Arnold Meyer Spielberg (February 6, 1917 – August 25, 2020) was an American electrical engineer instrumental in contributions "to real-time data acquisition and recording that significantly contributed to the definition of modern feedback and control processes".^[2] For General Electric^[3] he designed, with his colleague Charles Propster, the GE-225 in 1959.^[4] He cited the first computer-controlled "point of sale" cash register as his greatest contribution.^[5] He was the father of film director Steven Spielberg.

Early life and career

Arnold Spielberg was born in Cincinnati on February 6, 1917.^[6] He was of Jewish descent. His mother, Rebecca (née Chechick), was born in Sudylkiv, Ukraine; his father, Samuel, was born in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukraine.^[7] They later immigrated to the United States, meeting and eventually marrying in Cincinnati.^[8]

From the age of nine, Spielberg began building radios. He scrounged parts from garbage cans to assemble his first crystal receiver. "At 15, Arnold became a ham radio operator, building his own transmitter, a skill that proved fortuitous when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in January 1942, one month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and joined the Signal Corps." After training as a radio-gunner for the Air Corps, his skills in the design of new airplane antennas elevated him to the position of Communications Chief of a B-25 Squadron in India.^[5] During the Holocaust, Spielberg lost between 16 and 20 relatives.^[9]:21

Spielberg married concert pianist Leah Posner (1920–2017) in January 1945.^[10] After graduating from the University of Cincinnati with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, he joined RCA's Advanced Development Department in 1949, where he did early work on servo and guidance systems.^[6][11]

In 1960, Spielberg traveled to Moscow as part of a delegation of electrical engineers from Phoenix. The trip coincided with an incident that became the subject of his son's 2015 film Bridge of Spies.^[12][13]Steven Spielberg described the event his father experienced at the time:

The Russians were putting the pilot Gary Powers' helmet and his flight suit and the remains of the U-2 plane on show for everyone in Russia to see. A military man saw my father's American passport and took him to the head of the queue and repeated really angrily to the crowd, "look what your country is doing to us."^[12][14]

Work

When RCA entered the computer field, Spielberg began doing early circuit designs implementing computer logic. Moving into systems design, he was responsible for the design of a tape-to-tape data sorter. He designed and patented the first electronic library system, implemented as an interrogation system for data stored on an array of magnetic tapes. Promoted to Manager of Advanced Product Development, he was given responsibility for development of a "point of sales" system. The system involved a central processing computer called Recorder Central with ten satellites, specially designed point-of-sale units. All data were error-checked by feedback data verification. The system had all the capabilities of today's point-of-sale systems, including price lookup on a large drum storage unit, calculating sales transactions including sales tax and discounts, and credit verification.^[2]

In 1957, Spielberg began working for General Electric. Here he was instrumental in developing the GE-200 series of computers.^[15] The GE-225 was derived from the GE-312 and 412 process-control computers. Spielberg and Charles "Chuck" H. Propster had worked together at RCA on BIZMAC before designing the GE-225,^[16] introduced in 1960.^[10]

Spielberg retired in 1991 but continued consultation work for technology companies. He also worked with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, formerly Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,^[10] an organization founded by his son Steven.^[17]

Personal life and Death

Spielberg had four children with his wife Leah: son Steven and daughters Anne, Nancy, and Sue. He also had 14 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.^[18] In February 2017 he became a centenarian.^[19] Spielberg died from natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, California, on August 25, 2020, at the age of 103.^[6][10]

References

1. [...]

2. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b} "Arnold M. Spielberg". computer.org.

3. ^ "A Portrait of the GE Computer Department". smecc.org.

4. ^ "It's BASIC: Arnold Spielberg and the Birth of Personal Computing". gereports.com. Archived from the original on May 3, 2015.

5. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b} "A close encounter with Steven Spielberg's dad – Hollywood". Jewish Journal.

6. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b c} Moreau, Jordan (August 25, 2020). "Arnold Spielberg, Father of Steven Spielberg, Dies at 103". Variety. Retrieved August 25,2020.

7. ^ http://birth-records.mooseroots.com/l/1321764/Arnold-Meyer-Spielberg

8. ^ Illingworth, Shaun; Holyoak, Sandra Stewart (May 12, 2006). "Spielberg, Arnold". Rutgers Oral History Archives. Rutgers University. Retrieved August 26, 2020.

9. Book : "Steven Spielberg - A biography - 2010, 2nd edition - by Joseph McBride" / Chapter 1, family history / Source - [HB004L][GDrive]

10. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b c d} Barnes, Mike (August 25, 2020). "Arnold Spielberg, Computer Designer and Father of Steven Spielberg, Dies at 103". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved August 26, 2020.

11. ^ Oldfield, Homer R. (1996). King of the Seven Dwarfs: General Electric's Ambiguous Challenge to the Computer Industry. IEEE Computer Society Press. p. 82. ISBN 9780818673832.

12. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b} Keegan, Rebecca (December 3, 2015). "For Steven Spielberg on 'Bridge of Spies,' being boxed in by facts is great for the imagination". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 29, 2016.

13. ^ Calia, Michael (October 7, 2015). "Steven Spielberg Remembers the Cold War in 'Bridge of Spies'". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 29, 2016.

14. ^ Chilton, Martin (August 13, 2015). "Steven Spielberg: Bridge of Spies star Mark Rylance is 'extraordinary'". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved August 29, 2016.

15. ^ "G.E. 200 Series Computers". smecc.org.

16. ^ Dalton, Andrew (August 26, 2020). "Computer pioneer Arnold Spielberg, Steven's dad, dies at 103". Associated Press. Retrieved August 26, 2020.

17. ^ O’ Malley, J. P. (January 28, 2017). "How Steven Spielberg grew a social conscience". The Times of Israel. Jerusalem. Retrieved August 26, 2020.

18. ^ "A close encounter with Steven Spielberg's dad". Jewish Journal. June 13, 2012. Retrieved August 26, 2020.

19. ^ Tomas Kellner (February 5, 2017). "Happy Birthday, Mr. Spielberg: Computer Pioneer Who Helped Design GE's First Computers Turns 100 On Monday". General Electric. Retrieved February 7, 2017.

The name Spielberg brings to mind a movie magician whose blockbusters changed storytelling forever. But Steven Spielberg isn’t the first disruptor in the family. His father, Arnold, who turns 100 on Monday, helped mold computing — a field whose rise and dominance over all areas of life has no peer in the history of mankind.

Arnold used to design groundbreaking computers for GE in the 1960s. In 2006, he received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award — one of the industry’s top honors.

Arnold has been interested in machines, radio and electricity ever since he was a boy growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio. He served as a communications chief in a B-25 squadron in World War II and later established himself as an expert in early computer systems. Coming to work at GE in the 1950s, he helped revolutionize computing when he designed the GE-225 mainframe computer. The machine enabled computer researchers at Dartmouth University to develop the BASIC programming language, an easy-to-use coding tool that quickly spread and ushered in the era of personal computers as well as movies driven by computer graphics — a tool mastered by his son.

Last year, we visited with Arnold for a one-on-one interview. Surrounded by photographs with President Barack Obama, Hollywood actors and directors, family and framed patent certificates — he received 12 patents in total — he talked about computers, his love for science fiction and his work on Hollywood blockbusters such as Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar.” What follows is an edited version of our discussion.

GE Reports: When you started designing computers back in the 1950s, the technology was still very new. How did you choose that line of work?

Arnold Spielberg: I was always interested in electricity. I liked working with magnets, and I liked working with radios. I knew about Edison and Tesla, but not in detail. I got my first crystal radio set when I was 9. It’s basically a diode that can detect radio waves, and I played around with it. But I never could get it working until a radio repairman who lived next door helped me set it up.

GER: What else were you building?

AS: Once I saw an Erector Set in a hardware store. I went inside and asked the owner if I could use it to make a steam shovel and put it in the shop window so they could sell more Erector Sets. He grudgingly agreed and I sat in the back every day after school until it was finished. Later, I brought my mom over and showed her what I built. Sure enough, I got the construction set for Hanukkah. But I was also influenced by science fiction. There were twins in our neighborhood who read one of the first sci-fi magazines, called Astounding Stories of Science and Fact. They gave me one copy, and when I brought it home, I was hooked. The magazine is now called Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and I still get it.

GER: How did you end up in GE?

AS: [...] I joined GE’s computer department in Schenectady, New York, in 1955. My first job was designing circuits for the first computer process controls. The department was just starting. I stayed at the YMCA and visited my family, which was still back in New Jersey, on the weekends.

GER: Who were the computers for?

AS: The first ones were used for the industrial market. Our customers were paper mills and steel mills like Jones and Laughlin Steel Company in Pittsburgh, Youngstown Sheet and Tube in Ohio, and McLouth Steel in Michigan. They were the first customers ever to have a control system for a hot strip mill.

GER: What did the computers do?

AS: The first computers I built were data-acquisition systems. Their job was to monitor defects. They were a wire-programmed system, which means that they were uniquely designed to do just that job. Another computer called GE-312 monitored a turbine for Southern California Edison. We didn’t dare to control it because that required stops and starts, which could have endangered the machine’s life. The function then was just to make sure that it stayed within specified temperature ranges and that all the contacts were opened or closed as prescribed.

GER: Tell me about the computer Dartmouth used to write BASIC.

AS: Unlike the previous computers, the GE-225 — as it was called — was a business computer. It stored its own software, handling the input and output of data. We relocated the factory to Phoenix and sold it within GE as well as to the external market. GE used them for general business applications and some scientific work, but mostly to do business processing. I was in charge of the small-computer-systems group, whose job it was to design the circuits, design the logic, plan the system and put it all together.

GER: How small was this small computer?

AS: The computer consisted of three racks of equipment. Each rack was 2 feet wide and 7 feet tall. There was air conditioning at the bottom of each rack to cool it off because the circuits ran pretty warm. The memory could range from 8,000 to 16,000 20-bit words. It had an auxiliary memory that could go to 32,000 20-bit words. The computer interfaced with magnetic tapes, with punch cards and punch tapes, among other things.

One of our colleagues, Bill Bridge, designed a computer interface for Dartmouth that could transfer information from the computer to dumb terminals. They had no memory and no capability of doing computation. These were just input and output devices with keyboards. People could connect between 15 to 20 terminals to one computer and use that for time sharing. GE was one of the first companies to do time sharing and allow multiple terminals to talk to a computer.

Dartmouth had one of our computers, and they programmed it to develop the computer language BASIC. It allowed people to use the system to solve problems and handle data coming in out of the computer. Steve Wozniak may have used one such remote terminal to write software for Macs.

GER: Did your friends or family understand what you were doing?

AS: Back then I didn’t have that many friends who were interested in computers. It was like a big mystery to them. My son Steven came to visit once, and I showed him the factory and the engineering floor. I tried to get him interested in engineering, but his heart was in movies. At first I was disappointed, but then I saw how good he was in moviemaking.

GER: You were also involved in movies.

AS: I went to Caltech, and met with the astrophysicists Kip Thorne and Lisa Randall and several other scientists, and we sat there and brainstormed ideas about black holes for the movie “Interstellar.” It was a lot of fun because we kicked around all kinds of ideas about the size of black holes and how feasible they are and how likely there actually may be one.

GER: You didn’t turn Steven into an engineer, but he turned you into a moviemaker.

AS: It’s in the family now.

[...] Arnold Spielberg graduated from Hughes High School which cross the street from UC at the southwest corner and located on Clifton Avenue where Calhoun and McMillan meet Clifton. [...]

When he talked about Cincinnati, I was able to relate and when he mentioned the Hughes vs Roger Bacon football rivalry, he noticed I was particularly interested because I went to Roger Bacon. If you want to learn more about what he did outside of his Cincinnati time see a list of interviews below. I will focus on his time in Cincinnati and at UC. His first wife, Leah Posner, graduated from Walnut Hills High School and so did his brother Russell. They were high school classmates of Viola Woodward who also graduated from UC and did computer programming on the ENIAC (see UC’s first computer geek).

Arnold Spielberg was born on February 6, 1917 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Avondale Public School and then Hughes High School (1930-34). At Hughes he won an award for his science ability, but his overall GPA was not good enough to get a college scholarship. His parents were not well-to-do and his father had been sick at the time so he had to go to work. The summer between his junior and senior year in high school he work in Cynthiana, KY, which is a small town north of Lexington. His cousins had a small department store there. After graduating he went back down there and work for a total of seven years until 1941 when World War II started.

At Hughes he discovered his love for math and science. He also took Spanish, architectural drawing, and drafting. In those days, there was a boys’ homeroom and girls’ homeroom. Oatis Gates was the head of the homeroom who was well-liked by the students. He worked out with the gymnastic team and learn how to do tricks on the horizontal bar and other apparatus. He built up his upper body strength even built a horizontal bar for use when he lived in Kentucky. Two of his friends, Sid Patterson and Roger Walby(?), were the co-captains of the football team. Their chief rival was Roger Bacon and Hughes beat RB his senior year he told me with a satisfying smile. He went back to Hughes on two different occasions for his class reunion.

