He was in the room

Like Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers,  Harry Huxley was in the room, the room that ushered in the digital age as he worked with Alan Turing on hardware, helped to design the Eniac computer and built the first personal computer in 1954 called the G-15.

Dr. 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.

It gets better.

The very word “computer” was so novel that Dr. 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,” Dr. 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.”

You can't make  this up and ... he was a genius without question.

The Eniac

Harry with his G-15. :)