Dr. Kay Brossard Magleby

Born in Rigby, Idaho, raised in Pocatello, he graduated from Pocatello High School in 1953. He graduated from University of Utah, majoring in Electrical Engineering and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He then went on to attend advanced management studies at Harvard University. His interest in the new technology of digital integrated circuits led him to become the architect of HP?s first minicomputer and leader of the team that led HP into the computer industry. Initial work started in a corner of the Dymec Division building under his leadership. His previous HP design experience was with sampling oscilloscopes and a vector voltmeter. He had become interested in working with digital product designs and the new digital integrated circuits that had started to appear on the market. He and Paul Stoft had developed the concept of an HP instrumentation controller at Dymec in 1964. The combination of DSI?s minicomputer-design expertise with his and Stoft?s carefully considered goals for an instrumentation-oriented minicomputer, along with Dymec?s systems know-how allowed the design and release to manufacturing of HP?s first minicomputer ? the HP 2116A, to proceed at a rapid pace. The resulting processor instruction-set architecture (ISA) is a model of efficiency and the HP 2116A processor shares some attributes of RISC architectures that surfaced nearly 20 years later. His tireless efforts along with those of his team; Ed Holland, Arne Bergh, Willie Austin and many others, ruggedness and reliability became hallmarks of the 2116A. HP's "go-anywhere, do-anything" computer was eventually discontinued as new technologies rendered the 2116A obsolete. However, for nearly a decade, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute successfully used the HP workhorse to record data under harsh sea conditions.