William (Bill) John Poduska, Sr.

Founder of Apollo Computer, one of the first creators of graphical workstations in the 1980s, Poduska is an American engineer, entrepreneur, and independent business consultant. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he graduated from Central High School in Memphis in 1955. He was interested in electronics at an early age and went on to earn his S.B. and S.M. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, both in 1960. He also earned an Sc.D. degree in EECS from MIT in 1962.

Prior to his entrepreneurial ventures, Poduska headed the Electronics Research Lab at NASA's Cambridge, Massachusetts facility, where he worked on various Apollo missions. He also worked at Honeywell Information Systems and was involved in a number of other high-tech startups.

He co-founded Prime Computer in 1972. In 1979, Poduska founded Apollo Computer, which was one of the first creators of graphical workstations in the 1980s — the company was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989. Next, he founded Stellar Computer, which merged with Ardent to become Stardent Computer and is now known as Advanced Visual Systems, located in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Poduska has served on numerous boards, including Novell, a global software company; Anadarko Petroleum; Wang Center; Interactive Supercomputing; and Anystream, an Internet software company that specializes in streaming media encoding technology. He has been a trustee at Bentley University and has served on the Boards of Boston Ballet and the Boston Lyric Opera.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His awards include the McDowell Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the MIT Corporate Leadership and Distinguished Industrial Achievement Award. Poduska is also the recipient of the National Academy of Engineering award (1985).