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I was born in 1924 in Miskolc, Hungary. Our Family came to the US in 1937.
I went to Stuyvesant High school in NYC. I never graduated, because in December 1942 I went into the Army
and was assigned to the Artillery. In the spring of 1943 the War Department decided to send soldiers to universities
to train specialists. I went to the University of Iowa in the ASTP program to study electrical engineering.
In the fall of 1944, the ASTP was terminated, and some of us were sent to the Army Engineers at beautiful
Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi, where we were magically transformed into diesel mechanics.
In April '45 we were shipped to France -- when Hitler heard of this, he shot himself.
In June we were shipped to the Phillipines -- the Japanese soon realized that further resistance was hopeless.
(Our troopship sailed from Marseille through the Panama Canal to Manila in thirty days.
I had a very important assignmemt: guarding the galley at night to keep hungry GIs from stealing food.)
I got my BSEE at Iowa in '47 and MSEE in '48. Then I did graduate work in physics at Harvard for two years. They
were the first university with a computer, the Harvard Mark I, and this was a lot more interesting than quantum
mechanics.
In 1950 I started as a programmer with Eckert-Mauchly, later acquired by Remington Rand, as a programmer for UNIVAC.
In 1959 five of us founded Applied Data Research (ADR), the first independent software company. I was in software
development until I retired in 1991, and loved every minute of it.
In the early 1950s I wrote some of the first business application programs. I cleverly saved two bytes by using
two digits, rather than four, for the year in dates. This eventually led to the Y2K problem, which generated hundreds
of billion dollars in economic activity and provided gainful employment for many thousands of my fellow programmers.
While I didn't win the Nobel Prize for this, I did avoid being lynched when Y2K fizzled out.
Some of my other professional experiences:
In 1952 I was the head programmer for the first televised election projection. We managed to predict Eisenhower
over Stevenson, to my chagrin. Therafter I worked on all presidential and congressional projections through 1964.
I worked on the first COBOL compiler in 1960 and later served on the committee that developed COBOL improvements.
I also developed a number of other computer languages.
I travelled widely giving seminars in the UK, Switzerland, Finland, Russia and Bulgaria.
Personal History
I married Joan Parsons in 1967 (at age 43). We lived most of our married life, 21 happy years, in the then
rural area near New Hope PA. We had no children so we adopted half of the abundant wildlife around us (we lived
within walking distance of the SPCA where people discreetly abandoned their pets). At one time we had a menagerie
of 3 dogs, 5 inside cats, and 4 outside cats, as well as 15 birdfeeders.
My wife died in an automobile accident in 1988. Not long after, I moved to a townhouse in Doylestown PA, where
I live with now. Apart from the usual wear & tear, I am in excellent health.
Although I became instantly obsolete when I retired, I try to keep up with software and hardware developments.
After many Gateways, I now have a Dell. With a Nikon digital camera, a Canon scanner and a photo printer I am having
a great time in my virtual dark room, editing photos and building various Web pages. I still do a little programming.
I served on several forums as an archivist, saving all messages and periodically uploading them to the forum library.
I do a lot of reading (particularly history, science and astronomy), some travelling, and I play bridge and
poker weekly.
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