CE Hall of Fame Inductees

2012 Inductees

• Robert Briskman

  Robert Briskman

  Satellite Radio Pioneer and Innovator; co-founder Sirius XM Radio

  Already a satellite communications legend, Robert Briskman should have been contemplating retirement as he approached his 60th birthday in 1990. Instead, Briskman co-founded Satellite CD Radio – now Sirius XM – developing and implementing the first major advancement in radio since Edwin Howard Armstrong invented FM radio, and revitalizing the radio industry.
  
  Born in New York City on Oct. 15, 1932, Briskman earned his B.S. in engineering from Princeton University in 1954, and his master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1961.  As chief of program support for NASA's Office of Tracking and Data Acquisition from 1959 to 1963, he invented the unified S-band microwave communications system still used by the International Space Station, receiving NASA's Apollo Achievement Award for his work.
  
  After leaving NASA, Briskman worked for the Communications Satellite Corporation and then COMSAT General Corporation, holding a variety of positions. During his time at COMSAT, Briskman was responsible for, or was involved in, a long list of satellite communication firsts, including satellite command and control for the launch of INTELSAT I (the first commercial communications satellite), the development and implementation of the INTELSAT global communications system, the COMSTAR satellite system, and the first TDMA system used for voice and data communications services for IBM. Briskman was also responsible for planning domestic communications services via satellites, including AT&T's satellite system.
  
  He then served as senior vice president of engineering for Geostar from 1986 to 1990, where he was responsible for the development, design, implementation and operation of the company's Radio Determination Satellite Service (RDSS), which enabled positioning and message communications between mobile users and dispatch centers.
  
  In 1990, former Geostar president Martin Rothblatt founded MARCOR, an incubator company, and asked Briskman to come aboard to assist in several of the proposed development ventures. One of these incubator companies, Satellite CD Radio, was established to discover if the idea of satellite radio was feasible. Briskman thought it was.
  
  Briskman transformed his satellite radio theories into patented developments on satellite spatial and time diversity, which enables mobile users to receive satellite audio transmissions with almost no outages. He implemented the entire satellite radio technology infrastructure – the satellites, earth stations, terrestrial repeaters and consumer receivers – to make satellite radio practical. His efforts included a new digital broadcast technology called SDARS (Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service), which broadcasts digital audio from satellites in the 2332 MHz band.
  
  Briskman designed and directed the construction of three of the then most powerful commercial broadcast satellites, each producing two megawatts of radiated power, and launched them into a "figure 8" geosynchronous orbit over the Americas in 2000. The unique elliptical orbit that Briskman devised achieves the highest possible elevation angle of the satellites to the three-channel mobile receivers he designed. As a result, Sirius XM radios can almost always capture the signal, even in urban centers.
  
  Briskman designed and built the earth stations and satellite control facility technologies to complete the Sirius system. On the business side, he helped procure the radio frequency allocations from the FCC, finalized in 1993, and aided CD Radio CEO, David Margolese in raising the needed $1.4 billion to launch the service. In 1999, the company was renamed Sirius Satellite Radio.
  
  Sirius started broadcasting on July 1, 2002. Briskman's technology was then licensed to competitor XM, which merged with Sirius in 2008. Today, Sirius XM subscribers can receive more than 160 audio channels, including 65 commercial-free music channels and 95 voice channels featuring sports, news, entertainment, traffic, commentary, weather and other topics.
  
  Satellite radio now has more than 23 million U.S. subscribers and another two million in Canada, with more than 50 million estimated listeners.
  
  After retiring from the board of directors and other executive positions, Briskman assumed the title of technical executive to concentrate on finishing and improving the technical implementation of the Sirius XM system. He has successfully launched a record 31 consecutive satellites; a 32nd is due to launch in 2013.
  
  Briskman has been honored by a multitude of satellite, science and engineering organizations including the AIAA (The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics), the Washington Academy of Sciences, the IEEE, the SSPI (Society of Satellite Professionals International) and the Space Foundation.

  
• Richard Citta

  Richard Citta

  Digital Television Pioneer

   
  For 70-plus years, there was only one method used to broadcast over-the-air television, an analog method prone to interference from nearly anything and everything inside and out, including simply walking by a TV antenna. Persnickety TV reception has all but disappeared with digital television thanks to an interference-free digital transmission system called VSB (Vestigial Side Band) invented by former Zenith researcher Richard W. Citta.
  
  Instead of toiling over schematics, test equipment and equations in a lab, Citta discovered the solutions to the digital broadcasting problem while lying flat on his back in a hospital bed.
  
  Citta was born on July 17, 1944. Like many teens in the 1950s, Citta and his friends were ham radio operators, building their sets from kits sold at local electronics stores. In high school, Citta tinkered with cars and fixed all the teachers’ TVs. He worked on electronics sets others had bought and were unable to complete, and discovered he could.
  
  He earned his B.S. in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1968  and his master's in the same subject from the University of Washington in 1971. During his first 20 years at Zenith, Citta’s work included developing unique modulation technologies for cable set-top boxes and two way interactive cable TV systems.
  
  Citta's initial work on VSB began in 1987, when he and his group at Zenith embarked on new modulation technologies for cable transmission and terrestrial broadcasting. In the spring of 1988, Citta – nicknamed "Wolfman" thanks to his thick and wild salt-and-pepper hair and beard – was perched precariously atop a ladder while painting his house. The ladder gave way and Citta fell, crushing his left ankle.
  
  With little else to occupy him while lying immobile in a hospital bed, Citta stared at the ceiling pondering the HDTV transmission problem – and experienced a "Eureka!" moment. He jotted down some notes and drew diagrams for what would become the new VSB digital TV transmission scheme and presented his concept to Zenith higher-ups when back on the job a few weeks later.
  VSB modulation employs unique technology to prevent interference into existing NTSC (analog) broadcast signals. It contains a unique pilot signal to aid in reception under extremely adverse receiving conditions resulting from white noise, impulse noise and multipath impairments.
  
  Citta’s breakthrough enabled the use of the previously unusable or "taboo" channels in the VHF and UHF television broadcast spectrum. VSB was first proposed as an HDTV transmission method in Zenith’s 1988 proposal to the FCC's Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS). Based on the success of these demos, Citta and the Zenith team developed the so-called 8-VSB transmission system, employed by the HDTV Grand Alliance, which was formed in May 1993.
  
  Citta led exhaustive testing under both laboratory and real-world conditions. The Grand Alliance standard was finalized in September 1995 after several successful transmission field tests in Charlotte, N.C. In December 1996, VSB was officially adopted by the FCC as the centerpiece of the nation's new digital television broadcast standard. In January 2001, the FCC reaffirmed 8-VSB once, for all and forever.
  
  Citta led many of the technological innovation efforts that facilitated the end of analog TV broadcasting and its complete replacement by the digital VSB technology. These efforts laid the foundation for the FCC's simulcast rules during the transition from analog to all-digital broadcasting between 1996 and June 2009.
  
  Today, more than 1,800 U.S. television broadcasters are broadcasting digitally using VSB. Hundreds of millions of digital TV sets have been sold in the U.S. market alone, all of which must contain VSB demodulators.
  
  After retiring from Zenith in 2000, Citta was named chief scientist for LINX Electronics designing digital TV receivers. He spent three years as chief scientist for chip maker Micronas developing custom integrated circuits and chips for use in HDTVs, and two years as a consultant with Thomson before founding his own consulting firm, the R. Citta Group, which develops concepts for enhancing the mobile ATSC DTV ecosystem.
  
  Citta, has been awarded roughly 200 patents, with many still pending. He is a charter member of the Academy of Digital Television Pioneers and, along with other Zenith colleagues, received the prestigious IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award in 2006 for development of the VSB transmission system. In 1997, Citta and the Zenith team received the Engineering Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts and Science. He is the only two-time recipient of Zenith's highest technical honor, the Robert Adler Technical Excellence Award (1988 and 1994) and was honored by the University of Washington for his pioneering efforts behind the ATSC Digital TV Standard that transformed the way we enjoy television today.
  

  
• Bjorn Dybdahl

  Bjorn Dybdahl

  Bjorn's Audio Video
  Founder

  Although he never learned to play an instrument, Bjorn Dybdahl’s love of music led him to found one of the country’s most innovative and successful AV and custom install retailers, Bjorn’s Audio Video, in northern San Antonio, insisting, “We sell entertainment and fun, not equipment.”
  
  Dybdahl was born June 4, 1943, in Oslo, Norway. When he was six, his parents immigrated to the U.S., settling in Minneapolis. The young Dybdahl soon developed a passion for classical music; his first record was what he thought was the theme for “The Lone Ranger” – the William Tell Overture. From there, Dybdahl discovered composers such as Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, literally wearing out records, which he played on a portable record player in his room. Like many kids in the 1950s, his first job was as a paperboy. He then was hired as a stock boy at Dayton’s department store. These jobs made him realize how much he enjoyed dealing with customers.
  
  Without a specific career goal after graduating from high school, Dybdahl joined the Air Force in December 1961. Five months later, he married his high school sweetheart Sharon (Shari). Stationed in San Antonio, Dybdahl soon realized he didn’t want to make the Air Force a career and started college at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio while still serving. He graduated in 1971 with a degree in political science.
  
  In 1967, a year before leaving the Air Force, Dybdahl started working for Bill Case Sound, a small audio store in San Antonio, to discover if he could turn his hi-fi avocation into a profession. At first, Dybdahl thought he would move back to Minneapolis after leaving the service and open a hi-fi shop.
  
  But upon his discharge, Dybdahl realized he had no money, a wife, a daughter, another child on the way, and that he hated snow. He continued to work for Case until the summer of 1975.
  
  At loose ends, Dybdahl received encouragement from several old Case customers. One previous customer called Dybdahl and asked how much he needed to open his own hi-fi store. Dybdahl got a loan of $15,000 with no strings attached and, together with an SBA loan, was able to open a 1,000-square-foot store on October 1, 1975. He and a bookkeeper were the store’s lone employees. Less than a year later, Dybdahl hired his second employee and a custom installer, although at the time, neither Dybdahl nor anyone else knew what a “custom installer” was.
  
