Arnold Spielberg
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". For General Electric he designed, with his colleague Charles Propster, the GE-225 in 1959. He cited the first computer-controlled "point of sale" cash register as his greatest contribution. His children are filmmaker Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Anne Spielberg. Early life and career. Arnold Spielberg was born in Cincinnati on February 6, 1917. He was of Jewish descent. His mother, Rebecca (née  Chechick), was born in Sudylkiv, Ukraine; his father, Samuel, was born in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukraine. They later immigrated to the United States, meeting and eventually marrying in Cincinnati. 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. During the Holocaust, Spielberg lost between 16 and 20 relatives. Spielberg married concert pianist Leah Posner (1920–2017) in January 1945. They would divorce in 1965. 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. 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". 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." 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. In 1957, Spielberg began working for General Electric, where he was instrumental in developing the GE-200 series of computers. 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, which was introduced in 1960. 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, an organization founded by his son Steven. 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. His third wife, Bernice Colner, died in 2016. Spielberg died from natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, California, on August 25, 2020, at the age of 103.