Ambros Speiser

Ambrose Paul Speiser ( born November 13, 1922 in Basel, † 10 May 2003 in Aarau ) was a Swiss engineer and scientist. He directed the construction of the first Swiss computer.

Life

Ambros Speiser studied electrical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ( ETH), where he graduated in 1948 with a degree in communication engineering. 1948 and 1949 he lived with Eduard Stiefel and Heinz Rutishauser at Harvard University with Howard H. Aiken and Princeton with John von Neumann, where they met the developed during the Second World War, American computer, such as the Mark III. Although the Institute was founded in 1948 for Applied Mathematics at the ETH in 1950 Konrad Zuse's Z4 was able to purchase, but there was still no further programmable calculators that were commercially available and would have been suitable for scientific work. This led to the idea of the development. Under the technical direction of the feeder was 1950-1955, the first electronic computing machine of Switzerland, ERMETH.

Speiser PhD and became even during the development of ERMETH, but started an industrial career by joining IBM in 1955. From 1956 to 1966 he was director of the IBM research laboratory in Rüschlikon. In 1966 he got out of Brown, Boveri & Cie. the contract to build the research director, the group-wide research and the research center in Daettwil.

1962 appointed the ETH feeder as Adjunct Professor. There he held the free lecture, Digital computer systems before the ETH had a formal program for a computer science degree and an appropriate institution. His same -titled book served as a lecture basis. In 1986, she awarded him an honorary doctorate for his pioneering work in the field of computer science. The Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences elected in 1987 as President Speiser its board of directors and awarded him an honorary membership in his resignation in 1993. Speiser was also a member of the Swiss School Board, Board of Trustees of the Swiss National Science Foundation and from 1983 to 1988 President of the suburb (now Economiesuisse ).

Writings

  • Ambros P. Speiser: design of an electronic computing device with special consideration of the requirement of a minimum cost of materials for a given mathematical performance. Dissertation ETH Zurich, 1950.
  • Heinz Rutishauser, Ambros Speiser Paul, Eduard Stiefel: program -controlled digital computing devices (Electronic calculating machines ). Basel: Birkhauser, 1951.
  • Ambros P. Speiser: Digital computing systems. Berlin: Springer, 1961 ( more Ed followed ).
  • Ambros P. Speiser: About the future of technology. A world view. Presentation and discussion of the 33rd meeting of the study group energy perspectives, Baden, January 28, 1988.
  • Ulf Hashagen: Speiser, Ambros Paul. In: New German Biography ( NDB ). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0, pp. 654 f ( digitized ).
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