He was friends with Jake Schott (class of 1933) who was also a ham radio operator and later went on to become the Chief of Police in Cincinnati. He (treasurer) and Jake formed the radio club. Withrow High School had a glider club (a secondary glider that was towed the entire time) and the two schools did a project together were they put a receiver in one of the gliders to see if they could communicate with it. This experiment helped him later when he was stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Base in Dayton. He learned how to shoot using a rifle that he borrowed from Jake. Later, Arnold bought a used Steven’s Walnut Hill Single Shot 22 Caliber rifle from an old hunter in Cynthiana which he had recently given to his son, Steven. This is the gun his son first had learned how to shot.

Arnold was also a ham radio operator (call sign of W8IDX) using a system he had built himself. He was more interested in electronics than working at his cousins’ department store. He had to change his call sign while living in Kentucky to W9AUM (Always Under Modulated). He also built a phone transmitter during that time. He learned the department store business which paid later in his life. He went from stock-boy to assistant manager. In 1940 he was transferred to a store in Richmond, KY where he served as a co-manager. He learned a lot about managing a business, skills that would serve him well later in life.

At the onset of WWII, he decided to enlist since he knew he would have been drafted anyway so he joined the Army Signal Corp. He enlisted at Fort Thomas, KY and after a week he was sent to Louisville and later to New Orleans at New Orleans Army-Air Force Base and the 422^nd Signal Company. Part of his responsibilities was to teach Morse code to the new recruits who did not seem very interested in learning any of that until he started telling “dirty” stories and then suddenly their learning shot up. In May of 1942 he was sent off to what was then Karachi, India (now Pakistan) zigging and zagging on the way there. This was at the height of the German submarine attacks something that another UC Bearcat, Dr. Paul Herget, had a hand in preventing.

When he came back to the United States, he was stationed at Wright Field where his brother was also stationed. He was a master sergeant working on designing a radio receiver to help guide a bomb. He knew he wanted to engineer after his experiences in the war and his work at Wright. He did his freshman and sophomore years in one year. Keep in mind that he was an older student having graduated from high school in 1934 and after having served in the war he was quite mature. He and Leah were also married. They lived in Avondale in a two-family house. He would walk to UC or take the street car.

[...]

Mr. Spielberg was recognized by the IEEE in 2006 as a Computing Pioneer for his work on developing a computerized Point of Sale System while working for RCA. The system was tested in Cleveland, Ohio at the former Higbee's Department Store. Higbee’s was made famous in the movie “A Christmas Story” and now is the site of the Horseshoe Casino Cleveland. This citation reads “For recognition of contribution to real-time data acquisition and recording that significantly contributed to the definition of modern feedback and control processes.” Mr. Spielberg went on to work at General Electric where he developed some of their first computers and later for IBM, Scientific Data Systems, and ended his computing career with Burroughs Corp (which became Unisys).

Footnote:

1. While at the GE Computer Department Alumni symposium in 2006, I met another UC Bearcat who also worked for GE and helped start the time-share industry in the 1960s. His name was Gerry Haller.

Interviews:

1. An interview with Arnold Spielberg conducted by Anne Frantilla on June 23, 1987 at Mission Viejo, CA, Charles Babbage Institute Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

2. An interview with Arnold Spielberg for the Rutgers Oral History Archives conducted by Sandra Stewart Holyoak and Shaun Illingworth, New Brunswick, NJ on May 12, 2006. ( https://oralhistory.rutgers.edu/interviewees/30-interview-html-text/146-spielberg-arnold )

3. A recent interview that Arnold Spielberg gave can be found at http://boingboing.net/2016/12/27/arnold-spielberg-stevens-d.html

Notes :

• F = ANNE FRANTILLA

• S = ARNOLD SPIELBERG

• // = UNINTELLIGIBLE PASSAGE

F: This is Anne Frantilla talking to Arnold Spielberg in Mission Viejo, California on June 23, 1987.

S: Electronics was sort of a way of life for me, because I started playing around with radios when I was about eight or nine years old, when I was living in Cincinnati. Crystal sets were all that was practically available for a little kid. And I always had an interesting connection with Boy Scouts, because there was a Boy Scout who was older than me, and he sort of took a liking to me and gave me an old crystal set that he had. This was about 1926 .. My uncles had just come to this country from China, and they came to the United States through China from Russia. I'll never forget at my house I had this crystal set turr:ied on to a radio station in Cincinnati, WKRC, and I put the earphones on his ears, and his eyes opened wide. He had never, heard a radio in his whole life, you know. I've never forgotten it. So I always was interested in electronics and played with magnetics and made magnets and Erector sets and all that stuff. So in time I became a ham radio operator and that was in 1932 and I used to operate a lot. I was raised during the Depression and I missed college by an inch. So I went to work and I worked for about SE;wen years in the department store business down in Kentucky.

F: In sales, or ...

S: Well, sales, and then I eventually became a manager at the store. And so I learned that business pretty thoroughly. But all this time I was still working witrt ham radio. And then in the service I volunteered during World War II and I was sent to India. And in India I was the Communications Chief of a bomb squadron. And so I picked up some more electronics there. And ...

F: For a bomb squadron?

S: A medium bomb squadron, of B25s. Our squadron was called the Burma Bridge Busters because our job was to destroy the communication lines for the Japanese that were coming up through Burma, to try to invade China from the bottom, and into India as well. So, for a while I flew a combat missions as a radio operator, but then when they found out I could fix radios, they grounded me. So that worked out o.k. And when I came back to the States on rotation, I was able to finagle my way into Wright Field. My brother was a graduate engineer there, working in Wright Field, and he got drafted into the service. And so I took his place, so to speak, at Wright Field. And I worked on developing a radio receiver to guide a bomb. Now that was the first time anybody handed me a developmental program. I didn't know the first thing about how to go about designing something other than one does as a ham,"code your own equipment, you know. I never had a college education, and so it was just hands-on experience and it was kind of fun.

F: What technology does that involve? Was that something new? _

S: No, it wasn't radar. It was radio. It was using high frequency ...

F: Guides?

S: Yes, we used high frequency radio signals at 300 MHertz, and the bomb was guided by five different tones. The tones were filtered out and they in turn actuated a servomechanism which tilted the fins to left or right, or forward or backward, or neutral. That were the five tones. And the pilot sat there with a stick and he watched the bomb go down, and he would steer to left if it was veering, you know, to try to hit the target. And the way a bomb falls, it falls in a trajectory that if you'd fly the plane at the right altitude, you could sort of stay above it, you know, as it goes down and try to guide it in. And it had a technical name, RAZAR--radio and azimuth, range and azimuth control or something like that, I've forgotten. But that was my first experience in doing some engineering, so ....

F: Sounds pretty creative.

S: Yes, it was fun, and I was frustrated for a long time because the specifications that they wanted us to adhere to, you know, were specs I'd never heard of, so I had to look them up. What does microvolts per meter mean, and what's the IF band width, and ...

F: Did most people you were working with know? _

S: Oh, yes. There was a lot of engineers there. It was funny situation, because I came back from India as a Master Sergeant, with no college education, working with Ph.D.s who were corporals, you know. Some of them were pretty mad. What's this guy doing with all this rank here, and no training, and here I am, this hafd-working Ph.D. and they drafted me i_n the army and stuck me right back in Wright Field as a corporal. That kind of stuff. But I got a lot of help and//. And so right after, I decided to go to school under the GI Bill. [...] . So when I graduated [Cincinnati], I joined RCA. I joined RCA to work on television, but they had other ideas and they put me in some radar programs, and I kind of enjoyed that. In 1950 I transferred into a the beginning computer group there. So I really started working on computers in 1950. And at that time vacuum tubes were the main source of logic. And so I did some interesting work with the RCA tube design group in Harrison, New Jersey, because they were trying to design vacuum tubes that would respond as logic elements. They had one tube designed to be a three-input 11and11 gate, another one designed to be a two-input "and" gate, an "or" gate. And I built up some circuits with them. My job was to try to evaluate this and see if they were practical, should they continue with designing of functional, tubes. And a number of us pretty soon came to the conclusion that wasn't the way to go.

F: How much contact did you have with other people in the industry? Were there other people working on the same sorts of problems? Was it ... a kind of tight-knit community?

S: Well, there was a large group of people, and RCA, in order to get started there, was hiring people from all over. Some of their main sources of talent were people from MIT that worked on the Whirlwind computer. Which was the MIT's claim to fame. And there was a bunch of sharp guys, because the group that came together, RCA came out of research and development labs. While the development was going on down in Camden, New Jersey, there was some very original work going on up in Princeton Labs of RCA by a gentleman by the name of Jan Rykeman, who was the man would claims to have invented the magnetic core memory. And there was a big patent ...

F: I thought that was attributed to Forrester.

S: Well, there was a day ... that's right. And there was a big patent battle between Jan Rykeman of RCA Labs and the Hazeltine Corporation which held ...

F: Hazeltine Corporation?

S: Yes. For they claimed to hold a patent, and the two patents were right on the edge of contention. And I think J. Forrester won on that one. But I thought Rykeman was as much a contributor to that invention as Forrester, because they were just running parallel. And at that point in time I became a supervisor, and I had a very smart young guy that I sent up to the labs to learn how to make magnetic cores. We pretty soon came to the conclusion after this early vacuum tube stuff, that vacuum tube functional elements, that we would use vacuum tubes as drivers and use diodes for logic, although we had a contest, so to speak, whether we were going to build computers out of magnetic elements or diodes and logic elements. And the industry went diodes. And so that's where we went, too. Then I got , involved with the Bizmac computer and my first job there was to design the arithmetic system. And then after that I was responsible for designing a data sorter-merger-extractor, a wired program system, because they didn't use stored programs on that. They kept the stored program concept for computers and we did wired logic, were doing special functions. So this is a huge machine that would fill this room. And the purpose was to take data on magnetic tapes and sort it, or to extract information from magnetic tapes, or to merge data. And this was all in response to a contract that RCA had with the Ordnance Tank and Automotive Center to design a computer system for handling the ordnance operation. And it was in Michigan. And it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot there. A lot of us had a lot of opportunity to write patents. I must have about 1o or 15 patents in my name for all kinds of computer logic and systems . Then after that program got launched, since I was in the Advanced Development part of RCA, I got a very interesting program, that was the design of point-of-sales unit for a department store. We worked with an associate merchandising corporation and they were interested in sponsoring someone to develop an electronic cash register. And I got , picked for that project because of my department store experience. So I was able to be very conversant with department store managers, and, as a matter of fact, I think that was one of the best planned systems, despite the ancient technology we're in now.

F: Would that be something that would keep track of inventory?

S: Yes, it could. I'll just give you a brief outline of what its purpose was. The first thing was designed to capture data at the point-of-sale, like you see in any store you go to now. What we did was make a mockup and went to about six different major department stores throughout the country and set up--what you might say-- operating environments, where we'd have sales people ring up sales on this mockup machine, and then critique it, and we had buyers critique it, floor managers critique it, and we took elaborate notes. And then went back and incorporated this in an overall system design. And the overall system was designed to have multiple cash registers feeding into a central computer. And then the central computer in turn produced data on magnetic tape, which was in turn carried over to the Bizmac computer which was the inventory control computer. So the purpose was to capture data at the point-of-sale and then use it to modify inventory records, so as the store would have a current status of all their stock, and a current status of the sales activity.

F: Sounds like a pretty advanced .. .

S: It was. As a matter of fact, it is ... there's very few changes in the current system of point-of-sale operation that we didn't conceive of at RCA, including reading merchandise tags, including checking for bad credit and having a list of credit people on the drum. We used a big drum for the storage of information.

F: You know who made the drums?

S: Bryant, in Walled Lake, Michigan was the original. That drum was about 16 or 18 inches in diameter and about 24 inches long. It was huge drum.

F: Burroughs, I know, used some in the sos that they bought from the ERA.

S: Yes, that's right. The ERA was a good drum maker then. Well, Bryant was a maker of high-quality bearings and machine tools. And we felt that they could engineer a drum that would spin and hold its own, and what problems we had were usually-metal expansion, all that stuff, which was a pain in the neck. But we had it working. I have some pictures of my · collection at home of those earlier systems. · But the sales recorder, they used a computer, and it was one of the first times that I've ever known of, other than John Wilkes in England, that anyone built a micro-programmed computer. This computer we built, the custom computer for taking all the data of the sales recorder, was a wired micro-program computer, that is, we used diodes to set up the micro-steps, and we had a counter that stepped it along, and tor multiplication would step along feedback step-along. Feedback is your repeated additions and shift, binary type multiplication. So we literally had a micro-programmed computer, but not like the current technologies, which is stored in RAMs and ROMS. But the concept is similar. That's what I meant by this business_ of ideas re-occurring and re-occurring and re-occurring.

F: Did you get other contracts from that?

S: No. What happened was we did try for a lot of contracts. We went to the military, we showed them that we could automate logistics centers at the various Air Force bases. But the problem was very fundamentally that the system was too early. We didn't even have transistors in it. It was all diode logic in tubes. This was done from 1954 to 1956, and the mean-time-to-failure of that system when it was installed--it was installed as a test system in Higbee's in Cleveland--and there was 10 point-of-sale units in the sportswear department feeding the recorder's Central, which was the name of the supporting computer. And it usually would stay together for about eight hours and then it would go down. And somebody would be jumping out to fix it, so it would barely hold together for the day and then the technicians would pile on it at night and try to get it back to life again . .

