Harry Douglas Huskey (born January 19, 1916) is an American computer designer pioneer.
Huskey was born in the Smoky Mountains region of North Carolina and 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. Huskey 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 United Kingdom 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 National Bureau of Standards, Huskey joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1954 and then University of California, Santa Cruz from 1966. While at Berkeley, he supervised the research of 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 married Nancy Grindstaff in 1994 and now lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Huskey appeared with a junk dealer as the third pair of contestants in an episode of Groucho Marx's radio show "You Bet Your Life". He was described as the designer of an "electronic brain". They selected the "state category" and missed the final question when they failed to identify Iowa as the state North of Missouri.[1]