Tribute to Arnold M. Spielberg - W8IDX, W9AUM, W2IXM

Tribute to Arnold M. Spielberg - W8IDX, W9AUM, W2IXM
1917 - August 25, 2020

W9AUM was Arnold Spielberg in Cynthiana, KY, northern Kentucky, then in W9 land 1940.
W8IDX was Arnold M. Spielberg in Cincinnati, OH in 1948.
W2IXM was Arnold M. Spielberg in New Jersey, 1954 thru at least 1960.

Arnold at age 100.

Born in Ohio to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Spielberg had a fascination with radios, building his first receiver at 9; at 15, he built a transmitter to enable him to talk to others as a ham radio operator. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Spielberg joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and although he trained as a bomber radio operator and gunner, the Army discovered he had a knack for designing airplane radio antennas, and he was promoted to Communications Chief of a B-25 Squadron. After the war he went back to school, graduating with a degree in electrical engineering, and went to work for RCA’s Advanced Development Department in 1949.

As RCA’s Manager of Advanced Product Development, Spielberg defined and managed the design of a new class of product: “point of sale” cash registers, computerized terminals that looked up prices from a central memory system, calculated tax and discounts, and checked credit status, “an online data acquisition and recording system unique for its time (1954),” notes the IEEE Computer Society, which chose Spielberg for its 2006 Computer Pioneer Award. In 1957 he was hired away by General Electric, where he led the design of the GE-225 computer, which went on the market in 1960 at $250,000, the equivalent of about $2 million today. One of the machines was installed at Dartmouth College, where it was used to create a new computer language: BASIC, which was instrumental in making computers accessible to hobbyists, leading to the personal computer revolution.

Spielberg, who retired from GE in 1991, had three daughters and one son. “I tried to get him interested in engineering,” he said of his son, “but his heart was in movies. At first I was disappointed, but then I saw how good he was in moviemaking.” Indeed his son, Steven Spielberg, is very good at making movies, including the computer-enabled Jurassic Park. During the design of the 225, “Dad explained how his computer was expected to perform,” Steven said, “but the language of computer science in those days was like Greek to me. It all seemed very exciting, but it was very much out of my reach until the 1980's, when I realized what pioneers like my dad had created were now the things I could not live without.” Arnold Spielberg died at his Los Angeles home with his children present on August 25, 2020. He was 103.

Arnold Spielberg graduated from Hughes HS in Cincy in 1934. His buddy in HS was Jake Schott W8FGX (class of '33). I recognized Jake's name right away, because I was a budding young DXer in the early 1960's, when Jake was mentioned often in publications I was reading. Arnold was W8IDXN, W9AUM and W2IXM and Jake was W8FGX (later, W8DZ). Together they started the ham radio club at the high school. In the online documents, we see comments from Steven Spielberg about his father: a tinkerer, making things....
But Steven never mentions that he himself ever became a ham. The father is quoted as saying his son started making movies at age sixteen and never wanted to do anything else.

Info courtesy of NL7XM, K6NA, N2BTD, W9VA
Photo courtesy of GE
Tnx NL7XM