F: There must have been some sort of backup system with it.

S: Nope.

F: During the day if it went down they couldn't make any sales?

S: When it went down, they had to go use hand cash registers. They left the regular cash registers around. So after a year of trial, they concluded that functionally it was a good idea, that functionally it would work, but that technology-wise it wasn't ready. And so RCA ate a couple million dollars worth of costs there, and so did the associate merchandising corporation. And they said, o.k., end of experiment, end of program. Now, a lot of the people that were on that program went to different companies. Some went to IBM, and IBM set up an operation in Rochester, Minnesota to continue to examine systems using point-of-sale. And some of the original RCA guys became part of that and I ran into them later when I joined: IBM. And, matter of fact, they asked me all about it--early days. I left RCA in late '56, early '57. I joined the General Electric computer department. At that time the computer department was called the Industrial Computer Department because Ralph Cordner said, "You will not join the business, making business computers. I will not allow that. 11 And every time a plan was sent to him that mentioned going into business computers, he would would write "No" across it and send it back .

F: What was his reason?

S: His reason was that. General Electric is an industrial company, and if you want to make computers, you can make them for the industry. So there was a sharp guy by the name of Barney Oldfield who was head of the Microwave Lab, and he set-about to, somehow to make this happen. And he convinced the Bank of America that General Electric could build the IRMA computer that the Stanfdrd Research Institute (SRI) was designing for them. So, after several under-the-table operations in which he had some pretty good names associated with the company, like Dr. Herb Grosch, Dr. Bob Johnston who used to be//, was part of that team. And they hired me to help set up the Industrial Computer Department, because that was the banner under which we flew. But in the meantime, they did seti the Bank of America the concept of building the computer, and GE launched into the computer business despite Gardner's statement that he wouldn't. And so when they were recording the story, when they finally dedicated the first computer, Cordner came out to attend the dedication ceremonies and promptly fired Barney Oldfield right after the ceremony, for violating his rules. And he gave the company 18 months to get out of the business. You know, gave them II. And there was only about five or six people that knew about that. Certainly not me. But I remember working on a computer for process control, that another guy and I went to the general manager and said, "Hey, we can put a memory in this thing and now you've got yourself a business computer. So II we did it. And that got him started. That became the GE 225 and 235 which was, well, they were both successful computers. I really didn't find out about all that high-level machinations until I went to the GE reunion, where some of the guys that were involved in that spoke about it.

F: Whatever happened to the Bank of America contract?

S; They shipped about 18 or 20 systems. They were problem systems, but they worked. And we got our data sorters, you know, check sorters, from National Cash Register, who in turn got them from II Pitney-Bowes, I believe, was the original developer. In the meantime, Burroughs was doing their own ...

F: But the check sorters that we used came from National Cash Register.

S; I didn't know they made them.

S: Well, they actually had them made by Pitney-Bowes, and then modified themselves, and GE finally made their own. But then they really lost the banking business because--a lot of things I wasn't totally aware of, but-while their product planning was not well directed, they came up with a middle-range product that I started, called the 400-Series of the product planning I I decimal machine, something like our B.;Series. But it was not competitive, it was priced too high, so it didn't succeed. And then they came out with a 600 line which was pretty good. But by then they just decided to work their way out of the business. And a lot of people thought they lost a lot of money in the business, but as I understand it from some of the people that were involved in finances, they really didn't lose much money on it. At least that's the story I heard. So when they started to ease their way out of the business, that's when I left and went to IBM. And I joined IBM in 1963 to work on process control--computers. IBM was just really starting to get into process control. And again, one of the guys that got me into IBM was a fellow that worked with me at RCA. So there's again the old IBM community of people. And ...

F: How was IBM perceived within//?

S: How was it perceived? It was a top company. This was, in '63 IBM was a league leader. They were in business computers. They decided to get into process control and they adapted an old machine called the 1620, and they repackaged it and called it the 171 o. But it really didn't cut it. They installed a few because they have such a tremendous sales force, that they put a few in some paper mills and a few in some// to do some data logging, but then they started programs that would come up with a new one. And that's where I came in. And thts new machine was not well-conceived because the people who put the system logic together came out of the business computer line and their goal really was not to make a process control computer, but to make a small business computer. And since they were funded from the process control line, they gave lip service to process control. It was typical politics. So when I took a look at that computer, I say, "My God, this will never work in a process control world!' And so, this fellow who came with me from RCA, John//, and I sat down and designed a machine that we thought would do the trick. And we presented it to management and they bought it. And I ended up being responsible for the design of that machine. And the result that was called the IBM-1800. But the guts of the machine were then flipped over and used in the 1130, which was a very, very popular IBM small business scientific computer, and it replaced the 1620 which by then had died out in terms of the market, in the market.; So the 1130, I guess, over its life sold about 15,000 or 20,000 machines. And the 1800 process control computer sold about 82,000. In both cases they met their forecast. The real problem with getting into process control is the same as it is in almost any company--the marketing end of it. To sell computers in the process control industry requires a lot of custom design because each of the processes have different technologies, different sensors required. The front ends are the most complex part of the system. So when I first started working on this system, I spent at least three to four months writing specifications for what the front end should be, based on my experience at GE. And there were a few good guys at IBM that knew that industry, and so we put our heads together and got a fairly good specification written, and then part of it was built up in Rochester, Minnesota--the high-performance analog-to-digital conversion stuff was built up there. And the low-level work and the main processor and all the peripherals and all the peripheral controllers were built in San Jose, were under my control. And so it was a very intense work, because anybody who says that things are taken easy at IBM is wrong, because I used to come to work at 7:00 in the morning and work until 6, 7:00 at night and come in and work on Saturday, because what' happened was when they decided to put the new computer in, they didn't want to change the schedule. So we literally had to discard the first system and start over again and still keep the same schedule. And it was almost like an impossible thing, and yet, in a little less than two years, we designed a machine, built the first prototype, built the second version of it--you know, called the B-level, the first was the A-Model and then the B-Model--and we were just ready to release the C-Model to Manufacturing when I got an offer to be a Vice President in Scientific Data Systems, and I said, "Goodbye, IBM." And so I went to work for Scientific Data Systems in Santa Monica.

F: Was there any project that was competing with the one that IBM--the one for process control?

S: The 1800 was a, what would be considered now, mini. But in those days it was a small, medium-sized computer. Small-medium range. And the systems that were similar to it in performance characteristics were Scientific Data Systems' 900-Series--the 91 o, the 920, the 930--were a competing level of machine. Except they didn't have process control front ends. They were designed to be used in the small scientific and in downrange missile stuff. They did have some special front ends for them, but they were directed at missile simulation, missile data analysis. And that's one of the reasons I guess Scientific Data Systems wanted me-- because of that experience there, and also the previous experience at GE, plus several of the guys from GE went to work at SDS while I was at IBM, and said, 11Why don't you get Arnold? 11 That kind of stuff. So the other competitors to that machine were TRW, the RW-300, that was a little bit earlier machine, actually. And Daystrom had a machine that was--it was a good machine, but they never could market it right--they were always selling at such a low price that they really couldn't make any money · off it. And IBM's marketing force just overrode a lot of people. And also they had a shrewd piece of marketing concept: they did not try to use the computer as a process controller. They used it as mostly a data logging system. And they also incorporated a lot for factory record, data gathering, parts counting, production line control, production line data logging. Every place they could apply it to a data-logging operation, they would not then get committed to run a process. And it's easier to sell in that marketplace. You can build a good base of business, and from there they can grow. After I left IBM they started a System 7 which was their next generation processing control, but I was no longer involved in that. And I don't even know what happened to it, or whether it's still active or not. I know that while I was there I was often questioned about the point-of-sale system because IBM was doing some planning along that line. // they were very careful not to ask me about real trade secrets.

F: I don't think that would be true today, do you?

S: I don't know about today, but I know then they had a man in charge of, you might say, official information gathering. But when I left GE I had to sign all kinds of disclaimers I wouldn't give out any information. When I entered IBM they said, 11We don't want to know anything about what you've done specifically. 11 So the questions they asked me about sales recorders, pointof- sale systems, were not how I built it, or how it was built, but what were some of the concepts in terms· of application orientation. That's fairly open. But that was kind of interesting. I stayed at Scientific Data Systems where I was responsible for the whole 900-Series and then the Sigma-Series. The Sigma 2, 3, 5, 7. We were working a Sigma-9 with the French company. They would paying for a lot of them, and that's when they sold out to Xerox. And at that point I left and decided to go with a small semiconductor company called Electronic Arrays. That was a mistake. They built MOS semiconductors up at Mountain View and they asked me to be a Vice President of Operations in Southern California, in the L.A. area, actually out in the valley, to try to get them into the business of applying their MOS technology. So we had a few small contracts, but the company was very underfunded and the president was a guy that was so wrapped up in semiconductors, especially so wrapped up in MOS, that we had to build all of our systems out of the MOS technology that was coming out of the mountain he planned, even though the costs were so prohibitive that we couldn't make it for a profit. And even though we wanted to use TTL, he said no, we got to use MOS. And he would come up with a logic family of MOS technology that was like the small-scale integration right now. Very small scale. But it was too costly in terms of the number of gates that were functions per dollar. So, while we shipped about 40 or 50 of those systems, the company eventually--well, it was MAl--that was Management Assistance, and they did maintenance and they also did a few products of their own. And their job was do a lot of computer maintenance, or contract maintenance. So we built this IBM controller for them, tape controller, and then when they canceled the contract, fortunately for the company we had a cancellation clause, we collected a million dollars on the . cancellation clause. We used that to set up a calculator company, so I had to write the business plan for a calculator company, and we set up and manufactured a four-function calculator, a printing calculator, and then we had two others planned. And that was my first experience in applying MOS into calculators. And at that time we sold a lot of chips to the Japanese, which, instead of buying from them, they were buying the chips from us. That was rather interesting. And this was in the period of 1969 through 1971. '68 to '71, that time. And then the company really got into trouble financially. We sold the calculator operation to a sort of a broker who tried to complete the line and then he ended up getting a couple of good contracts to make some more calculators. But what had happened, the prices were going down so fast that it was difficult to keep up with it. Our original plan was that the calculators were going to sell for $398.00--for a four-function calculator.

F: Wow!

S: Well, that's what they brought. Our plan was the next year they'd go to $298, the next year $198, the next year to $100. And it came down even faster than that. So the price just shot down, because the minute Jhe Japanese got a hold of it and they started putting high production techniques in it, the first calculator would have five chips, the next calculator was designed to have three chips, and of course pretty soon they were down to one chip. So that was a// adventure that got me experience in doing plans, and setting up a small business within a business, and so was the whole small company a business, because as a Vice President I was laying out printed circuit boards, you know, in the beginning, when there was only about 10 people in the group. We used to do everything. After leaving Electronic Arrays, I went into consulting, and I did some consulting for SRI, and for some small companies that needed systems and procedures working, and some technology, evaluations and things like that.

F: You had no problem getting work?

S: It was a bad time then. I would say I was about 35% busy and the rest of the time just messing around. And then Dr. Bob Johnston had a party one time. He found out that I wasn't doing anything much. He said, "Why don't you come to work for Burroughs?" And so in 1973 I joined Burroughs as the Director of Engineering under Lloya~ole~~) And for the first--oh, I joined him in April of '73, and then until September I spent my time out here in California helping the Galicia plant, going through some of the rough starts on getting the 1700-line. That was under Rod Bunker then. And I worked with Dean Ernest and some other guys, that we were just trying to see if we couldn't get the product cost down, because the 1700 was promised as a low-cost machine and it came in pretty high and it took a lot of effort to kind of re-direct it to get the cost down, but never down to the goals.

F: Well, it was definitely one of the most successful product lines ...

S: It became a successful product line, and yet initially it looked very sad in terms of cost. But I guess marketing handled it o.k. And after there I moved to Detroit, and I was involved in all the plans then under the Computer Systems Group. And I was in Detroit for about two years when the DC&L program started. That was a mistake. We involved way too much . of the company's product plans onto a technology that was (how shall I call it?). It was best labelled experimental in the beginning, and it looked like-- as a matter of fact it had promise. It did have promise, and if we'd have picked maybe one or two products and said let's use these as the target products, we wouldn't have gotten management so nervous about committing all this money and all the programs to a technology that was still evolving and still had a lot to go and had a lot of cost.

F: Is there anyone group or group of people that sort of were pushing for that?

S: Yeah, the focus of the push was really two places--at the senior management level it was under Dr. Bob Johnson and Herb Stopper. Herb really did a lot of the conceiving of the function of the circuit system. The Rancho Bernardo plant actually did the implementation of the BC&L technology. The packaging concepts were worked out in Tredyffrin under Sid Einhart then, and I think if we had stayed, "Let's build the machine in Tredyffrin and no place else, we'd have had a good chance of success because that machine was big enough so we could have absorbed some of the cost of the water cooling, the liquid cooling,//, it exceeded its cost objectives it would be like the 1700 was. It exceeded its cost objectives a lot, yet it became successful. Another problem that happened with the product is there was a lot of problems initially in the technology at Rancho. And so this kept delaying the product coming to the marketplace. And so what happened was the technology became older without seeing the light as a product that brings some return to the company. Also, the signal level that was chosen under the emphasis of Dr. Stopper, was incompatible with the other ECL technology that Fairchild was sponsoring and that Motorola was working on. So we had no way of rescuing ourself by saying hey, let's grab some ECL from Motorola or from Fairchild and fill in the gaps and make a system that could have been compatible in that sense.

