh: I at first thought your Bluetooth item was a joke, but some searching suggests that the word does indeed come from the king’s name.

That was the explanation given to the press at the initial announcement of Bluetooth.

There’s the (fairly unknown) Eiffel programming language, named indirectly after Gustave Eiffel. Even more obscure is Sather, a derivative of Eiffel, which is named after Sather Tower, which was named after Julia Sather.

There’s Caesar rotation, a crude encryption technique that used to be very popular (named after Julius Caesar, who, according to Suetonius, ordered its use).

Mark N.: Apple contributed yet another one, the programming language “Dylan”, which might be the leading example of a computer-programming term named after a musician.

Officially at least, “Dylan” is short for “Dynamic Language”.

Sean Gleeson: Wait. You mean the algorithm wasn’t named after Al Gore?

No duh. Everyone has seen the man; he doesn’t have any rhythm.

Boole probably claims first position, because software developers invoke his name and work every day. Ada and Pascal have fallen largely into desuetude; Hertz and Volta are basically auxiliary.

Alessandro Volta developed the so-called Voltaic pile, a forerunner of the battery, which produced a steady electric current. Volta had determined that the most effective pair of dissimilar metals to produce electricity was zinc and silver. In the 1880s, the International Electrical Congress, now the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), approved the volt as the unit for electromotive force.

Voltage settings and vcore ratings are used by overclockers all the time....

Mnarayan, Dewb, Sean Gleeson, David Carroll: Pascal, Hertz, McIntosh, and Boole are what I had in mind.

Chuck: I didn’t know about the origin of “algorithm”! That definitely makes the cut. (I checked the OED, and it confirms that the term comes from “Arab. al-Khowrazm, the native of Khwrazm (Khiva), surname of the Arab mathematician Abu Ja’far Mohammed Ben Musa, who flourished early in the 9th c., and through the translation of whose work on Algebra, the Arabic numerals became generally known in Europe.”)

I think the other terms are materially less commonly used than my initial four plus “algorithm,” but that’s just my sense of the matter — I might well be mistaken.

Hm. And here *I* thought Hollerith invented the Hollerith card! :-)

Of course, no one has used those since I was in college...

His name is in common use in such phrases as ‘You need Moore memory to run this program’, and ‘You have Moore data than your disk can hold’, etc.

Rene Descartes — Cartesian co-ordinate systems are also commonly used and referred to as such. Much graphics programming uses Cartesian coordinates as they map directly to a bitmapped display.

Blaise Pascal, as noted by mnarayan at 2:40 am.

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, by Dewb at 3:13 am.

Joseph Fourier, as noted by Stolidus at 6:13 am.

Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (780–850), from whose name we get “algorithm” and the language ALGOL.

Agner Krarup Erlang — Erlang, the programming language.

Jan Łukasiewicz almost qualifies, but only his nationality is used in the common term “Reverse Polish Notation”.

Nicolas Bourbaki, who never existed, is named in the Bourbaki-Witt theorem, used in computability theory and domain theory.

Haskell Curry worked on Eniac, and so may be disqualified, modulo “modern computers”.

As noted by Prof. Volokh, Herman Hollerith may likewise be disqualified, or not. I’ve used H notation in FORTRAN II though.

Likewise, remotely disqualified, or not, Ada Lovelace and George Boole.

Plato, and I believe Aristotle, have been namesakes for various programming languages or projects as well.

Boolean (George Boole)

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I don’t know what the other two are. I often refer to FFTs.

I don’t think Pascal is used enough these days to qualify.

Chuck

The FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) is a common algorithm used in modern computing, named after Joseph Fourier.

Linus Torvald — developer of the Linux kernel

Wouldn’t count, since he was directly involved in computer science — i.e. he developed the kernal, and didn’t simply have it named after him.