Willis Ware
American computer and privacy pioneer (1920-2013)
Howard George Willis Ware (August 31, 1920 – November 22, 2013), popularly known as Willis Howard Ware was an American computer pioneer who co-developed the IAS machine that laid down the blueprint of the modern day computer in the late 20th century. He was also a pioneer of privacy rights, social critic of technology policy, and a founder in the field of computer security.
Biography
As an undergraduate, Ware read electrical engineering at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his master's degree in the same subject at MIT, in 1942.
During World War II, Ware worked for the Hazeltine Corporation (1942–1946) on classified military projects. After the war (1946–1951), he joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to work with John von Neumann on building an early computer. After completing his PhD there, he moved to North American Aviation (1951–1952), helped to move the aviation industry from punch-card machines to early computers, and in 1952 began teaching a class in computing at the UCLA Extension Division; it continued for 12 years. In 1952 he joined the RAND Corporation, where he stayed until 1992. He was an early design engineer on the RAND JOHNNIAC computer.
In 1961, he was the founding president of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, an early technical computing society.
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This entry incorporates text from “Willis Ware” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.