Harry Huskey

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Harry Huskey (born January 19, 1916) is an American computer designer pioneer.

Harold D. Huskey was born in the Smoky Mountains region of North Carolina and subsequently grew up in Idaho. He gained his Master's and then his PhD in 1943 from the Ohio State University on Contributions to the Problem of Geocze. He taught mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania and then worked part-time on the early ENIAC computer in 1945.

He visited the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK for a year and worked on the Pilot ACE computer with Alan Turing and others. He was also involved with the EDVAC and SEAC computer projects.

Huskey designed and managed the construction of the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) at the National Bureau of Standards in Los Angeles (1949–1953). He also designed the G15 computer for Bendix Aviation Corporation, which could perhaps be considered as the first "personal" computer in the world. He had one at his home that is now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

After five years at the US National Bureau of Standards, Huskey joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1954 and then Santa Cruz from 1966. At Berkeley, he supervised the pioneering programming language designer Niklaus Wirth, who gained his PhD in 1963. He is now Professor Emeritus at the University of California, after his retirement at the age of 70 in 1986. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Huskey married Velma Roeth (died 1991) and had four children. He then married Nancy Grindstaff in 1994 and now lives in Sun City Hilton Head, South Carolina.

[edit] Trivia

Huskey appeared as the third contestant in an episode of Groucho Marx's radio show "You Bet Your Life". Where he was described as the designer of an "electronic brain".[1]

[edit] References

Huskey, H.D. Harry D. Huskey: His Story. BookSurge Publishing, 2004. ISBN 1-59457-680-7.
Huskey, H.D. The ACE Test Assembly, the Pilot ACE, the Big ACE, and the Bendix G15. In Copeland, B.J., Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine, chapter 13, pages 281–295. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-856593-3.
Huskey, H.D. The state of the art in electronic digital computing in Britain and the United States (1947). In Copeland, B.J., Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine, chapter 23, pages 529–540. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-856593-3.