F: You mean technology was changing increasingly fast, or do you just think it took an extraordinary amount of time to get it ...

S: Yeah, but you see, that's true even now. But now they've really cleaned up the art of having very high density VLSI technology. They also have now cleaned up the design automation methodologies for laying down, you know, defining the patterns. In the early days the DA was crude. A lot of stuff had to be laid out by hand. Gate arrays were just beginning to be ...

F: Gate arrays?

S: Gate arrays. That's the concept, instead of doing the design of a chip exactly customized to the function that you want to do, you have an array of gates that can be interconnected to make the logic. But the array is a fixed pattern, and then you just configure it to the logic that you want. And some of our ... well, matter of fact, the A-3 is built of gate array type logic. The A- 1 o was built that way. A BCL, the A-9 was built that way, and the concept of having quick turnaround custom circuits just wasn't ready. But now with the silicon simulation technology that they have to go to simulate circuits using high-performance systems, you can have a much faster turnaround. And thus you can go back to some custom circuits. In the meantime, while all this was going on, the computers on a chip, you know, while I was with Electronic Arrays, Intel was beginning to work on the 8080, or the earliest single-chip computer. And as a matter of fact, speaking about rock, I proposed to Electronic Arrays that we build a three-chip computer, a computer chip, a memory access chip, and an 1/0 chip. And they said, naw, we don't want to do that. And it was about the same time the 8080 was coming out, I heard Dr. Davidow // at Intel. So I often thought, gee, what would happen ... we never had the money to do it, though. Forget it. We were so lightly funded that probably it was a good decision not to do it. But on the other hand it was a shame. We would have flunked because we would not have had the money to put into it. So in working on CML, it was a frustrating job because there was a tremendous controversy about using the program. This plant in particular, but then engineering manager, Irv Houk absolutely did not want to use CML. He was probably right, in retrospect. The A-9 program shoved around from one technology to another, trying to meet everybody's various pulls and demands as to what the machine should be. You start off as a CML machine, then they said let's do it on a PTL, but that wasn't enough performance. Then it was back to CML again because it wasn't enough performance. Then they proposed the F-100, Fairchild ECL technology . That one finally came out to be. But that cost about three or four years of //

F: I could be wrong, but wasn't the company doing very well in the '70s? I mean, it looked like that's when it started being really profitable. Mayo~ it's more toward the end of the '70s.

S: Well, more toward the end, yes. And also, recognizing the fact that CML was not going to make it, Bob Merrell was then the vice president, started a bunch of programs using PTL technology. They redid ... they gave up on the CTL technology. They redid the 1800, the 17 series of// in PTL. Then came the 1800 and 1900 series. They started a PTL program here that became the 5900. Pasadena continued evolving out of CTL into TTL, and so TTL really became the rescuing technology. And then Rancho Bernardo sort of sunk into limbo for a while. And there was one successful machine that opened out of BC&L in Pasadena, and that was the 4800. It was made out of BC&L-zero. And it exceeded its cost, but it had nice performance. Then there was another machine built out of BC&L-zero at Liege which was a 1700-style machine, but built at Liege out of BC&L-zero. The BC&L-zero was packaged in a conventional package. Instead ofa liquid cool pack, it was an air-cooled system. And so it didn't suffer from the problems of trying to make it a good packat)ing technology with liquid coolant work. And now there's some of the people who were early proponents of the liquid cooling have come up with a much nicer package down there at Rancho. Gunther Weber's//. And what happened with me is, after the CML fiasco (I might call it that), I officially transferred out here because my exwife did not want to live in Detroit any more. So I stayed here and worked on it. Then I went to work in this plant in Systems, and then gradually evolved into an Activity Manager and put together a graphics program.

[...]

F: Did you think it was frustrating for people working on CNL?

S: On CNL?

F: Well, it doesn't seem like overall the company lost that much. They sort of rescued themselves in time.

S: Well, they did rescue, but in reality, we delayed our entrance into the VLSI field by at least three years. I would say we could have been into the VLSI fiel"d sooner had we had a little more focus and more development without commitment. In other words, if we had put one product together and looked at it, we could have learned from it instead of diversifying--not diversifying--diluting all the skills and trying to cover a whole bunch of bases, and not succeeding at any ...

F: All right. Talking about who was arguing who, doing what, in terms of BC&L or not, what groups do you think had the most input. There's marketing people and legal people and engineering people.

S: Well, the market people, in all honesty, I think, really, didn't really know whether the technology was ...

F: Did they have a say?

S: Well, Product Planning was then under Fred Meier, you know, was concerned that we're not getting the objectives. You know, he looks at it and says, "Where's my results? 11 And the results weren't there. So obviously he became sour on it. Bob Merrell at first was for it and then against it, as he saw nothing happening. Bob O'Connell, who was head of the semiconductor group, was trying to make his group do it, and of course there'd be head clashes while they tried to straighten each other out. And the net result was finally the company said, "Let's go.""

F: Was the top-level management?

S: Well, gentlemen like Paul Mirabito were really at the mercy of his people who were giving him good technical advice, imaginative advice. But after a while he said, I'm sure he saw// 'we're not there yet.' And unfortunately Herb Stopper was a very convincing talker, an extremely brilliant guy. I used to work with Herb at GE, so I knew him before he came to Burroughs. He was in our group at GE. And he's an extremely bright guy, but extremely stubborn. And he had the concept that anything he says can be done, anybody ought to be able to do. And so, he never put a product down in the marketplace. And so he would come up with absolutely correct theories, but the implementation was tough, and he'd get totally impatient when it wasn't happening. And he'd start clamping down on people. And Bob Johnson supported him on a lot of that, although Bob's a very sharp engineer also, but also a guy who never really put products in the marketplace personally. And there's something to having your hands dirty and completing a program and making it into the factory and going through the nitty-gritty of getting a product through the manufacturing cycle that is a very--how shall I call it--leveling type of experience. You say, boy, Murphy's Law works. If it can go wrong it will. And you start to work on problem-solving those problems. And unless you carry that out and have some of that under your belt, everything looks ethereal, looks like it can happen. And then you get rosy glasses. And that's a lot of what happened in the higher level there. There was some rosy glasses at the corporate level of engineering, I think, and some insisted that yes, it can be done. And then at some of these big meetings we have at Detroit, stop work put up curves. Yes, the cost can really be here. It can under ideal circumstances, but not under the.practicality of what was happening at those times ..

F: It seems like such a complex thing.

S: It is. It was a very complex ... and the industry has matured now and now we know how to do it. And things that seemed to be ... that were very difficult then are still difficult, but the technology is here and the tools are here and the design automation is here an~Jthere's maturity in the thing. And we were on the forefront. And when you're on the forefront it's not too hard to slip. And it hurt me.

F: // It's hard to work on a project that doesn't.

S: I got a kick in the butt for it, too. Somehow or other I should have made it happen. That's the job.

F: Someone's got to be the fall guy.

S: Well, a fall guy or what. A number of us took a beating and I was about ready to quit. But then I said, naw, I ain't going to do that. I'm going to stick it out and show them I can do it. And that's what happened. And so now, well, we'll talk about graphics now, because what happened was the company had decided that it would be a good idea if we had some new product avenues. Graphics, according to the corporate product manager study, was an evolving, an emerging, field.

F: Do you think they're correct?

S: The company was correct in saying graphics is emerging. The company was correct in saying it can be a business. The company is correct in saying that it would complement our product line. What was wrong was that there was no real training in marketing, in how to sell it. It's such a new concept, and it's a technical concept that has to be sold. And you were not going into the front door to your DPO, operator of data processing operations and say, 11Hey, I'm gonna do more business for you. I'm gonna give you a more efficient machine now. I'm gonna crunch the numbers faster for you, or I'm going to do your banking faster," or what have you. Instead you say, 11l'm going to give you good reports. I'm going to give you graphic illustration of your data. And I'm going to give you publication quality of all these slides that you can make presentations with. 11 And so that was the marketing end of the thing that really need to be grown.

F: It was kind of before its time?

S: That's A. The company that we selected had a good product, but the product was an older product. And it was at the highest end of the graphic performance line. It was designed to be a high-end system producing very, very high resolution graphics. Very high quality. The software for it was very user-unfriendly. And unfortunately, initially enough of us did not know enough about graphics to know just how unfriendly it was.

F: It's probably a whole different ballgame then ...

S: Well, we began to learn as we got through the program. We began to see that this interact program that was sponsored by E. N. Herschel, who was the then-president of Superset, was a clever program, but it was designed to be run by a Ph.D. And when some of our programmers got hold of this, they said, "Oh, my God, this is user-unfriendly." And we tried to convince them to change it. And we couldn't. That's one. The other thing is the product cost and the market price we could sell it for were too close to each other. And the way Burroughs does business is, we lump in all the hardware support, and we lump in all the development costs as preproduction costs, you know. And that added to the whole cost transfer price such that the costs were too high from the profitability point of view, particularly since the volume forecasted was low. When I first started the program, I suggested that we don't even build any more plants. We take a small group of us and move us right down to San Diego, move into an adjacent building right with Superset, we set up a small manufacturing operation that has low overhead, and we can produce it, and top brass said, "No way. That's not our way of doing business." And I still think I'm right, you know, because subsequently large companies have set up what they call tiger teams that are put in a little building and go off and do this. I mean, take away the pressure and you just get this done. And that's what we really wanted to do. We wanted to set up a little tiger team and go out and do it. And so, as a substitute for the tiger team, we set up a plant within a plant in Pasadena. They decided this plant was too busy to make it. Ed Nelson was overloaded. They'll put it up in Pasadena. So they created a plant within a plant and· had a program manager. And they gave it relief for one year in charging into it all the high cost of the overhead. So that brought the cost down. But it was an artificial bringing down because they redistributed the cost to other products within the Pasadena plant. You can't get something for nothing. If you got n people there, the money's got to be charged some way. Well, they decided they'd do a favor for the graphics program and not charge it. But so the other products ate it. But that's life. We had a very good team here in putting this product together. We had a very good program planned, but the budget was always at the bottom end of everybody's desire. So when this plant was given budget money, they were given budget money for all the mainstream products and I got what was left, which wasn't enough. And yet it seemed like a lot of money, and the reason it seemed like a lot of money is if you don't sell many, any development costs a lot of money. So it became a circle. And the interesting thing about all this in retrospect is after we canceled the program and turned the work back over to Superset for a while, until it was completely canceled, we had the program here, and then turned the work back to Superset and said, "O.k., you've got a lower-cost operation then. You do all the work." The marketing was still not selling enough, and when I talked to Dr. Stern, as I went back to the stockholders' meeting about three or four months ago, and Fred Meier introduced me to him as a man who helped get the GP-2000 started, so I said, "Well, just at the time when we had decided to kill the program, orders were starting to come in." Now what that does, it ties back to the concept of how you really have to develop a sales force to sell it and it takes time.

F: You also have to work in tandem with what's going on.

Well, there was only two people in market planning to work on this. One guy in product planning and one guy in market planning. And they were fellows who never had experience in direct brand-new program introduction. And so, while they tried hard, it was very difficult to get the market people to make a decent forecast. First the forecast was real high. Then when it came time to cut the mustard, down went the forecast. Up went the cost. The cost forecast played reverse roles. The higher the forecast, the lower the cost. The lower the forecast, the higher the cost. Both are self-fulfilling destruct prophesies. And the lesson we learned out of that, and we're trying to pioneer, is to help marketing get started early in a new product program. I remember giving several talks here at the plant to our other activity managers about the experience we had on this program, the idea being to help look for advance clues as to how we can help marketing introduce a product, help get training across, help make the product palatable to the salesmen so they can sell it.

F: You know, some of that sounds familiar to me as some marketing problems they haa when they were doing the B-5000. That was part of it, that the salesmen didn't really know what they were selling. The customers didn't know what to make of it, so ...

S: And they didn't know how to sell the graphics programs either.

F: It's kind of similar.

S: And now I think graphics is a really fascinating industry. An ir,tteresting sidelight--1 was over to Steve's house one day and George Lucas was there. This was about three or four years ago. And Lucas had this company making the very highest level of quality graphics, and they were using it for animation. And he was trying to help organize a company under his name. I said, "Hey, George, what are you going to do with that company?" He said, 11Arnold, 11 he said, 111 don't know how to manage that company. I'm going to sell it." And he did. He sold it off. It was just too new for him. It was too different. It didn't fit under ILM, the industrial lights and magic. It had special effects. Because it was prohibitively costly and to get a really good animation into a movie, you almost needed a Cray computer to crank out the data. Now even that's being helped, because now the industry, like Tl especially is coming out with custom chips that are graphics-oriented chips. They're designed to refresh the tube real fast, refresh the screen, refresh the memory real fast, do bit manipulation, picture manipulation, pixel management that they're all customized on a chip. So you can put a system together that works fast and it's cheap. And so what's happening is the graphics industry is becoming driven now by PCs, except for the very high end. Then they really need big computers because you got so many pixels to manage. Now I'm running a mundane program but necessary called . Engineering Reso.urces. ,And we have a lot of things to do here. I don't know hdw much you want to go into that now. It's not really an archival thing--it's a current project.

