Babbage, Lovelace, Turing
Babbage's Difference and Analytical Engines, Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes and the first published program, the 1991 working Difference Engine, Boole's algebra of logic, Shannon's 1937 thesis linking logic to circuits, Turing's 1936 paper on computable numbers, Church's lambda calculus, and Turing's later life and 2013 pardon.
Ideas a century ahead of the hardware
The Analytical Engine was a general-purpose computer designed in mechanical parts a century before electronics made it practical. Turing's 1936 paper, written to answer a question in mathematical logic, ended up describing what every computer is. Turing worked on codebreaking in the Second World War (next part), designed the ACE computer, and proposed the "imitation game" (1950) now called the Turing test. He was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexuality and died in 1954; the British government apologised in 2009 and he was pardoned in 2013.
Doron Swade, The Difference Engine (2000); Ada Lovelace, "Sketch of the Analytical Engine... with notes by the translator" (1843); Alan Turing, "On Computable Numbers" (1936) and "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950); Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983).