Robert J. Spinrad was a computer designer, he accomplished and initiated work in scientific automation at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), and he became director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center when the computing technology discovered there in 1970s was marketable.
Robert J. Spinrad died Wednesday in Palo Alto, California at the age of 77; his wife in this grieve moment said that the major reason of his passing away was a disease that is called Lou Gehrig.
Spinrad was an electrical engineer but switched his career into computer science and it was really a hard decision, Spinrad assembled his personal computer from useless telephone switching equipment when he was studying in Columbia.
When talking to a The New York Times reporter in 1983, he explained that when he was feeling bigheaded of his making, generally people had no awareness in that type of equipment. And I may as well have been talking about the study of Kwakiutle Indians, for all my friends knew.
Being at Brookhaven he designed a room size, tube-based computer and gave it a name Merlin, as part of an early age group of computer systems he applied to automate scientific trialing.
Spending a summer at Los Almos National Laboratories after coming at Brookhaven, He educated about scientific computer design by learning an early machine known as Maniac,Designed by Nicholas Metropolis, a physicist.
At Brookhaven Spinrad’s group build up method for using computers to run testing and to analyze and show data as well as to control trial interactively in reply to earlier measurements.
Later Spinrad joined Scientific Data Systems in Los Angeles as a computer designer and manager. He also contributed in Xerox,s decision to put a research labortary next to the campus of Stanford.
Spinrad was born in Manhattan on March 20, 1932. After finishing his graduation in electrical engineering and he also did Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In addition to his wife, Verna, he is lived by two children, Paul, of San Francisco, and Susan Spinrad Esterly, of Palo Alto, and three grandchildren.
