Erich Bloch Helped Pioneer IBM's Most Successful Computer
December 02 2016 - 10:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Rachael King
Erich Bloch fled Nazi Germany as an orphaned teenager and went
on to become a pioneer of high-performance computing, leaving
indelible marks at International Business Machines Corp. and the
National Science Foundation.
Mr. Bloch was a key figure in developing IBM's System/360, a
family of mainframe computers introduced in 1964 that became the
most successful product in the company's history. President Ronald
Reagan in 1985 gave Mr. Bloch and two of his colleagues the
National Medal of Technology and Innovation for their work on
System/360.
Mr. Bloch died Nov. 25 at home in Washington, D.C., due to
complications of Alzheimer's disease. He was 91.
As director of the National Science Foundation between 1984 and
1990, he focused the organization on U.S. economic competitiveness
and awarded more than 10,000 research grants.
Former colleagues describe Mr. Bloch as a forceful leader and
inspiration to employees.
"Some people thought he was gruff, but I joked that his bark was
bigger than his bite because he didn't have a bite," said Deborah
Wince-Smith, president and chief executive of the U.S. Council on
Competitiveness, who knew Mr. Bloch for decades.
Erich Bloch was born Jan. 9, 1925, in Sulzburg, Germany. At age
14 he left Germany and lived during World War II in Switzerland in
a home for Jewish refugee children. His parents died in
concentration camps, according to his daughter, Rebecca Rosen, who
said her father rarely spoke of these events.
In Switzerland, Mr. Bloch studied electrical engineering at the
Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich.
Mr. Bloch immigrated to the U.S. in 1948 and soon married Sarah
Stern, whom he had met in the orphanage. Mr. Bloch enrolled
part-time at the University of Buffalo in New York, where he
studied electrical engineering. He worked at Allied Chemical &
Dye and attended school at night, working 16 hours a day, he later
told his university's alumni magazine.
In 1952 Mr. Bloch went to work at IBM where he was "looked at as
a screwball" who wanted to "play around with computers," Mr. Bloch
told the alumni magazine. "I didn't want to play around with them
-- I wanted to put them to use."
He became the engineering manager of Stretch, IBM's first
supercomputer that was delivered to the Los Alamos National
Laboratory in 1961 and to the National Security Agency in 1962.
Mr. Bloch then led IBM's Solid Logic Technology program, which
yielded the microelectronics technology used in the System/360.
That computer, which cost $5 billion to develop, brought computing
to a wide range of industries from banking to travel.
"He was driven to put in incredible hours and was basically the
developer of these miniature hybrid circuits," said Dag Spicer,
senior curator at the Computer History Museum.
Mr. Bloch worked at IBM until 1981 in a variety of roles
including vice president of the data systems division and general
manager of the East Fishkill development and manufacturing facility
in New York.
In 1984, Mr. Bloch became the eighth director of the National
Science Foundation, the first person in that post recruited from
industry. There he oversaw the foundation's annual budget, which
grew to $3 billion. He recognized computing as a critical research
area and played a key role in establishing the nation's
supercomputer centers.
He established engineering, science and technology research
centers at universities dedicated to tackling complex, high-risk
problems. These centers brought together researchers from academia,
industry and government in a multidisciplinary approach.
"He was determined to make sure NSF and its tax dollars advanced
the nation's economic and national security," said William Harris,
who worked with Mr. Bloch at the National Science Foundation.
Mr. Bloch also encouraged the development of the NSFNET -- a
computer network that connected researchers at supercomputing
centers in the late 1980s. That network later evolved into a
portion of the internet backbone.
His wife, Sarah, died in 2004. Mr. Bloch is survived by his
daughter, Rebecca Rosen of Trumbull, Conn., as well as two
grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Write to Rachael King at rachael.king@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 02, 2016 10:14 ET (15:14 GMT)
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