Arnold Spielberg, father of film director Steven Spielberg, was a computer-industry pioneer.
Photo: Business Wires/Associated PressWorld War II yanked Arnold Spielberg out of an early career as a small-town department-store manager and propelled him into the design of computers, including an early prototype for electronic point-of-sale systems.
Mr. Spielberg, father of the film director Steven Spielberg, went to work at a Lerman Brothers store in Kentucky after graduating from high school in 1934. Prompted by the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for military service and was sent to India as a radio operator for an Army Air Forces bomber squadron. His ability to fix radios was prized.
The GI Bill allowed him to study electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati after the war. Then came computer-design jobs at RCA, General Electric, International Business Machines and Unisys. In the mid-1950s, he led the design of an RCA system of electronic cash registers that kept track of sales and inventory. Tested at a Higbee’s store in Cleveland, it crashed frequently and eventually was dropped by RCA.
“Technology-wise, it wasn’t ready,” Mr. Spielberg said in an oral history. His career often involved trying out concepts whose time hadn’t arrived. “It’s called the neck-sticking-out position,” he said.
The IEEE Computer Society recognized him as an industry pioneer with an award in 2006.
Mr. Spielberg died Tuesday at the age of 103.
Arnold Spielberg with his son Steven in 2006.
Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesIn a 2016 interview with representatives of GE, Mr. Spielberg said he tried to interest his son, Steven, in electronics. “But his heart was in movies,” the elder Mr. Spielberg said. “At first I was disappointed, but then I saw how good he was in moviemaking.” An obituary prepared by the family said the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” directed by Steven Spielberg, was partly inspired by his father’s wartime experiences.
Arnold Meyer Spielberg was born Feb. 6, 1917, in Cincinnati. His parents ran a dry-goods store. He developed an early interest in radios and magnets and built an electric-shock machine to thrill his friends. As a teenager, he communicated with faraway strangers via his ham radio set.
College was unaffordable when he finished high school, so he went to work, initially as a stock boy, for cousins who owned department stores in Kentucky. His starting pay was $5 (the current equivalent of about $97) a week. Within a few years, he was promoted to a managerial role and figured out ways to improve profits in the women’s shoe department.
In the Army Air Forces, he was assigned to a B-25 squadron known as the Burma Bridge Busters. He flew on combat missions as a radio operator but “when they found out I could fix radios, they grounded me” to handle repair work, he said in an oral history with the Charles Babbage Institute. Later he worked on a team developing a receiver for high-frequency radio signals to guide bombs.
After earning his engineering degree in 1949, he worked for RCA and designed electronic circuits for missile systems. He then joined a team at RCA that developed the Bizmac computer, reliant on thousands of vacuum tubes, soon rendered obsolete by advances in electronics. One Bizmac, sold to the Army for about $4 million and requiring 20,000 square feet of floor space, was used to keep track of spare parts for tanks and other vehicles.
In 1957, the machine was programmed to predict batting averages among major-league baseball players, then derided for an unimpressive performance in that realm.
Mr. Spielberg moved to General Electric in the late 1950s and helped design the GE-225 computer, on which the Basic programming language was later developed. At IBM in the 1960s, he worked on computers to control factory processes.
After retiring from the computer industry, Mr. Spielberg supported the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, founded by his son to videotape interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses of genocide.
Along with Steven Spielberg, his survivors include three daughters, 11 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com
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