SANTA CRUZ >> Former UC Santa Cruz professor Harry Huskey, the last of the mathematician pioneers who invented the field of computer science, died in his sleep Sunday at Sunshine Villa.
He was 101.
Like most centenarians, Huskey died in a world vastly different from the one he was born into. But few are like Huskey, who can say today’s world is possible because of their work.
In 1945, he worked on the top-secret ENIAC project at the University of Pennsylvania, designing the country’s first programmable computer.
Two years later, he was in England building a test computer with the famed mathematician Alan Turing. The next year, he was designing and building the Standards Western Automatic Computer, then the fastest computer in the world.
Then in 1954, Huskey designed the world’s first personal computer. It was the Bendix G15, and it was the size of two refrigerators.
Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, compared Huskey to Leonard Zelig, a character in a 1983 Woody Allen movie who keeps showing up at key transitions in history, such as the Great Depression, World War II and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“He’s like this thread that appears over and over again at all these different milestones — with Harry it was like that.”
Huskey is the last of a generation of computer pioneers, said Spicer, who met Huskey several times, including in 2013, when Huskey was awarded the museum’s lifetime contribution award.
“It’s almost like you’re alive during the time of Michelangelo, and you can ask him to talk about David the statue,” Spicer said of meeting Huskey. “So you’re hearing from the creator is what I’m trying to say, so there’s a certain magic to that.”
RURAL BEGINNINGS
Huskey was born in 1916 in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, where his father worked at a lumber mill. Huskey spent his early years on a ranch in Idaho, tending sheep.
He was the first in his family to attend college, and earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics at the University of Idaho.
Later, he got a doctorate in mathematics from Ohio State University, where he met his first wife, Velma Huskey. He was a teaching assistant in geometry, and she took his class and turned out to be his best student, said Doug Huskey, Harry Huskey’s son.
An academic life requires uprooting every few years at first, so the couple, and later, the family, leapfrogged to London, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Boston, before settling in Santa Cruz in 1967.
For one year, in the early 1960s, Huskey worked in Kanpur, India, designing the country’s first technical institute, from the ground up.
Doug Huskey said he remembers as a 6-year-old, playing with the paper tape output of the hippo-sized Bendix G15 in his father’s home office in Berkeley. For decades, the machine resided in Harry Huskey’s Westside Santa Cruz garage, before he donated it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1988.
“My mom referred to that computer as being my twin brother or my brother because dad would spend as much time with it as he did with the family,” said Doug Huskey. “He was kind of really into working on that stuff.”
Doug Huskey said he also remembers getting wood shop lessons from his father in their basement workshop, and building a Van de Graaf generator with him for a school science project.
SETTLING IN SANTA CRUZ
Harry Huskey moved his family to Santa Cruz to build the UCSC Computer Center, and became one of the founding members of the school’s computer science department. Huskey also taught Bible study classes at Santa Cruz’s Messiah Lutheran Church, and was part of the parent-teacher association at Santa Cruz High, where his children attended.
After Huskey retired from UCSC in 1986, he and his wife became passionate about the history of computing, specifically the story of Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century British mathematician who many consider to be the first programmer.
The couple spent many weeks in England, at libraries and universities, looking at Lovelace’s original documents. They were working on a book until Velma Huskey got sick and died in 1991.
REFLECTIONS
Huskey was part of the genesis of the computer, and saw its entire sweeping trajectory to where we are today, a world in which new generations have to force themselves to “unplug.”
In 2006, Huskey was interviewed for an oral history by the Computer History Museum, which was transcribed into a 46-page document detailing Huskey’s career. At the end of the interview, Huskey mused about how computers have changed society.
“What is the effect of almost instantaneous communication on society?” Huskey told the interviewer. “The fact we can look at what’s going on in Burma today and other places. The Constitution was written when you had to go from New York to Boston by horse and it took you three days or something. And if you look at it purely as a dynamic system, the stimuli can arrive much faster than you can respond to it. And what do you do about it? I don’t know.”
Harry Huskey
Born: Jan. 19, 1916
Died: April 9, 2017
Who: Computer science pioneer who designed several early computers in the 1940s and 1950s.
Residence: Santa Cruz
Family: First wife Velma Huskey (died in 1991), second wife Nancy Huskey (died in 2015), daughters Carolyn Dickinson of Aptos, Roxanne Dwyer of Scotts Valley, Linda Retterath of Santa Clara, son Doug Huskey of Santa Cruz, and five grandchildren.
