Robert Spinrad

Robert J. Spinrad (March 20, 1932 – September 2, 2009) was an American computer designer, who was on the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory and who created many of the key technologies used in modern personal computers while director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Early life and education Spinrad was born on March 20, 1932, in Manhattan. At Columbia, he built a rudimentary computer out of remnant parts from telephone equipment. He then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in the same field.

Career One of "the last of the dinosaurs" created before the widespread use of transistors, he developed a computer at Brookhaven National Laboratory called Merlin that was built using vacuum tubes. Filling up a room, the computer was designed to help run experiments. After spending a summer with at Los Alamos National Laboratory with physicist Nicholas Metropolis and his MANIAC II scientific computer, he returned to Brookhaven and designed processes to allow computers to operate scientific experiments with a feedback loop that allowed the system to modify the tests based on the results of measurements taken earlier in the test cycle. Described by physicist Joel Birnmbaum as "the father of modern laboratory automation", Spinrad wrote on the subject for a 1967 cover article of Science magazine. Birnbaum credited Spinrad with recognizing the need to put the scientist into the loop between the computer and the laboratory equipment.

A resident of Palo Alto, California, Spinrad died there at age 77 on September 2, 2009, due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (informally known as Lou Gehrig's disease). He was survived by his wife, Verna, as well as by a daughter, a son and three grandchildren.