Last week brought news of another loss to Silicon Valley, as it says goodbye to a highly influential lady.  The saddening news is that we have lost Patricia Dunn, the former Hewlett-Packard Co. chairwoman, who died of ovarian cancer this Sunday at her home in Orinda, Calif.  Dunn was born on March 27, 1953 in Burbank, and was battling cancer for the past eight years.

Dunn started her career as a temporary secretary at Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, where she worked her way up to chief executive and met her husband, William Jahnke, a banker, who survives her. When Barclays bought Wells Fargo in 1996, Dunn became the chief executive in 1998. In the same year, she was appointed to the HP board.  Dunn also played a significant role in hiring in 1999 — and then firing in 2005 — CEO Carly Fiorina. Dunn also helped recruit Mark Hurd, who was ousted within a year after a damaging probe into a sexual harassment claim brought shame to the entire company.

“Pattie Dunn worked tirelessly for the good of HP,” Thacker, the spokesman for the Palo Alto company, said in an emailed statement. “We are saddened by the news of her passing, and our thoughts go out to her family on their loss.”

It’s been a difficult year for the tech industry, which has lost a handful of celebrated leaders.  The most recent is Ilya Zhitomirskiy, co-founder of Diaspora, who died at the ripe age of 22 on November 12.  Zhitomirskiy was one of the four co-founders of Diaspora, along with Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer.

We also lost John McCarthy, a computer scientist and creator of the Lisp programming language, who died at the age of 84.  McCarthy was a pioneer in artificial intelligence, and even coined the term.  He created Lisp in 1958 as a tool for furthering AI work, though the language has found broader use since its inception.

And in a suspected suicide episode, a single shot in the chest killed Reijane Huai, former CEO and founder of FalconStor. The past year had been tough for Huai, facing a series of trading probes and charges. Huai stepped down as the organization’s CEO, chairman and president, after which a string of controversies and class-action lawsuits followed.

Last but not the least is Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of the programming language C and the co-inventor of the UNIX operating system, and Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple – two highly innovative people that we lost forever.  Both played vital roles in tech industry, and gave precious contributions that can never be forgotten.