F: It sounds like you're sort of involved in different aspects of projects over the years. You could make comparisons like between how equipment was tested over the years.

S: Well, for example, most all the early equipment, the '50s and '60s were all hand, manually assembled, hand-wired, soldered, and very complex back panels, large panels of logic, of plug-in ... one functional element was a package about six inches by six inches by two inches deep or I think it was something like that. It was a logic// couple tubes on it, some resistors and diodes and that's a flip-flop. Now a flip-flop is so small you can't even see it. That's one. In terms of the ... the assembly methodologies went from hand-soldered to wire wrap to etched back planes. I'll talk about the back . planes. The etched back planes reflow soldering, which means you don't have to get a new head, just put solder mask on there. I mean solder array //, then either reflow solder or air heater. And then make the connections that way. Patching gets denser and denser and denser. Layers get thicker and more and more layers o.f interconnect. A back panel used to be a layer of wires criss-crossing, then the XV edge, then multi-layer, you know. And that's where we're at now. Multi-layer back planes. And then mounting techniques were originally everything was socketed and then everything was soldered in by soldering by drilling holes and plate through the holes and putting the components in. And now surface soldering is coming in because it's more compact. And each time you advance that technology, the tools required are more complex. Surface ~o_ldering is complex ~n_d also ~he field repair poli<?Y is changed. It used to: be that a guy would go out in the field, unsolder the wires and take the transistor out, put a new one in, and solder it back in. And then a chip would be unplugged, and assembly of componentry. And now the whole board is changed out And that means everything can be repaired faster. And since computers are taking less and less space, a board becomes a more, a larger and larger significant part of the system. So the cost of spares are going up, because you can't stock a small component--now you stock a board. And more and more each board becomes a custom board. So often the spares are equal to cost of the machine. For example, we have an A-15 here, and a set of spares for the A-15 is a quarter of a million dollars. That means you now have a new logistics. You'd better make the machine last a long time, so that the reliability is way up there so the need to change out is small. Too, you better have a fast way of getting spares to . the spot, because no customer is going to be happy with a machine down more than half an hour. Or an hour at the most. Or they start to scream .

F: Do you think reliability is improving?

S: Definitely. In our future machines we're talking about reliabilities of over a year. And mean time between a system halt of longer than a year. Now when I was in Process Control, they wanted us at first to achieve a 99% up time. Then they raised they the jumping bar to 99-1/2% up time. Then they raised--about every two years they do this--then the next jump was about 99.8 up time. That's asking a lot. And our companies then would not agree to redundancy in the systems. I often proposed, particularly for nuclear control, a dual system. The military and space program often has three or four systems, all sharing the function, you know, and if one goes down the others take over. But the cost was so much in those days that they couldn't have the redundancy that they needed. So they used to talk about having redundant circuits. They tried to come up with circuit systems that would path A, if it would quit, path B would work. And very few machines were really built like that. But the most popular machines in the current marketplace are like tandem that have dual systems tied together. But what's happening is I think tandem's even going to get by-passed because of the increased reliability of very large-scale integration. So putting a machine together with very few soldered parts, you know, very few plugs, every time you make a connection it's a reliability focus point. And so the more you reduce that, the longer you can bet on the componentry lasting. And so we're committing ourselves now for future products to come out in the very late '80s to be in the one-year reliability range. That's pretty good. With 24-hours a day running, there was over 8,000 hours . Now that doesn't still hold true for some of the physically moving peripherals. Disks are getting lhat way, though. Disk technology is getting way up there in the $50,000 range, and that's a lot. You have to figure something drastic right there. Now, as far as testing things in the factory is concerned, early testing was by oscilloscopes and probes. You looked at pulses and you looked at the wave shape. You said now that's o.k. or it's not o.k. or something's missing here. So scopes and probes and brilliant engineers helping the test technicians on the floor how to test something. And also in the early systems, because componentry cost a lot of money, you tried to design with the fewest number of parts, and particularly, you tried to design with the fewest number of flip-flops because flip-flops are considered to be unreliable. So that perforce the logic became very complex, the system logic became complex in terms of you would take the same data and you'd use that .,. . qr rather take the same path, try t9 put different pieces of data througli the same path at a different time sequence, so tracing a fault, you had to know where it was in the time sequence as well as what path it was going through. Nowadays, with componentry costing less, you will to be redundant; you're willing to make a once-through path in terms of making the system easier to check. Furthermore, you now put probes on the end of cards, you know, so you can test the function. You have diagnostics that are getting better and better and betters so that you can exercise the machine with diagnostics more exactly and D-drive and other test techniques like that are homing in on individual parts. But now we back away from that somewhat, because now it's necessary just to show that card is bad. As far as the field is concerned, you can just pull the card, swap it, send it back to the factory where a different level of diagnostics can be used, to home in on the particular parts that are bad. The next thing that's happening, and it. actually was happening at IBM . when I was there, is the beginning of use of robots to test. Instead of putting peripherals on the line to test the computer going down the line, they'll find a functional robot that will simulate the peripheral, and especially for a high-volume production, just plug the robot into the output and it runs through a whole bunch of exercises// on the tape, I'm running like a tape, or acting like a printer. And we're talking about that now. Also, a lot of peripherals are disappearing from the scene that used to be electromechanical, like card punches and card readers, and paper tape readers and paper tape punches--they're all passe. And once the main elements of storage, disks, magnetics, magnetic disk, magnetic tape, magnetic cartridge, CD-type things, laser, laser-read, laser-written, these are all very reliable technologies. And what's coming to the front is distribution of data. So datacom is becoming more and more important, the need for long-distance communication, the need for terminals, so everybody's remote to the host. So datacom is becoming a larger and larger portion of the peripherals that are attached to a system. Highdensity storage, archival storage like tapes or CDs, terminals driven from concentrators and high-quality datacom subsystems is what a system is evolving into. And graphics next.

F: Talking about the telecom, datacom elements, it seems like products within an industry are becoming more interdependent upon each other. Like the new contract they did with the graphics company you were talking about. I don't think in the '50s companies really shared resources to come up with a product.

S: You mean, are we as much vertically integrated as we used to be? Do you know what I mean by vertically· integrated?

F: Yes, yes.

S: O.k. Yeah, plants try to be vertically integrated, but every now and then well we got smart. We have probably admitted we don't know how to make a good disk. Well, we don't know how to make a good magnetic disk system, and so we buy them. We don't know how to make tape any more, so we buy them. Or, put it another way. A specialty company has passed us up, so it's now more convenient and better business judgment to buy the technology from them. So we've become more and more an assembler of componentry and there used to be, early on, early discussed, I remember having sat with some of the people with Intel. They, remember (no you can't, you wouldn't understand}, you know, if you will turn over the development of this or//, the people let us do their system for you, we'll deliver yo_u a systems on a chip, you know what I rnean? And Poleski ~as then president of SDS, said, 11No way! You're not going to take away my prerogative design, my kind of computer, you know: 1 But yet 8086, 80386, the newest ones, those are now forcing companies to use that processor in their application, because somebody just concentrated on that. So you might say the semiconductor people are slowly stealing pieces of the show. On the other hand, the name of the game now is the application software, the business end of it, and that's where the companies ours will continue to shine. We just have to strike the right balance, what we buy and what we make. And so that's what happening. The industry is evolving into ... every time there's a new step in the technology, it creates a new set of balances as to how you deal with it in a business sense.

F: It seems like in the early days that it was more possible to trace products by the contributions of specific individuals, whereas now it seems to be almost impossible. You know, people change jobs so quickly and departments are so big. I don't know if it's because the technology is not improving dramatically, like it did between vacuum tubes and transistors. It's harder to trace product developments to specific individuals.

S: Yeah, I agree with you. And yet there's always some genius somewhere that comes up with the unusual break. But by and large, most of the engineers working in this place here are not inventors. They are applyers. That doesn't mean they couldn't under the right circumstance, but most of the circuits inventions are taking place in semiconductor companies, one. Two, most technology is so complex now it takes a team of people to make it happen. You, to put an idea together, whereas in the early days, I'm thinking of a terminology, I'll use the work the 11Benski-Fetch 11--and I know you've never of that. When I was back in RCA, a very bright guy who came to RCA from MIT where he was working on Whirlwind, came up with an idea of drawing information from a drum in clumps of data and transferring it to a core memory where it was operated on the core memory, and then putting the results back on the drum again. He got a patent on that. We called it the Benski-Fetch. It was named after Lowell Benski. Nowadays that's old hat. You know what I mean? But yet in the 1950s that was an invention because it was the first time done. I have some patents on library systems for storage retrieval based on looking up a reference and then using that reference to point to another reference and getting that, as a library system for searching for data on tape, with all the front and the back ends of tape all identified on a drum. So I can know which tape to go to . Now that technology is//, nobody needs it any more. Yet it could be identified with a person. Or, while I was working on a sales recorder, when we were storing information on a drum, we wanted to be able to find the . data and yet we were looking up some prices. A guy by the name of Phillipi Tonkel, a guy from Brazil, came up with a hashing scheme which everybody uses in the industry now. And we got a patent on it way back then. And it's a scheme of taking data that has an identifying number, and operating on that number and developing an algorithm which randomizes that number in such a way that you can distribute it in various channels, and you can search the channels by taking the unknown number, randomizing it, having a resultant number point to that channel, and go find it. And that's what we used on the sales recorder, and yet hashing is a common technology now. But it was a marvelous invention and you could point to that guy who did it. Now maybe somebody else did it in other companies, but we didn't know it. There's a lot of small invention like that. Circuits inventions, flip-flop inventions ideas. This fellow Chuck Profster came up with a novel way of designing a ,two-two flip-flop that he could get isolated output from. And he did it by' putting a resistor in the cathode of the tube and that change of voltage across the resistor was the output signal. And yet he made the circuits stable enough so it functioned. And that became a patent. So there's a lot of early st.uff that was done that you could name people for. And in the early days of the computer industry, whenever, when transistors started coming in, everybody that could be applied to it was translating tube surfaces and transistors and writing patents on them. But that was RCA. RCA was very patent-conscious .

F: So maybe patents aren't the way to document product development.

S: Well, patents still are, because there are some really great things happening that people get patents on. But also, I'm sure the guy who invented the CD deserves a patent. And yet, way back then, we worked on thermoplastic recording at RCA. In the early '50s we were working on a . scheme where we coated a disk with a thermoplastic material and the disk (no, I'm sorry, it was the first tape, magnetic tape) and the tape passed into a vacuum chamber through an isolator that squeezed down on the tape, and the thermoplastic was written on by an electron beam which warped the thermoplastic and made it take a shape. And then as it came out, a light was shined on it and you could then, based on the reflection, detect whether it was a 1 or a o. So we made a thermoplastic board and we tried to apply it two ways: one, for computer storage data, and the other for television. And yet the change of ... like a laser writing on a laser disk does exactly the same thing with a brand new technology. That's what I mean, re-invent, re-invent, re-invent. Yeah. I guess my enjoyment in this whole computer industry is I was always down in the front of something. It's called the "neck sticking out position."

F: You know, some people don't like that, I don't think, being in that position ...

S: I always took dumb risks.

F: Do you think they were dumb?

S: It was fun, I think that's the main thing, if you do it, you like it.

F: One other thing I wanted to ask you about is your reaction to the merger.

S: Oh. At first I was skeptical. Yeah, I just wondered how in the hell is Burroughs and Sperry going to make something go together. But, I give tremendous credit to Blumenthal. That guy is a genius. Because many of us saw synergies. I mean, you could look at a company and say, "Yeah, they got this and they got that: 1 But at his level--he's not an engineer in that sense--to be able to perceive that somehow or other ... I think it's more than perceiving, it says, when you're at that level of power, and you decide that something's going to happen, and you put enough mental force behind it, you can get it to happen. And i think that's the strength of a good leader. You may not know exactly how it's going to happen. You may see the threads of a connection, but you say I'm going to make those threads solidify. And then you say, hey, you go do it. And it's the go do it part, and the judgment factor to apply as to how much money to spend, how much not to, what to get rid of and what to keep, is the amazing thing, to me, about making the merger work. Plus trying to make it look like you really merged, not one to take over the other, so that the officers of the key people of the two companies didn't feel threatened, or particularly, Sperry didn't feel like being a threat and therefore we're on the low end of the ball.

F: Did you get the impression that he worked real hard?

S: And the fact that he changed the name to a completely different name, whether you like Unisys or not doesn't make any difference, just the fact that he changed the name, tried to give it a whole new image, is a good. piece of psychology. I'm real pleased with what's happened, because the stock's gone up, whatever we own in stock is worth more, and that's good. I'm a person who believes in taking a risk and also trying to get a reward for it. I think it's gone weU and I don't know all the officers--l've just met Mr. Kroger for the first time when I went back to Detroit. He impressed me as a pretty sharp guy, but that's all I know. I've met Mr. Blumenthal several times and he's a bright guy. When they brought Jerry Jacobson in, I thought ... he's a friend of mine. I thought he was a very bright guy and he may rub people the wrong way a lot because he's a very cynical sort of a guy, but he sure has got a good mind. So I think you have some really good minds in the company and you direct them right, and you're going to pull results in the end. I was skeptical at first. A lot of us were, I'm sure. But it's working out. I think also, another thing that impressed me was the . spirit with which data was exchanged. Teams came out here, some of our teams went back there to meet the Sperry people, they met with us, and there was a fairly open divulgence of information. That's important to keep things going on the right foot.