  Founded the year Sony introduced the Betamax and on the eve of the home video and home theater revolutions, Bjorn’s began concentrating on “systems,” before “home theater” was even a term, helping to introduce the latest home theater innovations to the San Antonio area. In 1976, Bjorn’s introduced the first two-piece video projector; two years later, Dybdahl integrated a multi-channel Audio Pulse system with a large screen projector and a laserdisc player to create an early surround sound demo.
  Bjorn’s helped introduce the CD, and was one of the first to demo HDTV, home THX and direct broadcast satellite (DBS) TV. Bjorn’s gave the first public demos of Dolby AC-3 (aka Dolby Digital), dual-layer DVD, HDTV and Pioneer’s first plasma TV. In 2006, Bjorn’s presented the first U.S. consumer demos of Blu-ray and HD-DVD and in 2007, one of the first 3DTV debuts with Texas Instruments and Mitsubishi. Dybdahl appeared as an HDTV spokesperson for Time Warner Cable TV ads, and has produced numerous broadcasts to educate consumers about HDTV.
  
  Dybdahl was an early member of PARA and a founding member of CEDIA. Audio Video International magazine has named Bjorn’s an Audio/Video Retailer of the Year every year since 1987, and in 2000, Frost & Sullivan presented Bjorn’s with its Market Engineering Award for customer service leadership.
  
  Bjorn’s continues to grow, having expanded four times. Its current location, a 25,000 square foot building, is accompanied by a 25,000 square foot warehouse, an installation group staffed by a dozen installers and a service department. “Yes, Bjorn’s still fixes stuff,” Dybdahl says. He continues to prowl the show floor, helping customers on a regular basis.
  

  
• Douglas Engelbart

  Douglas Engelbart

  Inventor of the computer mouse; father of hypermedia

  Douglas Engelbart envisioned how to create, access and share ideas and information using computers, as well as how people could interact with one other and work together more effectively in a connected world.
  
  To bring this holistic system into existence, Engelbart created windowed screen design, the user interface, hypermedia, collaborative computing, multimedia, knowledge management and the mouse. His seminal work beginning in the early 1960s led to the creation of the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) now used on all computing devices, and laid the foundation for how and why most of us use computers and the Internet today.
  
  Engelbart was born in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 30, 1925, to Carl Louis Engelbart and Gladys Charlotte Amelia Munson Engelbart. He attended Oregon State College (renamed Oregon State University) for a year, but was drafted, serving two years in the Navy. In 1948, he returned to Oregon State and earned a B.S. in electrical engineering. His first job out of college was at the Ames Research Center, run by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the precursor to NASA.
  
  In 1951, Engelbart got engaged to his wife, Ballard and returned to school, earning a master’s (1953) and a Ph.D. (1955) from the University of California at Berkeley in electrical engineering with a specialty in computers. He stayed on at Berkeley as an acting assistant professor, and in 1957, moved on to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI, now SRI International).
  
  At SRI, Engelbart began to develop tools to augment how people and organizations collect, use and share information. One of these technologies was hypermedia, the linking of one piece of data to another, developed independently but simultaneously in 1964 with east coast-based Ted Nelson, who coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia."
  
  For Engelbart, hypermedia was part of a larger integrated system. The foundation of the first hypermedia groupware system was dubbed NLS (oN-Line System). To help navigate NLS, Engelbart experimented with "screen selection" devices – pointers to navigate information presented on a computer screen including a light pen, a foot pedal, a knee apparatus and even a helmet-mounted device.
  
  In 1961, Engelbart envisioned a pointing device that would traverse a desktop on two small wheels, one turning horizontally, the other vertically, each transmitting rotation coordinates to determine the location of a floating on-screen pointer. Two years later, lead engineer Bill English built one from Engelbart's sketches. Encased in a carved out wooden block with perpendicular wheels mounted in the underbelly, it had only one button – that was all there was room for. Someone lost to history started calling it "the mouse."
  
  Engelbart and his crew experimented with additional buttons, working up to five, before settling on three by 1968. SRI patented the mouse, naming Engelbart as its inventor.
  
  At the Joint Computer Conference, a semi-annual meeting of major computing societies in San Francisco on Dec. 9, 1968, Engelbart conducted what has become known as "The Mother of All Demos," a seminal event in the history of contemporary computing. In front of 1,000 computer professionals, Engelbart and his geographically remote colleagues conducted the first public demonstration of the mouse, hypermedia and hyperlinking, display editing, windows, cross-file editing, idea/outline processing, collaborative groupware, and on-screen video teleconferencing – all brand new concepts and technologies at the time.
  Engelbart also was involved in the development of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ARPANET. On Oct. 29, 1969, Engelbart's lab was at the receiving end of the first message transmitted over ARPANET, which would eventually lead to inception of the Internet.
  
  In the early 1970s, several of Engelbart's ARC engineers landed at Xerox's new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), incorporating some of Engelbart's more tangible ideas into the Xerox Alto, the first personal computer with a GUI and a mouse. The GUI/mouse system developed for the Xerox Alto was later adapted for Apple and Windows operating systems.
  
  In 1989, Engelbart, and his daughter, Christina, formed the non-profit Bootstrap Institute, which was renamed the Doug Engelbart Institute in 2008, and is now run by Christina.
  
  Engelbart has been awarded 20 patents and is the recipient of multiple awards and honors including the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award (1987), the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award (1993), the Lemelson-MIT Prize (1997), induction into the Computer Hall of Fame and the U.S. National Medal of Technology, presented by President Bill Clinton (2000) and the Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition (2005).
  

  
• Charlie Ergen

  Charlie Ergen

  DISH/EchoStar
  Co-Founder

  Charlie Ergen is a bona fide gambler. In between jobs, he and a friend literally tried their hands in Las Vegas dealing blackjack and playing poker. But his biggest gamble was investing in the nascent satellite TV business, a bet that resulted in the founding of EchoStar and DISH, the pioneering satellite TV service.
  
  Born March 1, 1953, Ergen's interest in technology may well have been influenced by his birthplace – Oak Ridge, Tenn., a sleepy village built into a factory town by the federal government during World War II to produce plutonium for the atomic bomb – and by his father, William, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist. Ergen’s interest in business may have come from his mother, Viola, who was business manager of the Children's Museum of Oak Ridge.
  
  Ergen earned a bachelor’s degree in general business and accounting from the University of Tennessee, and an M.B.A. from Wake Forest University. His first job out of school was as a CPA and financial analyst for Frito-Lay, from 1976-1978.
  
  By 1980, Ergen and a friend, Jim DeFranco, drifted to Las Vegas to make their way as professional gamblers. But they were evicted from a Las Vegas casino for card counting. Once again at loose ends, DeFranco spotted a truck carrying a large C-band satellite dish and a business idea was hatched. DeFranco, Ergen and Ergen's wife, Cantey – known as Candy – started EchoSphere, a door-to-door C-band satellite TV sales and installation business.
  
  The trio pooled $60,000 in savings, bought two satellite dishes and headed to Colorado – they figured folks got poor over-the-air reception in the mountainous state. Ergen and DeFranco would drive to rural towns to deliver the C-band dishes for up to $15,000 plus $600 for installation, a dollar per mile more past 50 miles outside of Denver – unless the pair was allowed to rest for the night at the customer's home.
  
  By 1985, EchoSphere had earned more than $100 million in revenue. But Ergen believed the only real path to growth was to launch his own satellite. In 1987, Ergen and DeFranco applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a direct broadcast satellite (DBS) license, which was approved in 1992.
  
  Ergen contracted with China to launch his bird, and on Dec. 28, 1995, a rocket bearing EchoStar I was launched successfully from Xichang, China. DISH, with a newly-built satellite uplink center in Cheyenne, Wyo., began broadcasting in March the following year. A second satellite was launched and a second customer service center was opened later that year.
  
  Within four months, DISH reached the 100,000 subscriber milestone and the company celebrated its millionth customer following the launch of EchoStar III on Oct. 5, 1997, from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
  
  Two years later, EchoStar bought the broadcasting assets of a satellite broadcasting joint-venture between News Corporation's ASkyB and MCI Worldcom, more than doubling DISH's continental U.S. broadcasting capacity. In 1999, DISH unveiled the DISH 500, the world's first satellite TV system, with more than 500 channels. In 2000, DISH released its first HDTV receiver. Over a six-month period straddling 1999-2000, its stock rose from $5 to $79.
  
  Ergen also fought for the satellite broadcast industry by helping secure passage of the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act in 1999, which allowed satellite broadcasters to carry local stations.
  
  By August 2003, DISH had launched EchoStar IX from a floating platform at the equator, the first Ka satellite; in all, DISH has launched a dozen satellites. By 2004, DISH became the first satellite TV service to offer local channels to all 50 states, the first to develop a UHF remote control and the first to sell a satellite receiver for less than $200. In 2012, DISH unveiled the Hopper, a whole-home HD DVR system that can record six channels simultaneously and allows customers to automatically skip commercials on most PrimeTime Anytime DISH programming.
  
  In May 2011, Ergen stepped down from his role as president and CEO to become chairman of the board. When not tending to DISH business, Ergen climbs mountains. A member of the Colorado Mountain Club, Ergen is has climbed each of the state's 14,000-foot peaks, as well as Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Aconcagua in Argentina and the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal.
  
  His biggest achievement, however, is his 30-year-plus marriage to his wife, Candy, and their five children.
  

  
• Larry Finley

  Larry Finley

  ITA (International Tape Association)
  Founder

  Audio cassettes were still a curiosity in the late 1960s, and videotape was used only in television studios. But a Los Angeles restaurateur, radio and TV personality, music recording pioneer and entrepreneur named Larry Finley saw the future of both audio and video tape, founding the ITA (International Tape Association) in 1970. ITA and its later incarnations – IRMA (International Recording Media Association) and, today, the CDSA (Content Delivery & Security Association) – played pivotal roles in establishing the home recording and video business.
  
  Born May 4, 1913, in Syracuse, N.Y., Finley and his cousins built crystal radio sets like many boys in the early 1920s – except Finley sold them to families who wanted to hear radio broadcasts in their homes. His youngest cousin, Rod Serling, became fascinated by these radios and would go on to write radio plays and create The Twilight Zone.
  
  Finley began his long and eclectic professional career at 18 as manager of a local nightclub, the Cafe DeWitt. Enticed by the glamour of Hollywood, he moved to Los Angeles and opened Finley's Credit Jewelers in Burbank, adding stores in Hollywood and throughout the LA area. To promote his burgeoning business, Finley staged street dances and concerts featuring famous musicians.
  
