Wen Tsing Chow (Chinese: 周文俊; pinyin: Zhōu Wénjùn; 1918–2001), was a Chinese-born American missile guidance scientist and a digital computer pioneer, known for the invention of programmable read-only memory or PROM.
Chow invented and holds a fundamental patent on what is now commonly known as programmable read-only memory or PROM.
PROM, in the late 1950s called a "constants storage matrix," was invented for the Atlas E/F ICBM airborne digital computer.
Chow, uniquely, worked on the guidance computers and guidance systems for every major United States Air Force ICBM and NASA crewed space program from the very beginning with the Atlas, through Titan, Gemini, Saturn, and Skylab, to missiles and spacecraft still in service today, Minuteman and the Space Shuttle.
Chow is one of only a handful of civilians to receive this award and along with John von Neumann, one of only two computer scientists so honored.