F: Could we talk a bit about your involvement in phase review and how it compared to what existed before?

V: O.k. Well, when I first came to work here, there was no phase review. Instead, the process of getting a program started, was called the PDA program. PDA process was the Product Development authority and the PDA really was a loosely-administered way of defining, or marketing of the product planning. First of all, PDA was started by ... by start I mean it was originated through request from marketing, or product planning, rather, to engineering, to propose to them a product around this description. So the first thing that came out of marketing was a description of what they wanted: Actually I use the word marketing loosely, I really mean what Dow CPM or Product Manager, and then called Product Planning. It existed before '73 when I joined. And the PDA process then was designed to take this request for a response and respond to it. And the PDA response required that you define what you wanted to build, estimate what it would cost in terms of development cost, define the product in response to the specification that you got from Product Planning, and indicate a competitive product cost of the unit, and then submit that. That, in turn, was reviewed by Product Manager, and it was finally signed off it o.k. by Dr. Bob Johnson and/or, in other words Corporate Engineering, as well as the group, the Engineering Vice President and the group directors. That became the authorization to spend money. O.k.? And the PDA asked for such things as schedule, cost, dates, marketing information, but in a . loose form, and had no phasing to it. It asked you to furnish a schedule. Then the schedule would be monitored ad hoc by internal local management and monitored by corporate management, by corporate engineering as part of a periodic review process which was not that highly formalized. When Blumenthal came into the company it was decided that a more formal method of defining product programs was necessary. And there was a prototype in terms of either IBM or Xerox's phase review process. And the concept behind that was that a product goes through various phases in its cycle: the concept phase, the development phase, the product engineering phase, the release to manufacturing, and finally, the release to a manufacturing and field test, and then finally, a year after the first shipment, a review process that says is this product still good? So a set of guidelines was prepared by a small team in Corporate Engineering in the Syst~ms Management portion of Corporate Engineering. And I think that's kind of ... Lyle, I think I mentioned, was involved. Tom Carpenter, I don't think Doug Simmons was involved because he was a corporate field engineer or something like that. And they came out with an early manual on it, and it was fairly well written. And a lot of the ideas were lifted from other companies, but that's o.k., and was sent to the plants for review. And along with it came an agenda for training a training program, and since I at that time was in charge of the systems management for the engineering group here, I was one of the first ones to go in to training, along with about a half a dozen other people. And the training was designed to be a handson type training in which we took a home-created product concept and just wrote a phase review on it, as if we were really dealing with a product. . V: Now, the first product that we put into phase review process here ... this is hardware, software came a little bit later. The first hardware to be put under phase review was the 5900 and I was given the responsibility of preparing that and it was a good shakeout method because it was kicked out and then accepted after we did some modification. And the whole process of scheduling phase review and timing here came to the focus. By timing I mean, first of all, the whole concept was broadcast to the company and so ·" they had it dovetailed and fit in with the various review programs. There was also a problem of concurrency. All phase reviews had to be concurred by the various function that were affected. First of all, there was the various management functions affected: financial, for overall analysis of profitability, manufacturing for manufacturability, engineering for sound engineering, marketing--is there a marketing plan? field engineering, if there's a field plan. You know, all the elements had to concur and be a part of the review process. Then they had a lot of guys I considered hanger-ans, who sat there and felt it was their job to keep busy in Corporate and usually reject everything--on the most nit-picking thing you've ever seen. That tended to bottle up the phase review process so that it took time to clear a phase review, that is, theoretically, when you entered Phase 1, you could be in Phase 2 and if you exited, ongoing to Phase 2, to Phase 3, from Phase 3 to Phase 4. So stuff could get hung up except no plant was going to sit there and wait on the review process. So the idea then was to keep the discipline of the phase review, not stop the plant from moving forward unless there was really something wrong. // So the trick was now how to invent ways of shortcutting the review process, clearing up non-concurrences and getting people to pick on the real major things. And, as it evolved, people who nonconcurred out of the area of their expertise were not permitted to nonconcur. That is, if I'm a marketing guy and I nonconcur with a manufacturing problem, forgefit. That's not right. If you're a marketing guy you concur or nonconcur with a market-oriented problem.

F: That makes sense.

END OF SIDE TWO, TAPE 1 OF SPIELBERG INTERVIEW

ONE of the stories Fievel told was of how he learned his lessons. As a Jew growing up in Odessa, Russia, in the late nineteenth century, Fievel was prohibited from attending secondary school by the czarist government's numerus clausus (closed number), a quota system severely limiting the number of Jews allowed to receive a higher education. But he found a way around the edict. Steven remembered what Fievel told him: "They did allow Jews to listen through open windows to the classes, so he pretty much went to school-fall, winter, and spring-by sitting outside in driving snow, outside of open windows."

A version of this memory made its way into An American Tail. Separated from his family after coming to New York, Fievel Mousekewitz forlornly presses his nose against a pane of glass to watch a group of little American mice attending school. Always the outsider, even in America, the strange new land of freedom, where there were supposed to be "no cats." Though Steven Spielberg failed to acquire his grandfather's yearning for education, he too became a storyteller, and he never forgot the image of the boy sitting outside the schoolhouse, or what it showed him about being a Jew in a hostile land.

Always convenient scapegoats during economic and political upheavals in a land of deep-seated anti-Semitism, Russian Jews in the late 1800s were subjected to increasingly frequent and brutal pogroms (the Russian word for "devastation")- In his childhood, Steven listened with fascination to his grandparents' tales of pogroms. The social and economic liberties of Russian Jews were restricted further by laws compelling them to live only in shtetlach and barring them from most occupations except for certain forms of trade. Nearly 2 million Jews fled Russia and Eastern Europe for the United States between 1881 and 1914, "a migration comparable in modern Jewish history only to the flight from the Spanish Inquisition," Irving Howe wrote in World of Our Fathers. America was seen "not merely as a land of milk and honey," observed novelist Abraham Cahan, "but also, perhaps chiefly, as one of mystery, of fantastic experiences, or marvelous transformations."

Steven Spielberg's ancestors were part of that vast migration, settling in the hospitable midwestern city of Cincinnati, which, in the words of historian Jonathan D. Sarna, was then "the oldest and most cultured Jewish community west of the Alleghenies." Some of his relatives remained in Russia for generations to come, and some eventually went to Israel, but many of those who did not emigrate were murdered along with the rest of their communities in the Nazi Holocaust. His father estimates they lost sixteen to twenty relatives in the Holocaust, in both Ukraine and Poland.

The original roots of the Spielberg family, Arnold Spielberg says, may have been in Austria-Hungary, where some of his ancestors, before emigrating to Russia, may have lived in an area controlled by the Duke of Spielberg. The Spielberg family name, which is German-Austrian, means "play mountain." Spiel connotes either recreation or a stage play (cf. the English word "spiel," meaning a recitation), and berg means mountain or hill. It is a fittingly theatrical name for a playful adult who works in show business and ever since his childhood has loved to build and film miniature mountains. A "play mountain" appears as a central plot device in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Richard Dreyfuss obsessively constructs in his living room the image of the Wyoming mountain where, in the film's magical finale, the alien mother ship makes its landing. A film production company Arnold and Steven Spielberg formed early on, when Steven was a college student in Long Beach, California, was called Playmount Productions.

Steven's grandfather Shmuel Spielberg, who in America would change his name to Samuel, was born in 1873 in Kamenets- Podolsk, Russia. Once ruled by Lithuanian-Polish nobles and known in Polish as Kamieniec Podolski, it is now part of the independent state of Ukraine. In 1897, a few years before Shmuel's departure for America, Kamenets had a population of about forty thousand, including about sixteen thousand Jews.

Most of the Jews spoke Yiddish as their principal or only language, and they lived as all Russian Jews did, in a tightly knit, insular community whose religious and cultural tradition brought comfort and mutual support in the midst of hostility. Although anti-Semitism permeated many of the city's institutions during the reigns of Czars Alexander III and Nicholas II, the memorial book of Jewish life in Kamenets reports, "In general, relations between Jews and non-Jews in town were correct." Even during the Ukrainian pogroms of 1881 and the widespread pogroms of 1905, there were no massacres in Kamenets, although there was some vandalism of Jewish properly.

Steven's grandfather Shmuel was the second son of a farmer, rancher, and huntsman named Meyer Spielberg and his wife, Bertha (Bessie) Sandleman, who also had three younger daughters. When Shmuel was about five years old, both his parents died in an epidemic, and he was raised by his brother, Avrom (Arnold Spielberg was given the Hebrew name Avrom in his honor). Shmuel worked on his brother's ranch as a cowboy, rounding up cattle and horses. Jews were conscripted into the czarist army for a six-year period, and Shmuel found his way into the army band, playing the baritone, a brass wind instrument. "By staying in the band," his son Arnold relates, "he managed to keep from getting killed or shot. And then he became a cattle buyer for the Russian army. He used to go up to Siberia and buy cattle, and he dealt with Manchuria. When the Russo-Japanese war started [in 1904], he just said, 'I will not get back into the army again.' He escaped to America in 1906, and then he brought my mother in 1908 [the year they married]."

Samuel (Shmuel) Spielberg's wife, Rebecca Chechik, "Grandma Becky" to Steven's generation, was the daughter of Nachman (Nathan) Morduhov Chechik and Reitzl (Rachel) Nigonova Hendler, who had eight other children. The Chechik family name, which is also spelled Tsetsik and means "linnet" in Russian, later was Americanized to Chase.

The Chechiks had a brewery in Sudilkov, a shtetl that no longer exists. Sudilkov was in the Kamenets area, near the larger town of Shepetovka, where some other family members lived. Arnold Spielberg relates that his grandfather Nachman Chechik "prayed and studied the Torah. His wife ran the brewery business. She was a shrewd woman. She and the children ran the business. My uncle Herschel, the oldest son, was the brewmaster. In those days, the old Jewish men, if they could get out of business and study the Torah, that's what they did." The brewery trade was forbidden to Jews by the Russian government in 1897, and some of Rebecca Chechik's siblings eventually emigrated to China. They lived in the Manchurian city of Harbin and then in Shanghai's British enclave, the setting for the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg's World War II film Empire of the Sun.

Samuel Spielberg, Arnold's father, worked for a few years as a grocer and a peddler in Cincinnati before he found a steady but modest living as a jobber, operating a store on West Third Street. "He'd go down to the small stores in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio," Arnold explains. "He'd buy up their merchandise that they had not been able to sell. He'd buy what they called job lots, or incomplete lots. He'd bring them to his store and he'd sell them to other merchants, or to retail; he had some retail trade. And, of course, in the wholesale trade he sold to even smaller stores."*

Arnold's mother, Rebecca, was "a very enterprising woman. She took care of the kids and ran the house. She was interested in politics-we were Democrats from way back-and she'd read a lot, go to plays, go to concerts. She'd join all the Jewish organizations." Mildred (Millie) Friedman Tieger, a longtime friend of Steven's mother, remembers Rebecca as "a strong, powerful woman, very smart, and more domineering" than her husband.

In addition to their son Arnold Meyer Spielberg, who was born on February 6, 1917, Rebecca and Sam had a younger son, Irvin (called Buddy or Bud), who became an aeronautical engineer and worked on NASA's space program, and a daughter, Natalie, who married Jacob (Jack) Guttman and with him ran a family business that manufactures cake decorations (Natalie died in 1992).

STEVEN'S mother's side of the family, the Posners, originated in Poland. "Posner" means "a person from Poznan," the name of a city and province in western Poland (also spelled Posnan or Poseft). Poznan was taken over by Prussia in the late eighteenth century, and as the late Dr.Jacob Rader Marcus, dean of American Jewish historiography, noted in a 1994 interview, "Germans despised Posners. If a German says, 'He's a Posner,' it means he's held in contempt." But the Posner ancestors of Steven Spielberg had a more worldly background in Russia than the Spielbergs, for the Posners' cosmopolitan hometown of Odessa, a bustling port on the Black Sea, was known as "The Paris of Russia."

In the end, however, Jews were scarcely more welcome in Odessa than they were anywhere else in Russia. Odessa was the site of regular anti-Jewish riots, and an unusually severe pogrom occurred there in 1905, the year of the attempted revolution and the mutiny by sailors on the battleship Potemkin (later the subject of Sergei Eisenstein's silent film classic Potemkin, which includes the famous Odessa Steps sequence). When Odessa's Jews celebrated the czar's promise of reforms, four hundred Jews were killed in retaliation during four days of mayhem. Such attacks-which also occurred in several other parts of Russia during 1905-were provoked by the authorities and executed by local ruffians with the help of policemen and Cossacks.