  In 1944, Finley opened the Casino Gardens Ballroom in San Diego, partnering with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. After the ballroom closed, Finley moved back to Los Angeles in the early 1950s opened up Larry Finley's restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, next door to the world famous Mocambo. On the heels of his MC'ing experience at Casino Gardens, Finley decided to initiate a radio show on KFWB, The Larry Finley Show, broadcast nightly from his restaurant. He recorded his shows on the latest audio tape format, and syndicated them around the country.
  
  In 1954, Finley produced an early 24-hour TV telethon, raising more than $l.5 million for the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., for which he received the Los Angeles City of Hope Torchbearer Award.
  
  Finley also became an early television pioneer; Finley Productions Inc. was the first west coast independent TV production company. He hosted a series of music-based local TV shows in the late 1950s on KTLA-TV and KABC-TV. Finley kinescoped and sent these shows by the Armed Forces Network to troops in Korea.
  
  On radio and TV, Finley interviewed the biggest entertainers of the day and introduced new stars, including Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Lou Rawls, Johnny Ray, Les Paul and Mary Ford. He also became friendly with entertainment industry heavyweights such as Howard Hughes, Louella Parsons, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, and Walter Winchell.
  
  In 1960, Finley moved to New York City and became president of Tops Records, and later, director of sales at MGM Records. Recognizing the potential of 8-track tape, Finley founded the International Tape Cartridge Corporation (ITCC) in 1965. Finley acquired audio tape rights from the leading 27 record labels, making ITCC the largest provider of entertainment on 8-track tape. During that year, Finley held the exclusive rights and licenses for all music on 8-track tape. Philips licensed much of Finley's catalog for use on its new compact audio cassette format.
  
  In late 1969, Finley was approached to start an association for this new, quickly developing cassette tape industry. ITA was formed in 1970 with eight member companies, including Panasonic, Philips and TDK.
  
  To establish quality and ethics standards within the tape industry, Finley contacted 3M, the major supplier of blank tape at the time, and convinced them to adhere to a labeling standard. Finley also fought successfully to keep commercial and consumer analog tape format decisions out of government hands.
  
  In 1979, Finley left ITA and formed Larry Finley Associates, which acquired programming for home video. He also became a proponent of the VHS format, and by so doing, became known as the Father of Video Tape. He encouraged JVC to license its VHS technology to duplicators and loaders, which allowed third-party vendors to produce and distribute video tape titles around the world – the basis of the entire packaged home video business. In 1984, he was inducted into the Video Hall of Fame.
  Finley passed away on April 3, 2000, at his home in Long Island, N.Y. "It takes a great man to create a business, but it takes a visionary to create an entire industry," said a former associate. "Larry Finley was such a visionary."
  

  
• Fansy and Henry Harold Gregg

  Fansy and Henry Harold Gregg

  h.h. gregg
  Founders

  A man bought a TV from a new electronics and appliance store. Over a holiday weekend, the TV stopped working. The customer called the store's owner – at home. The owner told the customer to meet him at the store with the broken TV in 20 minutes. The owner unlocked the store and got the customer a new TV.
  
  That story sums up the successful five decade-plus customer-focused "Our progress will come through satisfying the customer" philosophy of Indianapolis-based h.h. gregg and its founders Henry Harold Gregg, better known as "Hine," and his wife, Fansy. It is this philosophy that has allowed h.h. gregg to grow from one small storefront into a nearly 200-store national chain generating more than $2 billion in sales.
  
  Hine, a Navy veteran of World War II, was managing the Biddle Screw Products appliance store in Sheridan, a small town 25 miles northwest of Indianapolis. Fansy was the home service director for the Gibson Company in Indianapolis and traveled around Indiana and Illinois teaching retailers to sell and operate appliances and giving customer demonstrations. She would also go to homes and instruct owners how to operate new-fangled automatic clothes washers. One of her Gibson training stops in 1949 was at Biddle, where she met Hine.
  
  Hine moved to Indianapolis to take a job as an appliance salesman for A.C. Zickler at 4930 North Keystone Avenue and later became store manager. Two years after they married, Hine and Fansy used $3,000 they had saved and purchased A.C. Zickler's 800-square-foot showroom, opening on April 15, 1955. The Gregg's sold Admiral, RCA, Spartan and Whirlpool washing machines, clothes dryers, refrigerators and outdoor grills out front while Zickler continued to run his plumbing business in the rear. They soon also started selling "brown goods" including black-and-white TVs.
  
  A newspaper ad six months later exclaimed "APPLIANCES at ZICKLER'S," with "h.h. gregg, Proprietor" listed at the bottom. Hine served as the sales force while Fansy was in charge of the office. More importantly, that ad also asserted "We Will Be Here Tomorrow to Service the Appliance You Buy Today."
  
  The Gregg's used off-duty firemen as delivery men, or Hine and the customer would load the goods into the store's old red pick-up truck and make the delivery.
  
  Gregg's started to really grow once they started selling color TVs. On January 1, 1960, the couple invited guests to their home to watch the football bowl games on their RCA color TV. After three years of these personal demos, the couple added a "color room" to their new 5,200-square-foot headquarters, three blocks from the former Zickler store and began hosting their annual New Year's Day football festivities there.
  
  The business' growth didn't diminish the Gregg's dedication to customer service. Hine took the store's TV "tube caddie" home with him in case he had to personally make a house call to fix a tube.
  
  Mrs. Gregg's son, Gerald Throgmartin, joined the company after 10 years of sales experience at Sears. Her other son, Don, came aboard in 1969, and two years later went to manage the firm's second store in Kokomo, Indiana, for 10 years. Also in 1971, the Gregg's opened their third store, on the south side of Indianapolis.
  
  Hine died in 1974, the same year a fourth location opened in Anderson, Indiana, and Gerald took over day-to-day management of the company. The following year, a fifth h.h. gregg's opened on Indianapolis' east side, just as Hine and Fansy's grandson, Jerry Throgmartin, joined the business while still a teenager. Fansy continued to work until 1983 before retiring to Florida. She passed in 2004.
  
  In 1989, Gerald Throgmartin became chairman and CEO, while his son Jerry was promoted to president and COO. In 1999, when there were 19 h.h. gregg stores, Jerry became company chairman, CEO and director. A fourth generation of Throgmartins joined the family business when Jerry's son Gregg started work in early 2001. In 2007, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
  
  Thanks to Jerry Throgmartin's leadership and stewardship of Hine and Fansy's devotion to customer service, h.h. gregg's now has 190 locations with stores in 15 states including Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Pittsburgh, South Carolina and Virginia. Jerry unexpectedly passed away in January 2012 at the age of 57.
  

  
• In Hwoi Koo

  In Hwoi Koo

  LG
  Founder

  Getting into business with friends and family – especially in-laws – can be a trying experience. But Koo In Hwoi, founding chairman of LG, believed in "harmony among people.” At the time of the company's founding, LG was run by several families and organized by close acquaintances, including in-laws. Koo's harmonious business philosophy promoted consensus-based decision-making and support followed by full compliance once a decision was made.
  
  Koo's "noiseless" business management turned LG into a $120 billion global conglomerate comprising 44 different companies including chemicals, telecommunications and, of course, Korea's first consumer electronics products.
  
  Koo was born on Aug. 27, 1907, in Jisu-myun, South Gyeongsang province. Raised in a traditional noble family emphasizing Confucian values, he studied the Chinese classics during his childhood. When he turned 14, he married Eul Su Huh. After graduating from Jisu Elementary School, he went to Jungang High School in Seoul. In 1931, he returned to his hometown and, capitalizing on his experience in running a co-op, he opened his own draper called Koo In Hwoi Store in Jinju and began his career as an entrepreneur.
  
  Shortly after national liberation from Japanese rule following World War II, Koo relocated the base of his business to Busan. He began selling cosmetics, but also decided to produce a cosmetics cream himself and established Lak Hui – pronounced "lucky" in January 1947, the first half of what would become LG.
  
  The success of Lucky Cream cleared the way for LG to become the first Korean company to enter into the plastics industry. He marketed various plastic household products, including combs, toothbrushes and dishware. He also developed and produced quality Korean toothpaste that replaced U.S.-made Colgate as the top seller in Korea.
  
  While growing the plastics business, Koo also established GoldStar Co. Ltd. in 1958, the first Korean electronics company. A year later, GoldStar produced Korea's first home-grown consumer electronics product, the A-501 dual-band (medium and shortwave) tabletop radio. This led to a streak of "Korea's first" products, including telephones, fans, refrigerators, television sets and washing machines, which brought tremendous change to the lives of Koreans and accelerated the country’s rise as a global player in electronics and IT. Lak Hui and GoldStar merged in 1995 to establish the modern incarnation of LG.
  
  Koo went on to found a number of companies in the chemical and electronics industries, including a cable manufacturing company in 1962 that produced cables for electricity and telecommunications installations. Koo's companies also played an important role in building much-needed infrastructure in Korea, including telecommunications, by founding a company that produced switchboards and public telephones.
  
  Koo established GoldStar's first overseas branch in New York in 1968, the same year it manufactured Korea's first air conditioner.
  For the company, Koo's most important contribution was his business philosophy and management principles – harmony among people, a pioneering spirit and R&D leadership – which are upheld to this day. Koo also called on his employees to become pioneers. He saw R&D not as a reckless challenge, but as an essential component to turn this pioneering spirit into a driver of success. He valued engineers and made strenuous efforts to develop new products and new technology.
  
  "Find something that others did not try yet," Koo said. "Begin with something that is essential to people's living. Once you begin, continue to move forward. Even if you succeed, do not stop there; challenge yourself to something higher, greater and more difficult."
  
  In 1968, he built and donated the Yonam Library in Jinju, his hometown. Shortly before his death on Dec. 31, 1969, he established the Yonam Foundation – currently LG Yonam Foundation, a public service corporation which offers systematic professional support in culture and education - and left it as his final gift to Korean society.
  Korean society.
  

  
• Byung-Chull Lee

  Byung-Chull Lee

  Samsung
  Founder

  Byung-chull Lee played a vital role in building South Korea's industrial landscape by establishing and operating more than 30 companies for nearly 50 years in industries ranging from import substituting goods to high technologies.
  
  Lee's business philosophy comprised of "economical contribution to the nation," "priority to human resources" and "pursuit of rationality." Lee founded and managed companies under this philosophy and cultivated them to be the best. He is considered South Korea's leading pioneer businessman who contributed greatly to the development of society through various cultural, art and educational businesses.
  
