Robert J. Spinrad, a computer designer who carried out pioneering work in scientific automation at Brookhaven National Laboratory and who later was director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center while the personal computing technology invented there in the 1970s was commercialized, died last week in Palo Alto. He was 77.
The cause was Lou Gehrig’s disease, his wife, Verna, said.
Trained in electrical engineering before computer science was a widely taught discipline, Spinrad built his own computer from discarded telephone switching equipment while he was a student at Columbia.
Spinrad said that while he was proud of his creation, at the time most people had no interest in the machines. “I may as well have been talking about the study of Kwakiutl Indians, for all my friends knew,” he told a reporter for The New York Times in 1983.
