He built the world’s first ‘laptop’
Scientist became ‘a Zelig-like character, present at some of computing’s greatest moments’
Harry Huskey, one of the last surviving scientists in the vanguard of the computer revolution, who helped develop what was once billed as the first personal computer because it took only one person to operate, though it was the size of two refrigerators, died April 9 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. 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 general-purpose 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 problem-solving 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 the host, Groucho Marx.
“Now, doctor, what is this machine for, this robot?” Groucho asked.
“It’s to carry out sequences of computations, to compare figures,” Huskey patiently explained.
To which Groucho replied, in his signature manner of gigabit-paced repartee: “If you’re going to compare figures, I don’t need an electric brain for that. It’s called an automatic reflex in my case.”
Huskey’s teammate on the show, a junkman (they were disqualified after they guessed wrong on which state is north of Missouri), estimated the computer’s worth, by weight, at $100. But Groucho presciently described Huskey’s research as “worthwhile work which will make life easier and better for all of us.”
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, Calif., in 2006, as part of an oral-history project.
Dag Spicer, senior curator at the museum, described Huskey in an email as “a Zelig-like character, present at some of computing’s greatest moments.”
“Most of these attainments were accomplished before he was 50, only halfway through his remarkable life,” Spicer said. “Harry basically lived through and participated in the entire span of the history of electronic computing.”