  Lee was born in Uiryong-gun, Kyongsangnam-do, Korea, on Feb. 12 1910, the youngest of four children. In 1930, Lee went to Japan to study economics at Waseda University. Upon his return to Korea, he decided to devote himself to running a business under the belief that building Korea’s economy was the most urgent task. In March 1938, Lee founded Samsung Trading Company to carry out his philosophy of making an "economical contribution to the nation."
  
  After the success of Samsung Trading Company, Lee took over Chosun Brewery, laying out the foundation for Samsung. In the early 1950s, he expanded into businesses such as sugar, wool and paper manufacturing. He also contributed to the development of the financial industry through insurance and banking businesses, playing a significant role in rebuilding the national economy in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War.
  
  In the 1960s, Lee was at the forefront of building Korea's key industries by engaging in businesses encompassing fertilizer, electronics, retail, clothing, textile, media and land development. As part of his efforts to stabilize people's livelihood by enhancing self-sufficiency in food, Lee founded Korea Fertilizer in 1967, which was the world's biggest single production facility. He helped boost the country's exports, led the development of heavy chemical and defense industries and contributed to the development of high technology industries including semiconductor, aviation, fine chemicals and computers.
  
  Lee established a network of TV broadcasting, newspapers and other publications, marking an important milestone in the development of Korea's media culture. His Ho-Am Art Museum helped foster pride among Koreans in their cultural heritage among, and with the Samsung Foundation of Culture, he promoted a culture of morals and advanced the arts.
  
  Lee's foresight that the future of his business relied on the electronics industry led him to found Samsung Electronics in 1969. The company has become the world's largest IT company that leads the global TV, mobile phone, memory and LCD (liquid crystal display) markets.
  
  In 1973, Samsung Electronics developed a 19-inch transistor black-and-white television. Following the success of this television, the company expanded into other electronics products including refrigerators and washing machines. By 1981, the company had manufactured more than 10 million black-and-white televisions.
  
  Samsung Electronics expanded into the semiconductor business in 1974, acquiring Korea Semiconductor, and entered the telecommunications business by acquiring Korea Telecommunications in 1980. In 1983, Lee made what has come to be known as the "Tokyo Declaration," announcing that Samsung Electronics would enter the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) business. A year later, the company became the third company in the world to develop 64K DRAM. In 1984, it introduced the world's first 256K DRAM and later started mass production of 1Mega DRAM, helping South Korea become a semiconductor powerhouse and setting the groundwork for the company to be the global technology leader.
  
  Lee was one of Korea's most highly-regarded businessmen and his pen name, Ho-Am, means "filling up a space with clear water as lakes do, and being unshakeable as a large rock," in reference to his magnanimity and volition as a businessman.
  
  After his death on Nov. 19, 1987, he was awarded the Korean Order of Civil Merit, Mugunghwa Medal by the Korean government and the First Class Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government. In honoring his father, Samsung Electronics Chairman Kun-hee Lee established The Ho-Am Prize. Since 1991, Koreans who have made distinguishable accomplishments in the fields of science, engineering, medicine, arts and community service have been awarded Ho-Am Prizes annually.
  

  
• George Smith

  George Smith

  CCD imaging chip
  Co-Inventor

  Like he did almost every day, Dr. George E. Smith wandered into the office of his boss, Willard Boyle, at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., on Sept. 8, 1969, for their usual brainstorming session. Less than an hour later, they emerged with the single most important invention in the history of photography – the charged-couple device (CCD), the imaging sensor chip which ignited the digital camera revolution.
  
  This was not what they intended to create at all.
  
  Smith was born in White Plains, N.Y., on May 10, 1930. Smith's parents could not afford to send him to college, so upon graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Navy. After attending aerograph school – Navy speak for meteorology – he was assigned to the Navy Hurricane Weather Central in Miami. The Navy was slated to kill a research project aimed at finding the location of hurricanes using seismographs to measure the vibrations made in the ocean floor. Smith designed a different seismographic method and saved the project.
  
  Smith also took courses at the University of Miami. He worked part-time jobs at the university, running an ancient mechanical differential analyzer and making basic measurements on semiconductors.
  
  Back from the Navy, Smith entered the University of Pennsylvania as a sophomore, earning his B.A. in physics in 1955. He moved west and earned his master's (1956) and his Ph.D. (1959) in physics from the University of Chicago, submitting one of the shortest doctoral thesis on record – just three pages on "The Anomalous Skin Effect in Bismuth."
  
  Following graduation, Smith joined Bell Laboratories, where researchers were given the latitude to work on what interested them. In 1964, he became head of the Device Concepts Department, a group formed to devise next-generation solid-state devices.
  On that fall afternoon in 1969, Smith and his boss convened to brainstorm about semiconductor integrated circuits. They had been asked to examine whether it was possible to devise a form of bubble memory using semiconductors.
  
  Smith had been involved with an effort to create an electron beam imaging tube for the Picturephone, with a target consisting of an array of silicon diodes. After jotting some notes on the blackboard, Smith realized what they were devising could store data, and would also be an image sensor. The CCD takes advantage of the solid-state equivalent of the photoelectric effect that won Albert Einstein his Nobel Prize in 1921.
  
  According to Smith, “metal-oxide-silicon (MOS) capacitors were already being extensively studied as the gate structure for MOS transistors, which form the basis of today's vast integrated circuit technology. Charge stored on these capacitors could represent digital information for memory – no charge for a zero and maximum charge for a one – devices or analog information formed by incident light and the solid state equivalent of the photoelectric effect, the amount of charge being proportional to the light intensity.”
  
  The first model based on their idea was constructed and successfully demonstrated a few weeks later. The device was publicly announced in 1970, and was quickly picked up by several companies including Fairchild, RCA and Texas Instruments. Bell Labs also developed and demonstrated a CCD camera for Picturephone but the effort was terminated when AT&T decided not to develop a Picturephone network.
  
  A researcher at Kodak, CEA Hall of Famer Steve Sasson, procured CCD chips from Fairchild and, in December 1975, built the first working digital camera. But before the CCD was used in the first consumer digital cameras in 1994, it was installed in the Hubble Telescope in 1990 to snap digital photos of distant galaxies.
  
  Smith has been a member of Pi Mu Epsilon, Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, was made a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He holds 31 U.S. patents and is the author of more than 40 papers. Since 1970, Boyle and Smith have received several awards for their accomplishment and, in 2009, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for the invention of the CCD.
  
  Smith retired from Bell Laboratories as head of the VLSI Device Department in April 1986. He then started a world cruise aboard his 9.5-meter sailboat, APOGEE, which he completed in 2003 after 55,000 miles of ocean sailing. He lives in Barnegat, N.J.
  

  
• Willard Boyle

  Willard Boyle

  CCD imaging chip
  Co-Inventor

  It's not as far from a small logging community in north Quebec, Canada, to Stockholm, Sweden as you might think. Willard Boyle made only a slight detour through Murray Hill, N.J., on his way to collecting a Nobel Prize with his fellow Bell Labs researcher George E. Smith for co-inventing the CCD (charged-couple device), the first digital imaging chip, which transformed the world of photography.
  
  Boyle was born on Aug. 19, 1924, in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and was raised in the village of Wallace until his family moved to Chaudiere, Quebec. His father was the local physician, and Boyle was home schooled by his mother, who believed in the Socratic method of teaching. She asked him questions that required detailed explanations as answers. Boyle described her as a curious woman, and through her teaching, he developed a strong curiosity as well.
  
  When he was 14, Boyle began his formal education at Lower Canada College in Montreal. He continued to pursue his scientific interests at McGill University, but in 1943, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy and learned to land Spitfire fighter planes on aircraft carriers.
  
  Boyle later returned to McGill, where he met his wife, Betty, whom he married in 1946. He completed his bachelor’s, master’s and finally his Ph.D. in physics in 1950. After earning his doctorate, he remained at McGill in Canada's Radiation Laboratory for a year, and then spent two years teaching physics at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario.
  
  In 1953, Boyle took a job at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J. In 1962, he worked with Don Nelson to create the first continuously operating ruby laser, and, with David Thomas, was awarded a patent that helped lead to the development of the semiconductor injection laser, found in many electronic appliances. That same year, Boyle was named director of space science and exploratory studies at Bellcomm, a division of Bell Labs in Washington, D.C. While at Bellcomm, he worked on the Apollo program, and helped select lunar landing sites. Boyle returned to Bell Labs in 1964.
  
  On September 8, 1969, Boyle entertained fellow researcher and CE Hall of Fame inductee George Smith in his office for one of their regular brainstorming sessions. That day's assignment: forming bubble memory using semiconductors.
  After jotting some notes on the blackboard, Smith realized what they were devising could not only store data, but also could be an image sensor. The pair worked quickly, and within an hour had essentially created a digital imaging chip, the CCD. "[We] knew we had something special," Boyle said later. "We are the ones who started this profusion of little cameras all over the world."
  The first model based on Boyle's and Smith's ideas was constructed and demonstrated a few weeks later. The device was publically announced early in 1970 and was quickly picked up by several companies.
  
  A researcher at Kodak, CE Hall of Famer Steve Sasson, built the first working digital camera in 1975. CCDs would soon appear in any gadget that captured images or video, including cell phones, copiers, satellites, fax machines, and the cameras that roamed Mars and the ocean floor.
  
  Boyle retired from Bell Labs in 1979 as executive director of the Communication Science Division, holding 18 patents. Retired at 55, he sailed his 33-foot boat for six leisurely weeks up the inland waterway from New Jersey, through the New York Harbor, up to Quebec and down the St. Lawrence to the house the Boyles had built in Wallace, Nova Scotia.
  
  Over the years, Boyle has been honored many times including winning the Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute (1973), the Morris Lieberman Award of the IEEE (1974), the Progress Medal of the Photographic Society of America, the Breakthrough Award by the Device Research Conference of the IEEE, the Edwin H. Land Medal from the Optical Society of America (2001), the Charles Stark Draper Prize from National Academy of Engineering (2006), and, with Smith in 2009, the Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention of the CCD. He was inducted into the Canadian Science & Engineering Hall of Fame in 2005.
  
  Boyle lived in Wallace until his death on May 7, 2011.
  

  

2011 Inductees

• Samuel Bloomberg

  Samuel Bloomberg

  Tweeter
  Co-Founder, CEO

  Starting with a $10,000 investment and a 1,000-square-foot space, Sandy Bloomberg grew the electronics store Tweeter into the largest high-end specialty retailer in the country.
  
  Bloomberg was born in Boston on June 19, 1951, into a family steeped in retail as far back as 1889. His father, Harvey, and his uncle, were the second-generation owners of a furniture store chain. His father focused on buying, advertising, merchandising and customer service, priorities he handed down to his son.
  