That year of turmoil was the year Philip Posner, born in Odessa in 1884, came to Cincinnati to make a new life for himself and his family, one he hoped would be safer from persecution and tyranny. He would remain devoutly Orthodox, resisting the modernizing influences of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement that flourished in Odessa, and the Reform movement in America. But Odessa's cultural ferment would leave an imprint on his consciousness, despite the deficiencies of his formal education. An artist manque, Philip Posner would pass along his artistic inclinations to his daughter and his famous grandson.

* Steven Allan Spielberg's Hebrew name, Shmuel, is a tribute to his grandfather, who died before he was born. Asked why Steven was not given the first name of Samuel, Arnold says, "We gave him an Anglicized 'Steven.' We just artificially made it that. Leah and I wanted to give him a non-Biblical name. 'Allan' came from the Hebrew Aharon. And we just liked the name Allan, out of nowhere."

Philip's parents, Simon Posner (son of Ezekiel Posner and Anna Fildman) and Miriam (Mary) Rasinsky (daughter of Benjamin Rasinsky), emigrated soon after him to Cincinnati, where Simon Posner, like Samuel Spielberg, became a jobber. The oldest of six children, Philip followed the same profession, selling schmatte ( clothing) and other merchandise to support his wife, the former Jennie Fridman, and their two children, Leah and Bernard (Bernie). [ "Leah Posner" and "Bernard Posner" ]

Philip Posner was "a very emotional man," his son-in-law Arnold Spielberg recalls. "A religious, very observant man. He used to go to the synagogue in the morning, in the evening, any time. He was at one time quite well-to-do, and then the Depression took him under, along with many other people."

One time, Leah recalled, her family did not have enough to eat for several days until her father made ten dollars buying and selling old jewelry. He used the money to take them on a holiday. "We were poor, but there was no depression in our house."

Philip worked mostly out of his home, and Steven loved to play in his grandfather's attic, which was crowded with his merchandise-shoes and socks and shoelaces, belt buckles and tie clips. Norman Cummins, a fellow Jewish merchant who ran a discount clothing store, would buy Philip's discontinued stock "as a mitzvah-a blessing," Cummins's wife, Edith, remembered. "Mr. Posner was a little, slight, sweet sort of man. He had a very nice, pleasant little house. I would go there with my husband, and I'd talk to Steven. He was a real skinny tyke, very lively. Who knew he was going to be this big man? He'd sit there and eat a cookie and dip it in a glass of milk. When he had finished his glass of milk, his grandmother would strain the cookie out of the milk and put the milk back. I was very impressed by that. I don't know if it was poverty or just frugality."

Like the violin-playing Papa Mousekewitz in An American Tail, Steven's Grandpa Fievel poured his heart not into his business but into his music, playing the guitar and dancing ballet. Leah, who inherited her father's love for music, felt his creativity was sidetracked by his struggle to make a living. Fievel's brother Boris was the first known relative of Steven Spielberg to enter show business. He was a Shakespearean actor in the thriving Yiddish theater of the period; Leah remembers Boris declaiming Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy in their living room, in Yiddish. Boris was also a vaudevillian, singing and dancing with a straw hat and a cane, and he later became a lion tamer in the circus. (In Spielberg's 1995 animated film Balto, set in Alaska during the 1920s, there is a Russian Jewish refugee goose named Uncle Boris.)

Leah's mother, Jennie, born in 1882, was a native Cincinnatian. She was the second oldest of ten children born to Russian emigres Louis Fridman, who had come to the United States by way of London in 1870, and Sarah Leah Nathan. Louis Fridman's father, a cigarmaker named Israel Fridman, was born in Poland in 1830-the earliest date of birth that can be traced for any of Steven's ancestors-and died of emphysema in Cincinnati in 1883Louis practiced his father's profession for a while, but he also worked as a horse cart driver and a traveling salesman.

Steven's Grandma Jennie was a lively, hardworking, and self-reliant "American lady," as family friend Millie Tieger described her. "Both of [Steven's] grandmas were more assertive than the grandpas." Immigrant men often found that to be the case, for their traditionally dominant role in the old country tended to wither away in the face of the harsh economic realities and more liberal mores they encountered in America.

Before her marriage to Philip Posner in 1915, Jennie briefly ran a millinery shop with her sister Bertha. Jennie also majored in English at the University of Cincinnati, and Arnold Spielberg remembers her as "a very bright woman and a cultured, gentle woman." She called everyone she liked "Dolly," including her daughter Leah, who was born on January 12, 1920, and inherited her effervescent, outspoken personality from her mother.

Jennie "was never too domestic," Leah admiringly recalled. Jennie worked as a milliner and clerk for a while after her marriage. Later she taught English in her home to German Jewish immigrants, many of whom were refugees from Nazism and had their tuition paid by local Jewish charities to help them acclimate to life in America and to prepare for citizenship applications. And yet the husband of this thoroughly modern American lady never lost his old-world ways.

Fievel Posner had a long white beard and wore the traditional Orthodox garb of black coat and hat. While growing up, Steven became so embarrassed by his grandfather's appearance and frequent davening (praying) that he tried to keep his gentile friends away from the house when Grandpa Fievel came to visit. One day when Steven was eight years old and living in Haddon Township, New Jersey, he was playing football with some friends in the street, "and suddenly my grandfather, with the yarmulke, comes out of our house, two houses down, and yells: 'Shmuel! Shmuel!' [Steven's Hebrew name]. I'm not answering him. I'm pretending I don't know him. I'm denying that name. My friend is saying, 'He's looking your way. Does he mean you?' They point at me, and I'm saying 'No, it's not me,' and I'm denying the existence of my own grandfather."

I F not quite the "paradise for the Hebrews" extolled by a nineteenthcentury Ohio historian, what the Spielbergs and Posners found in the Queen City of the West was a stolid, largely German-American burg where Jews and gentiles lived in relative harmony and prosperity.

Arnold Spielberg had only "a little" trouble with anti-Semitism when he was growing up, such as an incident when a man wearing a Ku Klux Klan insignia on his belt called him a "Jewboy." "But my street was the best street in the world," he nostalgically recalls. "During the wintertime, the city would block it off and we had sled riding. The street went right down into a park. We had a ballfield there. We had a woods to go play in. It was a wonderful place for a kid to grow up. You couldn't have asked for a better place."

Even though its Jewish population has always been modest compared to those of cities on the East Coast-Jews made up only about 5 percent, or 22,000, of Cincinnati's 475,000 citizens when Steven Spielberg was bornCincinnati was long regarded as "a Jewish version of the American dream," Jonathan D. Sarna wrote in his and Nancy H. Klein's 1989 history, The Jews of Cincinnati.

The roots of the city's Jewish community date back as early as 1814. As the birthplace of the Reform movement, founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise to liberalize and Americanize traditional Judaism, Cincinnati is home to such renowned Reform institutions as Hebrew Union College, The American Israelite newspaper, and the American Jewish Archives. Spielberg's birthplace, the nonsectarian Jewish Hospital in Avondale, is the oldest Jewish hospital in the United States. Partly because of its strong German influence, Cincinnati has never been immune to antiSemitism, and Sarna concludes that "in many ways, the Jewish vision of Cincinnati was simply too good to be true." But Jews arrived early enough in Cincinnati to have won the status of pioneers, and they have long been seen as an integral part of the city's social, political, and cultural establishment, even if they were not always as readily accepted in all parts of the business community.

Among the many hurdles Russian Jews, such as Spielberg's grandparents, faced when they began pouring into America in the late nineteenth century was the hostility of many German Jews who had preceded them. German Jews who had settled in America viewed themselves as far more educated, more solvent, and more cultured than the hordes of newcomers seeking their help and kinship. For much of Spielberg's grandparents' and parents' lives in Cincinnati, their German Jewish neighbors "held Eastern Europeans in utter contempt," Jacob Marcus said. "The German Jews were predominant socially, culturally, and financially, but for every German Jew there were at least five or six Eastern Europeans, which included Russians, Poles, Rumanians, and Eastern Hungarians. It was only around the 1930s or the 1940s that a few individuals of Germanic origin began to marry into the families of Eastern Europeans." In housing, too, the German Jews were "always a street ahead [ of the Eastern Europeans] and ne'er the twain shall meet," he observed. "The lines were drawn very sharply until about 1950."

With the coming of the automobile around the turn of the century, Cincinnati, like the mid western city of The Magnificent Ambersons, found itself "heaving up in the middle incredibly." And as Cincinnati heaved and spread by annexing the outlying suburbs of the horse-and-buggy days, the old inner city was left a slum, occupied by Negroes and the poorest whites. Avondale, the genteel suburb of first remove for Jews leaving the West End, by the 1920s became the city's largely Jewish enclave. It was there Spielberg's grandparents and parents lived, where Steven was born and where he spent his first two and a half years.*

The more fashionable streets north of Rockdale Avenue in Avondale initially were the domain of German Jews. As the WP A's guide to the city put it, "The Orthodox Jews infiltrated the southern part of the suburb and gradually moved north, establishing a lively shopping district along Reading Road near Rockdale Avenue." Beginning less than a block from Arnold and Leah Spielberg's apartment at 817 Lexington Avenue, across the street from the Conservative Adath Israel synagogue on Reading Road, that district included the neighborhood movie house, the Forest Theatre. When Arnold was a boy, "Every Saturday we used to get a nickel and go to the Forest Theatre. I used to like to watch most adventure movies, all the Douglas Fairbanks movies, all the serials."

South Avondale was a haimish-warm and unpretentious-Jewish neighborhood of extended families and landsleit-people from the old country- who all pulled together to survive. Although his grandfather Samuel Spielberg died a year before he was born, Steven grew up with an advantage few of today's children share, that of having three grandparents living in the same neighborhood.

Leah's parents, Philip and Jennie Posner, had rented a white frame house at 819 Glenwood Avenue since 1939, the fifth home they had lived in since their marriage. Arnold Spielberg remembers it as "a very nice home. When I was going to school at the University of Cincinnati, they lived just one block over. Leah would go over to their house, I'd come back after school, and we'd sit down and have a Sabbath lunch. Then we'd pray after lunch and sing songs. I learned all their songs."

Sam and Rebecca Spielberg had lived in ten homes before the family settled in 1935 into half of a red-brick duplex they rented at 3560 Van Antwerp Place. "Our street was ninety-five percent Jewish," Arnold recalls. "And all of them were successful people, doctors, dentists, or lawyers. It was very education-oriented. My brother and I were the only engineers that came out of that street. We used to brag to each other as to how religious the families were. My friends were almost all Orthodox. We were one of the few Conservative families on the street." After Sam's death, Rebecca continued to live there, supported by her children. Although Sam's grandson would amass a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine in 1996 at $1 billion, Sam's estate amounted to only $1,728.57, of which Rebecca received $1,182.15 after the costs of his final illness, burial, and probate.

* Spielberg announced in 1989 that he planned to make a movie dealing with his childhood years in Cincinnati, from a script by his sister Anne, /1// Be Home. The movie would have to be shot on location, he said, because "there's nothing in LA. that looks like Cincinnati-nothing."

By the time of Steven's birth, many of Avondale's old homes had been cut into duplexes or subdivided into three or four apartments, with the former maid's quarters on the top floor often serving as the tiny apartment of an elderly or unmarried family member. After Arnold's discharge from the U.S. Army Air Forces in September 1945, he and Leah rented their modest firstfloor apartment on Lexington Avenue from Mrs. Bella Pritz, who lived upstairs with her daughter (the apartment occupied by the Spielbergs was one of two on the first floor). Though Avondale was already being vacated by German Jews, who kept moving northward into fresher and more rustic suburban acreage, it still was only "lower middle-class at worst" in those years, historian Jacob Marcus recalled. With housing growing scarcer as veterans began coming back from the war, the newlywed Spielbergs were lucky to find a decent apartment.

"It was a lovely neighborhood," recalls their neighbor Peggie Hibbert Singerman. The houses had "big backyards, huge porches on the front, swings. They were elegant houses, with wonderful woodwork in some of them." Many of those beautiful old homes remain well preserved today, long after the white flight of the 1950s that saw the Jewish population abandon Avondale to blacks climbing the economic ladder behind them. The house where Steven lived as a young child is still standing; it is a rental property owned by the Southern Baptist church, which in 1967 bought the Adath Israel building across the street, now a national historic landmark.

IN their growing restlessness with the comfortable but limiting environment of Cincinnati's Jewish enclave, Arnold and Leah Spielberg were typical of many second-generation American Jews whose postwar ambitions for themselves and their children would lead them to turn their backs on their aging hometowns and depart for the brave new world of suburbia.

Arnold Spielberg, his sister Natalie Guttman recalled, "was always a questioning, exploring, and highly intelligent youngster whose quest for learning was and has never really been quenched." But when Arnold was attending Avondale Grade School, he was regarded as "a nerd," according to a schoolmate, Dr. Bernard Goldman. "He didn't fit into the group. Other kids played ball, but he never seemed to join in that. He wasn't a spectator. He probably had his own interests."

