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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