  Bloomberg attended Boston University (B.U.) while working full-time at the Harvard Square branch of Audio Lab, one of the first audio component specialty retailers in the country. After quitting school in his sophomore year, Bloomberg traveled to Europe where he noticed there was greater appreciation for high-end stereo components and a host of high-end specialty retailers. Upon his return to the U.S., Bloomberg and his cousin Michael Bloomberg each put in $5,000, and on Valentine's Day 1972, they opened their first Tweeter store near B.U. in a 1,000-square-foot retail space.
  
  Bloomberg credits the easy, extended terms offered by Japanese manufacturers, most still looking for footholds in the U.S. market, for Tweeter's early success. Merchandise bought on 120-day terms was sold in 30 days, supplying cash to expand the business.
  
  A year-and-a-half later, the pair moved to a larger retail location near B.U., and opened a second store in the audio store crowded Harvard Square. During this post "Sgt. Pepper's" period, when rock musicians started producing more sophisticated work in the studio, nearly all component stores were strategically located near colleges where high-end audio gear was considered not simply a luxury, but a necessity.
  
  Tweeter grew fast thanks to a franchise model, allowing many Tweeter employees to open their own outlets. Many of these stores were located in suburban Massachusetts malls, following the migration of the college demographic as they graduated and started families. As the company continued to grow, Bloomberg wanted more control over merchandising and product mix and began to buy back the franchises.
  
  Bloomberg's product mix focused on exclusive items not offered by other retailers. Tweeter was one of the first area dealers to sell gear from Nakamichi, Yamaha, Boston Acoustics and Bang & Olufsen. In 1976, the stores started selling and installing car stereo, and a few years later, expanded into the new high-end video category.
  
  Tweeter began to earn a reputation for its exclusive products and knowledgeable, well-trained sales team. Prospective employees went through an intensive five-and-a-half-week training program to create a confident, service-oriented sales staff that often won out over big box retailer prices. The store�s slogans stressed Tweeter's mix of exclusive high-end products and expertise: "Audio, video and a boatload of know-how," and "Some hi-fi salesman can sell you anything. The problem is they do."
  Expansion continued in the mid-1980s when Tweeter opened Media Systems, one of the first high-end custom installation showrooms, in Boston. In 1979, Tweeter had six stores in the Boston area. By the end of 1986, there were 13 Tweeter stores in the U.S.
  
  Competition, especially on price, arose from new national retailer chains. On August 16, 1993, soon after the chain reached 20 stores, Bloomberg introduced the first automatic price protection (APP). Tweeter checked the prices listed in all the local electronics' stores newspaper ads. If a customer bought an item and Tweeter found that same item advertised at a lower price within 30 days, the company automatically sent a check to the consumer for the price difference. The program was so innovative, it was reported on in the Wall Street Journal.
  
  The first year APP was available Tweeter sales grew more than 20 percent. Over the course of the program, Tweeter sent out more than 100,000 checks.
  
  In 1996, Tweeter went on a national buying spree, acquiring 10 chains and reaching a peak of more than 150 stores with more than 3,000 employees. However, new and expanding big box retailers began to challenge Tweeter's exclusive merchandise mix and sales staff training and service. On Dec. 2, 2008, the remaining Tweeter stores closed for good.
  
  However, the company's focus on buying, advertising, merchandising and customer service left an indelible mark on the consumer electronics retailing industry. In 1997, Bloomberg received the Entrepreneur of the Year award from the New England chapter of Deloitte Touche.
  
  Bloomberg is now a partner at cabinet home theater speaker maker ZVOX Audio. He and his wife, Carolina, have two children, Joshua and Mikaela.

  
• Lance Braithwaite

  Lance Braithwaite

  Leading Video Technology Journalist

  Lancelot Lawford Braithwaite has likely forgotten more about how video gadgets work than most tech reporters ever knew. Braithwaite transformed himself from an English professor and video engineer into one of the most respected video technology writers of his generation.
  
  Braithwaite was born on November 29, 1936, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, to Ena Delores and Lawton Lawford Braithwaite. His father, a lawyer, civil servant and Conveyancer of Crown Lands, introduced him to electricity by letting him fix hot plates and lamps when he was as young as five-years-old, the same age he received his first camera. His father also influenced his interest in physics, chemistry, biology and technical writing. Braithwaite’s mother — an office manager, teacher and piano instructor — also encouraged his study habits.
  
  

  Braithwaite’s childhood was filled with tinkering. With friends he would rebuild wrecked cars, and he hung around a neighbor’s ham radio shack. He parlayed a fourth-place prize in a photo contest to his first paying job, as a wedding photographer, and at times, funerals — he once photographed a dead woman in her coffin, a job no adult photographer wanted. But not all of his interests were benign. He hurt his eyes and was forced to wear glasses for a few years when an attempt to make fireworks literally blew up in his face.

  Braithwaite enrolled at New York University to study engineering physics, electrical engineering, accounting and finance, eventually earning a Bachelor of Science in what is now Communications Arts from NYU in 1964.

  While at NYU, Braithwaite served as head lighting and sound technician for plays and operas at the school’s Hall of Fame Playhouse, including Hal Holbrook’s first New York presentation of Mark Twain Tonight. He also served as a gaffer for the play, The Fantastiks, as well as for Martin Scorsese’s first film, It’s Not Just You Murray, shot while both were still students at NYU.

  He then spent six months training at RCA Institutes (now TCI) for camera work, technical directing and lighting. Braithwaite soon got a job at WWOR TV and radio in New York. He helped the radio station get back on the air during the great Northeast blackout on November 9, 1965, by jumping the phone lines from the FM transmitter site on the top of the then-powerless Empire State Building to a phone line at the AM transmitter site in New Jersey.

  When looking for a sound system, Braithwaite couldn’t afford good speakers, so he decided to buy the best headphones available instead. Dissatisfied with the available information on headphones, he conducted his own research and comparisons. A friend introduced him to Ivan Berger, an established audio tech writer. Berger saw Braithwaite’s research and suggested that he shouldn’t be reading reviews, but writing them. Berger off-loaded a column to Braithwaite — reviewing hi-fi equipment for FM Guide New York.

  Braithwaite contributed articles to CB World and Popular Electronics magazines while spending the next five years as an assistant professor of English at Penn State University.

  In October 1978, Jay Rosenfield, publisher of Video Magazine, approached Berger to become the magazine’s technical editor. Berger, a respected audio writer asked Braithwaite to be a joint technical editor. The two agreed on a combined byline – Berger-Braithwaite Labs. Their first issue in the spring of 1979 included six joint reviews.

  Berger typed while the two argued in print about their conclusions. Their differing viewpoints — Braithwaite stressing performance, Berger insistent on ease of use — morphed into insightful, thorough reviews that proved to be popular with readers. Braithwaite soon became the industry’s most authoritative and respected video equipment reviewer.

  In 1982, Berger became technical editor of Audio Magazine, but Braithwaite stayed at Video and continued to write under the Berger-Braithwaite Labs byline. After 20 years at Video, the magazine was folded into Sound & Vision and Braithwaite went to work as technical editor for Good Housekeeping’s brandwise.com website in 1999.

  Braithwaite wrote for a number of publications in the succeeding decade, including Sound & Vision, Popular Electronics, Audio Magazine, CB World, Audio/Video International, the New York Post, and Widescreen Review. In addition, he served as a product engineering consultant for Samsung’s QA Labs, as a judge for the EIA/CEG’s (now CEA) Design and Achievement Awards and Audio/Video International’s Video Grand Prix Awards. He also worked on several EIA/CEG video standards committees, including methods for measuring low light performance in camcorders and for measuring DVD players.

  
• Dr. Eli Harari

  Dr. Eli Harari

  SanDisk
  Founder

  Recognizing that new-fangled digital cameras would need “digital film,” in 1988 Dr. Eli Harari co-founded and led SanDisk, helping launch the flash memory revolution to become the global leader in flash memory cards.
  
  Harari was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1945. His parents came to Palestine from Poland in 1933, as Nazism was on the rise in Germany. At age 17, while studying in a boarding school in England, Harari met his future wife, whom he married in 1972.
  Harari put himself through Manchester University in England, graduating with honors with a Bachelor of Science in physics. In 1973, Harari earned a PhD in solid state sciences from Princeton University under a research scholarship from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
  
  The newly-minted young physicist worked on space-borne electronics in early satellites at Hughes Microelectronics. In his spare time, he would check out consumer products, and was soon dabbling in prototypes for new fishing rods and self-illuminating screwdrivers. It was his wife who suggested that he apply his physics expertise to invent new semiconductor memory devices.
  
  From 1973 to 1983, Harari held research and management positions with Hughes, Intel and Honeywell. In 1975 while at Hughes, he invented the industry’s first commercial floating-gate electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM), a precursor to flash.
  
  In 1983, he founded Waferscale Integration, a startup company in Silicon Valley, serving as the company’s president and chief executive officer until 1986 and as chairman and chief technical officer until 1988.
  
  After a dispute with the board over strategy and direction, Harari was forced out of the company he founded. He started working on SunDisk, which later became SanDisk. Soon Harari recruited Sanjay Mehrotra, a former memory chip designer whom he met at Intel, and Jack Yuan, a former Hughes colleague and chip process engineer. The three founded SanDisk in a two-room office in Santa Clara, CA.
  
  Under Harari’s leadership, SanDisk’s small team of engineers invented a revolutionary concept they named “system flash,” which required radically new flash memory chip architecture, tightly coupled to a dedicated controller. This combination overcame flash’s inherent deficiencies and led to the industry’s first flash-based solid state drive (SSD). These smaller, more power-efficient SSDs were able to mimic a standard hard disk drive (HDD) with increased durability.
  
  Armed with funding from venture capitalists, AT&T and Western Digital, SanDisk developed its first 4-megabit flash chips and dedicated controller chips, and then outbid Intel, Texas Instruments and Western Digital to nab IBM as its first customer.
  SanDisk shrunk the technology by inventing multi-level “cell” flash, which allowed more data to be stored on each physical cell. This advancement and other innovations became the foundation for today’s flash memory products, resulting in the price of flash memory to consumers dropping by a factor of 50,000.
  