From early boyhood, Arnold's primary interests were scientific: "The earliest influence was the son of the man who lived upstairs [in my building]. His son used to tinker around with radios. I was a little kid then, about six or seven years old, and I used to go down to the basement, watching him build stuff. Then another guy moved into the house next door-he was a radio repairman, and he gave me parts. And I was going to Avondale School one day-I'll never forget this-I was walking up the street on Windham Avenue, and I looked in the wastebasket. There was a bunch of radio stuff. I picked up that radio stuff, ran home, and opened the door-'Mom, don't throw this out!' I went to school, barely made it to class, came home-it was a crystal set that somebody had tried to fix. I just put the wires to the nearest connection and I got it to work. This was in 1927 or '28; I was ten years old at that time.

"I'll never forget putting the earphones on my uncle's ears when he came over from Manchuria to America. It was the first time he ever heard a radio. The family thought I was nuts, you know, a 'crazy-head scientist.' I was always into magnetics and electrical stuff. Making magnets, burning up batteries, making shocking machines out of batteries from the old battery radio sets. I used to go around to people's houses and say, 'Have you got any used-up batteries?' They'd give 'em to me, I'd get some power out of 'em, connect 'em all in series, make sparks. Typical kid stuff."

Arnie and his brother Buddy, who was only a year younger, shared the same hobby. "They were into electrocuting rats in the attic," their nephew, Samuel Guttman, relates. "Arnold was a ham operator [from the age of fifteen], and somehow he had an antenna system that ruined the radio reception in the neighborhood. The two terrorized the neighborhood. My mother once got so crazy she threw a punch at 'em through a glass door." Arnold "was remarkably intelligent in school, and he would fool around at home- he did all kinds of smart scientific things," recalls family friend Millie Tieger. "He built a television set in the 1930s, before anybody else did, before anybody knew what a television was. Everybody said, 'Arnold, what are you doing?"'

Some of Arnold's visionary qualities can be attributed to his avid interest in reading science fiction, a habit he later passed on to his son. "I've been reading science fiction since I was seven years old, all the way back to the earliest Amazing Stories," Arnold says. ''Amazing, Astounding, Analog-I still subscribe. I still read 'em. My kids used to complain, 'Dad's in the bathroom with a science-fiction magazine. We can't get in."'

Sam and Becky Spielberg, who spoke mostly Russian around the house, were struggling to make ends meet during the Depression, and they could not afford to send Arnold and Buddy to college. After his graduation in 1934 from Hughes High School, Arnold barely missed out on a college scholarship and had to take a job far beneath his potential, working as a clerk in a chain of small-town department stores across the river in Kentucky, run by his mother's relatives, the Lerman brothers.

Before becoming a store manager for the Lermans, Arnold worked as an assistant manager in Cynthiana, Kentucky, for his older cousin Max Chase, a nephew of Rebecca Spielberg. Starting the process that eventually would make Arnold's son Steven into a filmmaker, Max gave Arnold his first movie camera during the early 1930s. "I started taking home movies when I lived in Kentucky," Arnold recalls. "My cousin bought one of the earliest 8mm movie cameras. He didn't know how to use it, so he said, 'Here, you use it.' I was about seventeen years old when I started doing that. I used to take a lot of junk movies, you know what I mean? Family and stuff like that. But no class. Just pictures."*

Arnold continued to work for the Lermans until the coming of World War II. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in January 1942, but was soon transferred into the Army Air Forces. After serving as an airplane-parts shipping clerk in Karachi, Pakistan, he parlayed his ham-radio experience into a post as a radio operator. Stationed first in Karachi and then outside Calcutta, in the China-Burma-India theater of operations, he was part of a B- 25 bomber squadron that destroyed Japanese railroad lines, shipping, and communications in Burma, earning them the nickname of "The Burma Bridge Busters." Arnold recalls that although he "flew a couple of missions," he spent most of the war running the squadron's communications room: "At first I signed on to be a radio gunner, but they said, 'No, if you know how to fix radios, you're better off on the ground.' They wouldn't let me fly anymore." He was rotated back to the United States in December 1944, serving out the rest of the war at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.

The country's shared sacrifices and its victory over fascism, coupled with the eventual discovery of the full dimensions of the Holocaust, contributed to the postwar advancement of social acceptance and economic opportunities for American Jews. The Cold War climate of fierce American competitiveness with the Soviet Union also helped open doors in higher education, science, and business during the postwar years, while helping make Christians somewhat more tolerant in their social interactions with Jews, or at least less overt about their anti-Semitism.

The most immediate and far-reaching benefit of wartime service for Arnold Spielberg was the GI Bill of Rights, which finally enabled him, like 2.2 million other American veterans, to attend college. The GI Bill gave veterans what one of them called "a ticket of admission to a better life."

It was that for Arnold Spielberg, making it possible for the former department store manager to earn a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Cincinnati in June 1949 and launching him on what would turn out to be a highly successful career in computer engineering. Arnold remembers that just before his father died, he was "so proud" to see his son enter college.

• Arnold is still shooting home movies today, mostly of his travels, using a Sony High-8 video camera and a professional-quality Avid editing system his son gave him. In his current occupation as an electronics industry consultant, Arnold also has been making industrial.films: "Ever since I retired, they say to me, 'With the name Spielberg, you've got to be able to make movies.' So they got me making movies."

"Arnold blossomed in an academic setting," family friend Millie Tieger observed. "Arnold was such a turn-around person. He married Leah and she encouraged him to go to college. She pushed him. She was already a graduate of the University of Cincinnati; she was a smart girl, talented, very outgoing. I think she wanted Arnold also to have a good education. He turned out to be a brain, absolutely brilliant, a pioneer in computers. When Arnold was working in New Jersey, doing early computer research, he used to come to Cincinnati, and he would sit down at our kitchen table and calculate numbers to the thirteenth power. I had no idea what he was talking about. I would say, 'Shut up, Arnold."'

WHEN Steven Spielberg's mother attended walnut Hills High School, the college preparatory school for Cincinnati public school students, she was "kinda mousy. So was I," recalls fellow student Edith Cummins. "We weren't the prom queen types. She was very plain." "I was different-looking," Leah told Fred A. Bernstein, author of The Jewish Mothers' Hall of Fame. "But I never wanted to change. If I had had a tiny pug nose, maybe I wouldn't have had to develop a personality. But instead, I learned to play piano. I was somebody. I loved my life, and I believed in me."

"She was so different from the Spielbergs," notes Millie Tieger. "She had a sparkle. They were all bigger, dark, and here is this under-five-foot young lady, blond, her eyes flash, she talks like this [moves her head and eyes rapidly as she talks]. Arnold was super-smart and accomplished, but I think Leah had a more all-encompassing 'people' personality. She's a very insightful creature."

Leah started dating Arnold Spielberg in 1939- Arnold attended high school with Leah's brother, Bernie. "We all played tennis together," Arnold's sister Natalie recounted. "Leah was going with somebody else at the time, but when she broke up with her boyfriend I introduced her to Arnold because I thought that would be a good match."

During the early 1940s, Leah pursued her musical ambitions as a student at the renowned Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, affiliated with the University of Cincinnati. She planned a career as a concert pianist and did some public performing, much to the pride and delight of her family. Leah was "a very talented concert pianist," Arnold says. "She contributed a lot of artistic talent to Steven."

Leah, a home economics major in college, was graduated and took a job as a social worker for the Travelers Aid Society at the city's Union Terminal. She married Arnold in South Avondale's Adath Israel synagogue on February 25, 1945, while he was still in active service at Wright Field. Joining him in Dayton, Leah worked for the local social services department. After his discharge later that year and their return to Cincinnati, Leah helped administer electrocardiograms for a few months at the Jewish Hospital, but quit that job shortly before Steven was born at the same hospital. With her own artistic career sidetracked by the demands of raising a family, she passed on her artistic ambitions to her son, but never stopped playing the . piano.

"The first piece of furniture we got when we were married was a piano," Arnold says. "We borrowed a bed, and we bought a Baldwin spinet." Arnold, who took piano lessons as a boy, was always an avid music listener. "We had a big collection of classical records," he recalls. "We had classical music playing in the house all the time, way back, early on." While pregnant with Steven, Leah spent much of her time playing classical pieces on her piano, and when he was an infant in diapers, he would sit on her lap on the piano bench, listening and learning to tap out the music. Sometimes Arnold also got into the act: "I knew enough to know the notes, so when she'd play, I'd turn the pages."

Sometimes the music would affect Steven in unexpected ways. "Steven always had a highly developed imagination," said Leah. "He was afraid of everything. When he was little he would insist that I lift the top of the [piano] so he could see the strings while I played. Then he would fall on the floor, screaming in fear." But Millie Tieger, who remembers watching him as a small child sitting at the piano with his mother, suggests that the early influence of Leah's music is "the key to the understanding" of his creative development: "What went into Steve when he heard his mother play music so beautifully?"

Like fellow wunderkind director Orson Welles, whose father was an inventor and whose mother was a concert pianist, Spielberg acquired his dazzling blend of artistic talents from a synthesis of his parents' disparate abilities. He once said he is the product of "genetic overload." His father describes Steven's personality as "a lucky piece of synergy," explaining that Steven's mother is "a very musically creative person, she's a good dancer. And she's a zany type. I'm a little more grounded. But I also like creative things. I was a great storyteller. I love science fiction."

Arnold's pioneering creativity within his own field of computers has brought him several patents. When Steven was an infant, his father would put him to sleep by the imaginative means of using an oscilloscope to reflect wavy lines on the wall. Though Steven showed no interest in following his father into engineering, he picked up his interest in filmmaking from his father. Steven's fascination with all kinds of cutting-edge technology and his mastery of the tools of filmmaking have been evident from the earliest days of his professional career.

The influence of music is also strongly evident in Spielberg's career. He played the clarinet (though not very well) in his grade school and high school bands, and sat in as first clarinet for composer John Williams in the beach scene of Jaws. He still noodles on the instrument for pleasure and relaxation. He has been a passionate collector of movie scores since childhood, and has said, "If I weren't a filmmaker I'd probably be in music. I'd play piano or I'd compose. I'd probably be a starving composer somewhere in Hollywood right now, hopefully not starving, but I probably would not have been successful."

In the view of Williams, who has written the scores for most of Spielberg's films, he is being overly modest about his musical sense: "Steven could have been a composer himself. He has that rhythmic sense in his whole being, and I think that is one of the great things about his directing-this rhythmic, kinetic sense he has."

Through his parents, Spielberg inherited his love of music from Grandpa Shmuel, who performed in the Russian army band, and from Grandpa Fievel, the Russian immigrant Jew who was not allowed to go to school but used his music to proclaim "How wondrous are Thy works."

Perhaps the most joyous scene in all of Spielberg's movies is the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the scientists finally devise a way of communicating with the alien mother ship by using their computers to play synthesized music together. The musical interchange between the humans and their extraterrestrial visitors starts as a few tentative notes and quickly becomes a rapturous duet of spiritual celebration.

"When I saw Close Encounters," Millie Tieger recalls, "I thought, There's Leah with the music and Arnold with computers. That's Steve, the little boy. Steve wrote a movie about Mommy and Daddy."

Bernard Posner, a Government bureaucrat who was so moved by the plight of disabled veterans that he put his very able body on the line as a leading champion of the rights of all Americans with disabilities, died on Wednesday at nursing home in Rockville, Md. He was 80 and had been executive director of the President's Committee for the Employment of the Handicapped.

His family said the cause of death was a stroke.

A native of Cincinnati who majored in English at the University of Cincinnati, Mr. Posner later studied under the G.I. bill to receive a master's degree in communications from American University.

He came through his Army service in World War II unscathed and with no special interest in the problems faced by the disabled. But when a chance encounter with friend led to a position in the Veterans Administration's press office after the war, Mr. Posner unwittingly took what would become more than a job.

Working with disabled veterans to create national campaigns to promote their employment had such a transforming effect on his outlook that he was soon a man with a mission.

Recognizing that millions of civilians with physical or mental handicaps faced the same problems as disabled veterans, he started working as an unpaid part-time volunteer for the Presidential committee on the handicapped that had been established by Harry S. Truman.

Mr. Posner joined the committee full time in 1960, initially as a special assistant to the chairman, Harold Russell, later as assistant director, and as executive director from 1975 until his retirement in 1986.

It was a reflection of his zeal and his devotion to the cause of the disabled that during his years as assistant director, Mr. Posner went somewhat beyond the official scope of his job and actually posed as a mentally retarded worker to gain insights into how the retarded are treated by bosses, co-workers and the public.

After brief stints working in a Washington laundry, picking onions in Arizona and washing dishes at a Los Angeles restaurant (all with the secret complicity of the business owners) Posner wrote articles about his experiences and used them in arguing for more enlightened treatment for the mentally deficient.

Mr. Posner, whose efforts were widely recognized by advocates for the disabled, helped lay the groundwork for the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which required Government contractors to provide accommodations for handicapped workers.

Even before the passage of the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, which extended the provisions of the 1973 law to an estimated 43 million handicapped Americans in 1990, Mr. Posner had been instrumental in getting millions of dollars' worth of elevators and other special provisions for the handicapped in the construction of the Washington Metro.

After he retired in 1986, Mr. Posner continued his work as a volunteer with the National Organization on Disability. In 1990, when President George Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act, the man who had taken a Government job and discovered a national mission was at the White House ceremony.

Mr. Posner, who lived in Silver Spring, Md., is survived by his wife, Bess; a son, Paul of Burke Va., and a granddaughter.