Harry Huskey

Who is Harry Huskey?

Harry Douglas Huskey 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 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 at the National Bureau of Standards in Los Angeles. 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, D.C.

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. During 1963-1964 Prof. Huskey participated in establishing the Computer Center at IIT Kanpur and convened a meeting there with many pioneers of computing technology. Participants included Forman Acton of Princeton University, Robert Archer of Case Institute, S. Barton of CDC, Australia, S. Beltran from the Centro de Calculo in Mexico City, John Makepeace Bennett of the University of Sidney, Launor Carter of SDC - author of the subsequent Carter Report on Computer Technology for Schools, David Evans of UC Berkeley, Bruce Gilchrist of IBM-SBC, Clay Perry of UC San Diego, Sigeiti Moriguti of the University of Tokyo, Adriaan van Wijngaarden of the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam, Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge University, and Gio Wiederhold, also of UC Berkeley.