  Harari believed consumer markets would accelerate once industry-standard card formats were adopted. So SanDisk licensed its unique patents to competitors, and invited industry giants such as Canon, Kodak, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba to participate in developing standard card formats. In addition to CompactFlash and SD cards, SanDisk invented the microSD card, the USB flash drive and embedded memory for the quickly growing mobile phone market.
  
  In 1999, the total flash memory market totaled less than $1 billion. Harari predicted the flash memory market would reach the size of the HDD and DRAM markets within a decade. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, Harari’s prediction is coming to fruition; the total flash memory market approached $25 billion in 2011 while growing at a faster pace than any competing memory technology.
  
  Harari holds nearly 150 U.S. and foreign patents. Along with SanDisk co-founders Mehrotra and Yuan, Harari received the 2006 Reynold B. Johnson Data Storage Device Technology Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In 2008, he received the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award, and in 2009 received the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal recognizing his “leadership in the development and commercialization of flash memory technology.”
  
  When Harari retired as SanDisk CEO and chairman of the board at the end of 2010, SanDisk was an S&P 500 company with 3,330 employees worldwide, revenues of $4.8 billion and the leading company with a 37 percent share of the global flash memory card market, more than twice that of its nearest competitor.
  

  
• Stanley S. Hubbard

  Stanley S. Hubbard

  Hubbard Broadcasting
  Chairman and CEO

  Stanley Hubbard was literally born to be a broadcaster. Taking over a radio empire founded by his father during the dawn of broadcasting, Hubbard formed United States Satellite Broadcasting (USSB) in 1981, becoming one of the first — and most persistent — proponents of direct broadcast satellite.
  
  Ten years before Hubbard was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hubbard’s father, Stanley E. Hubbard, founded WAMD — one of the nation’s first radio stations to rely solely on the sale of advertising for income — which later became the 50,000-watt station KSTP.
  
  Growing up, the young Hubbard was interested in electronics, especially portable radios, ship-to-shore radios, monitoring short wave broadcasts, and television. Hubbard was naturally fascinated by his father’s pioneering TV efforts — he bought the first RCA television camera ever sold and, in the summer of 1938, he held the first demonstration of television in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. A decade later, the senior Hubbard established KSTP-TV, the upper Midwest’s first commercial television station and today’s only locally owned and operated broadcasting company in the Twin Cities.
  
  After his graduation from the Breck Military School in 1951, Hubbard officially became an employee of KSTP-TV, starting in the station’s telephoto department. He worked his way through the ranks while earning a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Minnesota. Soon after graduating in 1955, Hubbard became KSTP’s vice president.
  
  In 1967 Hubbard became president of Hubbard Broadcasting. A year later, the company built WTOG-TV, Channel 44, in St. Petersburg, Florida, arguably the first successful UHF independent station to operate in a VHF market.
  
  In 1981, Hubbard started USSB (United States Satellite Broadcasting Company) to create a new satellite TV business. Three years later, after Hubbard was named Hubbard Broadcasting chairman and CEO, the company built and proved the feasibility of the first satellite news gathering vehicles, the design of which would become standard. The first unit, Model GT/AC, is on display at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C.
  
  In 1987, Hubbard and his son, Stanley E. Hubbard II, and Ray Conover, as chief engineer, established the first satellite news gathering company, Conus Communications, and became the first broadcaster to own a Ku-band transponder. At its height, Conus serviced more than 150 television stations around the world.
  
  In 1991, USSB, in partnership with Hughes Aircraft, launched the first high powered direct broadcast satellite.  Three years later, both USSB and DirecTV initiated the first direct-to-consumer satellite TV broadcasting and started competing with cable for customers.
  
  Within a year, satellite TV had more than half a million subscribers, while USSB had about 300,000 subscribers. In 1996, USSB earned $224.1 million in its initial public offering. In January 1999, DirecTV and USSB merged in a deal reportedly worth $1.3 billion.
  
  In recognition of his contributions to both broadcasting and his pioneering effort in the satellite TV business, Hubbard and his late father were given the Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of Broadcasters in 1995.
  
  While running both Hubbard Broadcasting and USSB, Hubbard served on the FCC’s Blue Ribbon Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service to develop HDTV, and on the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, which helped develop policies and plans for America’s new information and telecommunications infrastructure.
  
  Hubbard was an inductee in Broadcasting & Cable magazine’s first Hall of Fame in 1991, the Society of Satellite Professionals International Hall of Fame in 1992, a recipient of the SBCA’s Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994, and the Dealerscope Hall of Fame in 1996. He married Karen Elizabeth Holmen in 1959, and has five children. Of Hubbard’s 15 grandchildren, the three oldest are already active in Hubbard Broadcasting, carrying on the family legacy.
  

  
• Dr. Fujio Masuoka

  Dr. Fujio Masuoka

  Inventor, Flash Memory

  Each time you slide a flash memory card into a digital camera, or a thumb drive into a USB jack, sync your music to a digital music player, or store data on a tablet PC, thank Dr. Fujio Masuoka, who invented flash memory.
  
  Masuoka was born May 8, 1943, in Takasaki City, Gunma, Japan. When he was 10, his mother encouraged him to study mathematics and hired a private teacher. By the time he was 12, Masuoka had mastered advanced mathematics. In high school, Masuoka concentrated on theory, believing that advances in technology or electronics were achieved only through theoretical work. As a result of his studies, Masuoka also developed a deep understanding of economics and law.
  
  He received his Bachelor of Science, Masters of Science and PhD in electrical engineering from Tohoku University in 1966, 1968 and 1971, respectively. Soon after graduating, Masuoka joined Toshiba Research and Development Center in April 1971.
  
  Three months into his new job, Masuoka’s boss, Dr. Yoshiyuki Takeishi, showed Masuoka Intel’s Ultraviolet Erasable Electrically Programmable Read Only Memory (UV EEPROM), which was announced a few months earlier. Masuoka studied the Intel technology for two months and discovered a new structure, a stacked gate avalanche injection type MOS read-only memory (SAMOS), which became Masuoka’s first patent in 1972.
  
  Between 1972 and 1984, Masuoka made other significant memory breakthroughs, pairing a dynamic memory cell with a double poly-silicon structure. In 1977, he moved to Toshiba’s semiconductor division, where he developed 1 Mbit DRAM.
  
  Masuoka later transitioned to Toshiba’s memory product engineering division in 1980 to begin his work on developing flash memory. He then shifted to Toshiba’s memory design engineering division in 1984, where he perfected and patented NOR flash memory. He presented his findings at the International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco. A year later, he progressed to 256 Kbit flash memory.
  
  In April 1987, Masuoka returned to the Toshiba research and development center, where he began to successfully develop more advanced NAND-type flash memory. Despite his breakthroughs, flash was not yet ready for commercialization. What slowed Masuoka down was not technology, but money.
  
  In order to create and manufacture a commercial pre-fabricated 4 Mbit flash memory chip, Masuoka needed to develop a mask to serve as a high-tech stencil to project the various circuit patterns on each layer of a microprocessor. But the cost estimate to create a mask was 10 million yen, which Toshiba was initially unwilling to invest. Masuoka convinced Toshiba’s consumer electronics research executives that a 4 Mbit flash memory chip could be used to create a consumer-ready digital camera with the flash memory serving as “digital film.” With funding from the consumer electronics division, Masuoka continued his development and presented the 4 Mbit NAND-type flash memory at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in New York City in 1989.
  
  In 1994, Masuoka joined Tohoku University where he was a professor for 13 years before being appointed Professor Emeritus of the university’s Research Institute of Electrical Communication.
  
  For his pioneering work on flash memory, Masuoka has been presented with numerous honors and awards in Japan including the inaugural Watanabe Prize in 1977 and the National Invention Award in 1980. In 2007, Masuoka was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon from Emperor Akihito.
  

  
• Dr. Robert Metcalfe

  Dr. Robert Metcalfe

  3Com
  Founder & Inventor of Ethernet

  It looks like an oversized phone jack, but the now-familiar Ethernet jack and the computers and Internet network that it links us to, was the creation of Bob Metcalfe.
  
  A native New Yorker, Metcalfe was born on April 7, 1946, to Robert I. Metcalfe, an aerospace technician, and Ruth, a high school secretary. His father helped him build model trains in their basement and, while in the fourth grade, presciently wrote that his son would one day earn a degree in electrical engineering from MIT.
  
  For his eighth grade science project, Metcalfe cannibalized switches, relays and neon lights from his model trains and built a neo-computer that could add any number between one and three to any number between one and three to yield their sum between two and six, for which he received a memorable “A+++ H Superior.”
  
  Metcalfe’s father co-founded BAM Electronics, which repaired televisions. Metcalfe senior arrived home one day to find his son unconscious in the basement among some of his broken TVs. The youngster had reached inside the back of a set and grabbed the high-voltage cable leading into the cathode ray tube (CRT). After that, Metcalfe stuck to voltages below 5V.
  
  Metcalfe did indeed attend MIT. As an undergraduate, he worked for Raytheon, programming submarine target computers and design automation for the Air Force’s Cambridge Research Lab. He earned his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1969, along with a B.S. in industrial management.
  
  Metcalfe transitioned to Harvard for his post-graduate degrees. When the university refused to let him connect the school’s computers to the brand new network created by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), he joined MIT’s Project MAC to help engineer ARPANET hardware and software, and link MIT’s computers to the fledgling Internet.
  
  He earned his master’s in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1970 and his PhD about packet communication and ARPANET in 1973.
  
  While working toward his PhD, Metcalfe went to work for ARPA at MIT. Metcalfe then moved west to work at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where many of today’s familiar computer technologies such as the graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse were created.
  
  On May 22, 1973, Metcalfe circulated “Alto Ethernet” memo, which included a rough schematic of how a new local network would work, recognizing antecedents such as the Alohanet at the University of Hawaii.
  
  On November 11, the co-inventors of Ethernet — Metcalfe along with David R. Boggs — successfully demonstrated the first Ethernet system. They went on to connect the far-flung offices of Xerox Corp. In 1979, Metcalfe founded 3Com Corp, short for “computer, communication and compatibility,” to develop standard hardware and software products for the Internet, based on three proposed standards: Ethernet, TCP/IP, and Unix. 3Com went public in 1984 and Metcalfe retired in 1990.
  
  Metcalfe spent the next decade as a publisher and pundit. He served as CEO of IDG’s InfoWorld Publishing Company from 1992 to 1995, and as IDG’s vice president of technology from 1995 to 2000. For eight years, he wrote a syndicated Internet column for InfoWorld. He spoke at conferences, on radio and television, hosted a weekly webcast, and was executive producer of industry events including ACM97, ACM1, Agenda, PopTech and Vortex. He also authored several books including Packet Communication, Internet Collapses and Beyond Calculation.
  
