Harold Koplow

Who was Harold Koplow?

Harold Koplow, an American computer scientist and one of the early developers of office automation equipment, was raised in Lynn, Massachusetts. When his father developed health problems, Koplow became a pharmacy technician at his father's store, Broadway Pharmacy. After graduating from Swampscott High School, he was accepted at both MIT and the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and opted for the latter because he hadn't received a scholarship at MIT.

He married in 1962 after graduating from pharmacy school. He then enrolled at Tufts University for a graduate degree in Physics. He briefly worked as a school teacher before joining Wang Laboratories, where he programmed calculators. One of his programs permitted a Wang calculator to interface with an IBM Selectric typewriter, which could be used to calculate and print the paperwork for auto sales.

Koplow's interface program was developed, in 1974, into the Wang 1200 Word Processor, an IBM Selectric-based text-storage device. The operator of this machine typed text on a conventional IBM typewriter; when the Return key was pressed, the line of text was stored on a cassette tape.