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Quite a few people have been retroactively credited with the invention of the personal computer. One man who never claimed credit himself, but who would certainly be listed among Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Clive Sinclair, Adam Osborne, and John Roach as original creators of the personal computer industry is Jack Tramiel - who passed away today at the age of 83.

Steve Jobs became an icon as one of the greatest innovators of the modern age. He follows in a great American tradition of innovation that have built the fundamental building blocks of the U.S. economy. History will be kind to Jobs. Students will read about his accomplishments in their textbooks for decades and perhaps centuries to come. In classic Jobs style, those textbooks will probably be built into iPads.

Where does Jobs stand in the pantheon of great American innovators? Certainly, he was one of the most inspiring and creative Americans of the modern era. Let's take a look at the history innovation in the United States and assess how these great people influenced how we live our lives today.

Jerry Lawson, who is responsible for the development of the video game cartridge, died Saturday in Mt. View, California, of a heart attack. Lawson was 70 years old. He was a pioneer not just in video games but as a black engineer in an overwhelmingly white industry.

While working as an engineer for Fairchild Semiconductor in the mid-1970s, Lawson created the Fairchild Channel F video game console. That was the type that took a different software cartridge for each game.

Well, maybe Paul Baran didn't invent the Internet exactly*, but his work on its forerunner, ARPANET, made it possible. Baran, 84, died yesterday at his home in Palo Alto, according to the New York Times.

While working at the RAND Corporation in the early Sixties, Baran outlined a method for dissembling information into "message blocks" in order to move them through a network, reassembling them at the end point. This method has come to be known as "packet switching."

Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, one of the first women in the IT industry, has passed away at the age of 86. Bartik was on the team that programmed and de-bugged the first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

She was one of the female mathematicians, known as "computers," recruited by the United States military during World War II to test ballistics. They soon moved into the electronics program.