  Metcalfe collected numerous honorary degrees, honors and tributes from the computer industry, beginning with the Association for Computing Machinery Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1980. In 1988, he received the IEEE Bell Medal and later earned the IEEE’s Medal of Honor. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997, and, in 1999, to the International Engineering Consortium. In 2003, Metcalfe received the Marconi Prize, and in 2005, he received the National Medal of Technology from President Bush. Metcalfe was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007 and Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows in 2008.
  
  In 2001, Metcalfe became a venture capitalist at Polaris Venture Partners, serving on the boards of a number of Polaris-backed start-ups and as a director-trustee-advisor to Avistar Communications, USC Stevens and MIT. He also worked with MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, Department of Chemistry, Department of Mathematics and Deans of Engineering and Science.
  
  In January 2011, Metcalfe joined The University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering, where he is now Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise.
  

  
• Sam Runco

  Sam Runco

  Runco International
  Founder

  Sam Runco’s name is literally synonymous with home theater — he actually trademarked the term in California, and his namesake company, Runco International, became the most innovative and highly respected projection television makers in the world.
  
  Born into a coal mining family in Scranton, Penn., Runco devoured monthly issues of Popular Mechanics, Mechanics Illustrated andPopular Science, and spent his spare time tinkering. He even built a number of models of the futuristic products featured in these magazines.
  
  Runco also was greatly influenced by Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, especially by Carnegie’s belief that developing the ability to speak in front of people was a shortcut to distinction.
  
  Runco never made it to college. Instead, in his early twenties, he took a job with a motivational training company. Runco traveled around the country to Michigan, Seattle, and then to San Francisco, where he ended up in the walk-in cooler business.
  
  He soon discovered he not only had technical aptitudes, but also could cogently explain the technical aspects of products, a combination of skills that soon came in handy. At age 22, Runco was fiddling with a Fresnel lens in front of a 13-inch television, and was able to project a faint six-foot picture onto a sheet pinned to the wall. He was hooked. Runco continued to refine his big-screen concept until he achieved what he felt was “a good picture.”
  
  Runco began to make and sell projection television kits to local bars and via mail order. By the late 1980s, as the home theater concept gained traction, Runco was well ahead of the curve. He and his wife, Lori, formed his eponymous company in 1986; two years later, the company received a California trademark on the phrase “home theater.”
  
  Working from their garage in Foster City, CA, Sam and Lori shipped projectors one at a time until they could ship two. In the next few years, as the company grew, Runco made two technical innovations that gained Runco an almost cult following in the exploding home theater scene.
  
  In 1991, he introduced the first projector with a built-in line doubler, the Super IDTV (improved definition television) system, which consisted of the IDP-800 projector mated to the SC-1050 line doubler. Then Runco hit upon what would become both a legendary product and an enduring concept: the ARC-IV aspect-ratio controller, which allowed users to switch from standard television’s 4:3 aspect ratio, to the theatrical formats of 2.35:1, 1.85:1 and to the anamorphic widescreen ratio of 16:9, which became the HDTV format. This allowed Runco International to deliver HDTV-capable products seven years prior to the adoption of HDTV.
  
  In 1997, Runco improved the successor to the Super IDTV by designing and building the high-definition DTV-852, the first CRT projector with a built-in line doubler. He also developed the first nine-inch cathode-ray tubes in a consumer projector, the first corner convergence controls, and the first application of digital light processing (DLP) for home theater.
  
  Runco also has been very active in promoting the interests of the CE industry. He served on CEA’s Board of Industry Leaders from 2003 to 2008 and was a member of the CEA Video Division. He served as a director of Focus Enhancements Inc. from August 2004 to September 2008.
  
  By the time he sold his company to Planar in 2007 for $36.7 million, Runco International recorded net annual sales of $54.6 million.
  
  Runco and his wife still live in the San Francisco bay area, and have three children, Sarah, Sammy and Nick.
  

  
• Dr. Claude Shannon

  Dr. Claude Shannon

  Inventor, Digital Data Communications

  Who would have thought that a series of 1s and 0s could be used to create and transmit words, pictures or video? Claude Shannon did. His 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” created the foundation for the entire digital data communications revolution and is considered the Magna Carta of the information age.
  
  Claude Elwood Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan, on April 30, 1916. As a boy, Shannon excelled at science and mathematics. At home, he constructed model planes, a radio-controlled model boat and a telegraph system to a friend’s house half a mile away ingeniously using two barbed wires around a nearby pasture. He earned spending money from a paper route and from delivering telegrams, as well as from repairing radios for a local department store. His childhood hero was Thomas Edison, who he later learned was a distant cousin.
  
  After earning Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1936, Shannon became a research assistant in MIT’s electrical engineering department. There he was one of four assistants who operated the Bush differential analyzer, the era’s most advanced calculating machine.
  
  While studying how the analyzer operated, Shannon became interested in the theory and design, and determined that symbolic logic and Boolean algebra could be used in the analysis and synthesis of switching and computer circuits. He further developed these theories during the summer of 1937 at Bell Labs in New York City, and while writing his master’s thesis at MIT.
  
  Shannon’s thesis was awarded the Alfred Noble Prize of the combined engineering societies of the United States in 1940, and was later called “one of the most important master’s theses ever written – a landmark in that it helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science.”
  
  In September 1938, at the suggestion of the eminent electrical engineer Vannevar Bush, who later organized the Manhattan Project, Shannon switched from MIT’s electrical engineering department to the mathematics department. He spent the summer of 1939 at the Carnegie Institute’s Cold Spring Harbor branch working on his doctoral dissertation, “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics.” In the spring of 1940, Shannon received a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering and his PhD in mathematics.
  
  On a National Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton the following academic year, Shannon began to work on his ideas relating to information theory and efficient communication systems.
  
  With America’s entry into World War II, Shannon returned to Bell Labs and joined a team working on anti-aircraft directors. During the next 15 years at Bell Labs, Shannon worked in many areas, most notably in information theory. In 1948, he published his first foundational treatise on information theory, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which demonstrated that all information sources — including telegraph keys, people speaking, and television cameras — have an associated “source rate” that can be measured in bits per second.
  
  “Few other works of this century have had greater impact on science and engineering,” it was later noted. “By this landmark paper and his several subsequent papers on information theory he has altered most profoundly all aspects of communication theory and practice.”
  
  Shannon published other foundational work and papers including a paper on cryptography which led to his appointment as a consultant on cryptographic matters to the U.S. government.
  
  While at Bell Labs, Shannon met Mary Elizabeth (Betty) Moore, whom he married in 1949. She combined her interests in hand weaving and computing to pioneer work in computer-controlled looms in the 1960s.
  
  Shannon became a permanent member of the MIT faculty and also continued his affiliation with Bell Telephone Laboratories until July 1972. He received a host of honorary degrees, fellowships and scientific awards including the National Medal of Science from President Johnson in 1966. He was also a member of the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the board of directors of Teledyne, Inc.
  
  Shannon’s seminal work, equated with Einstein’s, was far ahead of its time. It was not until the early 1970s and the advent of high-speed integrated circuits did engineers begin fully to exploit Shannon’s work. His insights help shape virtually all systems that store, process or transmit information in digital form, from CDs to computers, in every field of communications, commerce, art and science.
  

  
• Dr. Andrew Viterbi

  Dr. Andrew Viterbi

  Qualcomm
  Co-Founder

  Andrew Viterbi’s eponymous algorithm for signal interference suppression made a major impression on digital cellular and satellite technology, and has helped to give us crystal clear cell phone calls and satellite television images.
  
  Born in Bergamo, Italy, on March 9, 1935, Viterbi’s family fled the Fascist regime to escape the persecution of Jews in 1939. The Viterbi’s settled first in New York City, and then moved to Boston where Viterbi attended the renowned Boston Latin School.
  
  Long absences from family members back in Italy instilled the young Viterbi with a desire to find ways of communicating across political and geographical borders. By the time he went to college, Viterbi knew he wanted to become an engineer, influenced by the proximity of his home to MIT.
  
  He earned a scholarship to MIT in 1952, where he was introduced to statistical communications theory. There he encounterd many renowned scholars, including CEA’s 2011 Hall of Fame inductee Claude Shannon. In 1956, he met and married Erna Finci; a year later, he graduated from MIT with both Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees.
  
  Three months after Viterbi joined the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Russian satellite Sputnik was launched. JPL got a contract from the Army to put up a small satellite. Viterbi was a junior member of the team that provided telemetry for the first successful U.S. satellite program, Explorer I. Viterbi specialized in “spread spectrum” as a way to quickly and accurately process and transmit information packets, overcoming the satellite’s weak signal and frequency changes created by rapid orbits. He was one of the first scientists to propose digital transmission techniques for satellite telecommunications.
  
  While working at JPL in 1962, Viterbi earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California. A year later he began teaching courses in digital communications and information theory at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. There he created an algorithm, now known as the Viterbi Algorithm, which he described as a quick method of eliminating dead ends in the communication stream.
  
  There was only one problem. At the time, only a handful of computers in the world could perform the millions of operations required by the revolutionary algorithm. Since there seemed to be no practical application for the Viterbi Algorithm at the time, Viterbi chose not to patent it.
  
  Soon after publishing his algorithm, Viterbi met 2009 CEA Hall of Fame inductee Dr. Irwin Jacobs at a telecommunications conference in California. Together with Viterbi’s colleague Leonard Kleinrock, the three men formed the consulting group Linkabit.
  
  Linkabit supplied software for government computers, and introduced many innovative products including the first commercial Ku-band Very Small Aperture Earth Terminal (VSAT), early commercial TDMA wireless phones and the VideoCipher satellite-to-home TV system. Viterbi served as executive vice president and later as president of the company.
  After Linkabit was sold to M/A-Com, Inc., in 1985, Jacobs, Viterbi and five former Linkabit employees decided to build a “QUALity COMMunications” company. Viterbi and his Qualcomm colleagues devised a new digital transmission technology for cellular phones — Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) — which provided simultaneous access to a multitude of users with less interference and greater security for voice and data. By 2000, there were more than 50 million CDMA-supported cell phones in the world and by 2010 all Third Generation phones employed the technology.
  
  Viterbi served as the company’s chief technical officer until 1996, and as vice chairman until March 2000.
  
