Creator of personal computer with OSU ties dies

Harry Huskey, one of the last surviving scientists of the computer revolution, who helped develop what was once billed as the first personal computer — and who had ties to both Ohio State University and Ohio University — died April 9 at his home in Santa Cruz, California. He was 101.

Huskey, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, began his digital career in the mid-1940s with the ENIAC, a behemoth that was considered the country’s first generalpurpose programmable electronic computer. A top-secret federal government project at the University of Pennsylvania, it measured 100 feet long, weighed 30 tons and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes.

He later worked with the pioneering British mathematician Alan M. Turing on a prototype of another early computer, the Automatic Computing Engine; oversaw development of yet another, the SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer); and in 1954 designed the G-15, a 950-pound predecessor to today’s laptops.

The G-15, a problemsolving computer that could be operated by one person, was sold to the Bendix Aviation Corp., which sold it to scientific researchers and corporate customers for the retail price of $50,000.

The very word “computer” was so novel that Huskey described the SWAC as “a large-scale electronic computing machine” when he appeared on the radio quiz show “You Bet Your Life” in 1950 and tried to explain it to host Groucho Marx.

Not even Huskey, though, quite envisioned the seismic changes his work heralded. “I never dreamed they would happen,” he told the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, in 2006, as part of an oral-history project.

Harry Douglas Huskey was born in a farmhouse in Whittier, North Carolina, in the Great Smoky Mountains, on Jan. 19, 1916, just 30 years after the invention of the first commercially successful manual adding machine.

The first in his family to attend college, Huskey graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Idaho in 1937. At Ohio University in Athens, where he studied briefly, he designed an automatic computer using relays; he eventually abandoned the project.

He earned a master’s and doctorate in math at Ohio State, where he was a teaching assistant in geometry.

Huskey worked with Turing at the British National Physical Laboratory and was chief of machine development at the Institute for Numerical Analysis, part of the U.S. Bureau of Standards.

In 1967 he joined the founding faculty of the computer and information science program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He directed its computer center for a decade and became professor emeritus in 1986.