Obituaries

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engineer 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".[1] For General Electric[2] he designed, with his colleague Charles Propster, the GE-225 in 1959.[3] He cited the first computer-controlled "point of sale" cash register as his greatest contribution.[4] He was the father of film director Steven Spielberg.

From the age of nine, he 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 Communications Chief of a B-25 Squadron in India.[4] During the Holocaust, Spielberg lost between 16 and 20 relatives.[8]:21

Leah Posner, a talented concert pianist, married Spielberg in January 1945.[9] 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.[5][10]



In 1960, Spielberg traveled to Moscow as part of a delegation of electrical engineers from Phoenix. The trip coincided with an incident that is the subject of the 2015 Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies.[11][12]

Steven Spielberg describes the event his father experienced at the time:

Quote: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."[11][13]

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.[1]

In 1957, Spielberg began working for General Electric. Here he was instrumental in developing the GE-200 series of computers.[14] 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,[15] introduced in 1960.[9]


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,[9] an organization founded by his son, Steven Spielberg.[16]