Harry Huskey

Harry Douglas Huskey ( born January 19, 1916 in the Smoky Mountains, North Carolina) is an American mathematician and computer engineer.

Huskey grew up in Idaho and studied mathematics at the Ohio State University, where he received his doctorate in 1943 at Tibor Rado. He taught mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 and worked with the early ENIAC computer, the EDVAC and on a visit to England with the Pilot ACE by Alan Turing.

With this experience he developed from 1949 to 1953 at the National Bureau of Standards in Los Angeles the SWAC - tube computer ( for Standards Western Automatic Computer ). Upon completion in 1950, he spent a year as the fastest computer in the world.

He was later at UCLA, where he was until 1967 with modifications in operation. In 1954 he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, Huskey designed the G15 computer, which was produced and distributed by the Bendix Aviation Corporation and is sometimes regarded as the first personal computer - Huskey himself had a copy at home. In 1966 he moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1986, he retired.

It was 1963/64, involved in the construction of the computer science department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and taught in New Delhi. Among his PhD in Berkeley include Butler Lampson and Niklaus Wirth.

In 1982 he received the Computer Pioneer Award. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1994). In 2013 he became a Fellow of the Computer History Museum.

He was married to Velma Roeth ( she died in 1991 ), with whom he had four children. With it, he also wrote essays about computer history.