Harry Huskey Honored with Founding Faculty Award

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(Contributed)

(Photo above: Harry Huskey, in front, poses with his Founding Faculty Award and (L to R) Patrick Mantey, first Dean of the Baskin School of Engineering; Joseph Konopelski, current Dean of the Baskin School of Engineering; Manfred Warmuth, Chair of the Computer Science Department at Baskin School of Engineering and his son. Credit: Karyn Skemp)

October 30, 2015 — Santa Cruz, CA

The Baskin School of Engineering and the Computer Science Department honored Dr. Harry Huskey today.

Huskey co-founded the “Information Sciences Department” at UC Santa Cruz in 1967 with David Huffman

Harry D. Huskey is internationally renowned for his outstanding contributions to early computing systems.

Harry Huskey poses in front of the memory tube from the first computer in California, the Standard Western Automatic Computer (SWAC). Huskey designed this computer. (Credit: Karyn Skemp)

From 1943 – 1946, he was part of the team at the University of Pennsylvania that developed the ENIAC computer, the first fully programmable computer developed in the United States.

After the war, he worked for a year with Alan Turing in England. He also contributed to the design of early programming languages.

While at UC Berkeley, he supervised the Ph.D. thesis of Niklaus Wirth who later developed the PASCAL programming language.

In July 1, 1967, Dr. Harry D. Huskey co-founded the “Information Sciences Department” at UC Santa Cruz with David Huffman.

Some of his side adventures include:

• During a two-year stay in India, he participated in the establishment of the Computer Center at IIT Kanpur, one of the first IIT campuses in India.
• And on the fun side: He was part of a Groucho Marx radio show, where the host makes fun of computers. With his 1950s humor, Groucho totally underestimates the powers of computers to come.

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