  From 1997 until 2001, Viterbi served on the U.S. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee. Since 1983, Viterbi has been active on the MIT Visiting Committees of the School of Engineering. In 2004, he was named to the President’s Chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering Systems at USC.
  
  Viterbi has received numerous awards and honorary degrees for his leadership and substantial contributions to communications theory and its industrial applications. Among these were the 2007 Medal of Science from the U.S. President and the 2010 Medal of Honor from the IEEE.
  

  

2010 Inductees

• Dr. Lauren Christopher

  Dr. Lauren Christopher

  Led development of the first digital satellite receiver

  Dr. Lauren Christopher managed a team of engineers that created the digital satellite receiver system for DirecTV, making a reality of a new alternative for television distribution.
   

  Dr. Christopher attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she received her B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering, specializing in signal processing and chip design. While still a student, Dr. Christopher’s involvement in a co-op program led her to RCA’s David Sarnoff Research Center, where she worked on television digital integrated circuits. Following her graduation, she returned to RCA, beginning her career conducting research for the company and participating in the digital television standards development.
  
  From 1987 until 1992, she was involved in two subcommittees of the ATSC, working on the digital TV standards-setting process. In 1990, following Thomson’s acquisition of the RCA consumer electronics division, Dr. Christopher moved to Indianapolis to work with the company on satellite receiver design.
  
  In 1991, Thomson won the DirecTV project with Hughes Electronics thanks in part to Dr. Christopher’s efforts. She assumed the role of manager and receiver systems engineer, leading 30 talented engineers to develop the receiver design for the satellite-based television system. After design was completed and tested, the system launched in 1994. Dr. Christopher and her team designed and tested this first of its kind system so thoroughly that there were no software updates needed for more than two years. Ten years after launch, there were still some first generation systems working in the field.
  
  Following her success at Thomson, Dr. Christopher returned to school and received her PhD from Purdue University in 2003, developing image segmentation techniques in 3D medical ultrasound images to automatically detect cancer. She has worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) since 2008, teaching courses on signals and systems, circuits and advanced digital systems design. She is a member of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society and the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
  
  With an interest in the future of 3D imaging and displays, Dr. Christopher has focused her continued research on 3D, including continuing 3D imaging research for medical purposes which was the focus of her doctoral thesis. As a mentor and teacher, she has developed a new course on 3D image processing for the spring 2011 semester. She is a founding member of the IUPUI nano-systems initiative which was awarded a teaching grant by NSF for developing undergraduate courses in nano-systems. She also has an active interest in entrepreneurship education for electrical engineering students.
  

  
• Joe and Rachelle Friedman

  Joe and Rachelle Friedman

  J&R Music and Computer World
  Co-founders

  Joe and Rachelle Friedman were both very young when their families immigrated to Brooklyn, New York. Rachelle entered Polytechnic Institute of New York the first year that female students were admitted, setting the stage for her entry into the male-dominated consumer electronics and home entertainment businesses. The school was in Brooklyn, one subway stop away from the location of J&R’s initial store at 33 Park Row. It was a short walk away from where Joe worked as an electrical engineer at Western Electric.

   
  Together, they founded J&R. Though much of the technology it started out selling is now obsolete, J&R has remained an icon of retailing for 40 years, attracting customers from the New York metropolitan area and around the world. The J&R stores now occupy and entire block on Park Row in Lower Manhattan across the street from City Hall Park. Under Rachelle and Joe’s leadership, J&R has expanded from a 500 square foot store into the largest single-location electronics, computer and home entertainment megastore in the country occupying over 300,000 square feet of selling space. JR.com, J&R’s award-winning website enables customers from all over the world to enjoy the unique J&R shopping experience in the comfort of their homes or offices. There is also a location in midtown Manhattan, J&R Express, in Macy’s Herald Square showcasing the best and latest in technology and entertainment.
  
  J&R is an authorized dealer for just about everything it carries and maintains an exceptional level of customer service with a staff of dedicated and knowledgeable sales associates. On top of this J&R holds a special place in the hearts of New Yorkers as a symbol of resiliency and a major player in the revitalization of lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11. The lower Manhattan stores were shuttered for six weeks following the events of 9/11 and when they reopened, it led the way for other companies to do the same and J&R’s loyal customers started coming back to Lower Manhattan to shop.
  
  J&R’s importance to the community has been recognized by the many civic and business organizations who have invited the company to sit on their boards: the Better Business Bureau of Greater New York, NYC&Co (the official New York City tourism bureau), the Downtown Alliance of New York and the Regional Advisory Board of JPMorgan Chase. J&R was recently named the “Photo Dealer Retailer of the Year” and was also elected to the Dealerscope Hall of Fame.
  
  Rachelle was recently inducted into the Women in Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame at the 2010 International CES show. She is currently serving (for an unprecedented third time) as chair of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers and has twice served on the Host Committee of the Grammy Awards. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and has recently been appointed to the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. The National Foundation for Women Business owners has acknowledged Rachelle as one of the “Top 50 Women Entrepreneurs in the World” and Crain’s New York Business has listed J&R as one of the largest women-owned companies in New York and has named her one of New York’s 100 Most Influential Women in Business. She has appeared on Working Women Magazine’s listing of the top 50 Women Business Owners since 1994.
  
  Rachelle was a recipient of the 2001 “Touchstone Award” presented by Women in Music Inc., and the Michael Award’s 2002 “Person of the Year.” She was also one of United Cerebral Palsy of New York’s “Women Who Care” honorees and was honored by the Guardian Angels as their “Role Model of the Year.”
  
  Rachelle and Joe have been long-time and generous friends to many charities. In addition, they have always found ways to give back to J&R’s customers with events such as the annual series of free concerts in City Hall Park. They take great pride in the 25 Mayoral Proclamations received over the years, each one officially designating the series of concerts as “J&R Week.”
  

  
• Richard Kraft

  Richard Kraft

  Panasonic Corp. of North America
  First U.S. President and COO

  Richard Kraft A forty-five-year-plus veteran of the consumer electronics industry, Richard Kraft helped usher in the era of high-definition television in the U.S., and led the way in encouraging local manufacturing and R&D investment in North America by Asian electronics companies. A gifted technologist and communicator, Kraft rose to become the first U.S. president and chief operation officer of Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal North American subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation (NYSE: PC).
  
  Raised in Chicago, Kraft graduated from Purdue University with a degree in electrical engineering and began his consumer electronics career with Arvin Industries where he developed radio circuits. Within a few years, he had moved on to Motorola where he designed television receivers first and then moved into engineering management. In 1967, his engineering team completed development of the Quasar “Works-In-A-Drawer” TV, initiating the industry’s transition from vacuum tube to solid-state technology.
  
  In 1972 Kraft became vice president of color TV engineering for Motorola’s Quasar Electronics operations. By the time Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (now Panasonic Corporation) acquired Motorola’s consumer products division in 1974, he had been promoted to vice president of consumer product engineering. He stayed on with the division and led it through its transition into a successful local Panasonic manufacturing subsidiary.
  
  Under Kraft’s leadership, Panasonic expanded its North American manufacturing and R&D operations, especially in digital TV and cable, revitalizing the company and positioning it for HDTV leadership. He was a tireless promoter of the industry and its contributions to the U.S. economy and strongly advocated the importance of engineering education. Under his leadership, the company rapidly expanded investment in maquiladora manufacturing operations in Northern Mexico to help maintain stable local production operations and contribute to the development and creation of employment opportunities.
  
  Purdue University first awarded Kraft its Outstanding Engineer status and then, in 1990, conferred on him a Doctor of Engineer degree.
  
  In 1997, Kraft retired from his position as president and COO at Panasonic, becoming an executive advisor to the Osaka, Japan-based parent company. A member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, he holds 13 U.S. patents for television electronics. For relaxation he enjoys travel, family and community involvement.
  

  
• Frank McCann

  Frank McCann

  Conducted HDTV public relations compaigns for ATSC and the Grand Alliance

  Frank McCann Every day, millions of Americans enjoy the benefits of digital, as well as high-definition television. The current Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) broadcast standards that provide these benefits came to be thanks in part to the tireless efforts of Frank McCann and the HDTV Grand Alliance consortium.
  
  Previously a reporter for Fairchild Publications covering the furniture industry, McCann joined RCA in 1960, where he made the transition to public affairs. McCann held a number of positions at RCA, eventually assuming the role of vice president of public affairs. He remained with the company when it was sold to GE, then later to Thomson.
  
  In 1987, the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS) was formed. McCann conducted HDTV-focused public relations activities for a consortium of broadcasters and manufacturers including NBC, Philips, Thomson and Zenith. During this testing period, a number of high-definition broadcast systems were proposed, all with certain advantages. It was decided that the Grand Alliance would be formed to combine the advantages of each system. When the Grand Alliance officially formed in 1993, McCann continued to lead the consortium’s public relations efforts.
  
  After much testing and tweaking, ATSC Standard A/53, which incorporated the Grand Alliance system, was published in 1995. One year later, the standard was adopted with minimal changes by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). McCann and the Grand Alliance received a Technical Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 1997 for their work towards the DTV standard.
  
  His work on the ATSC standard complete, McCann retired from Thomson in 1999 and formed his own public relations firm Frank McCann & Associates. The firm’s clients included consumer electronics companies such as Sirius Satellite Radio and McCann’s former company, Thomson. In addition, one of the main clients for F McCann & Associates was the International Recording Media Association (IRMA). IRMA is now called the Content Delivery & Storage Association (CDSA).
  
  McCann passed away in 2004 and is survived by his wife Anna and their four children Jill McKenzie (Suwanee, GA), Lisa Nelson (Stafford, VA), Megan Kelleher (Park Ridge, IL) and Brian McCann (Indianapolis, IN) as well as ten grandchildren. CEA previously recognized McCann’s outstanding achievements in bringing high-definition television to consumers in 2007, honoring him as part of the DTV Academy.
  

  
• David and Eugene Mondry

  David and Eugene Mondry

  Highland Superstores
  Led Midwest-based Highland Superstores through a period of unprecedented prosperity.

  David and Eugene Mondry Highland Superstores, founded in 1933 by Harry Mondry, was long a landmark on the consumer electronics retailing landscape. David and Eugene Mondry, Harry’s sons, led the Midwest-based consumer electronics chain through the period of its greatest prosperity — the 1970s and 80s. Many of Highland’s strategies for improving the customer’s retail experience have been mimicked, even to this day, including the development of audio rooms and in-store car installation.
  
  The first Highland store was opened in the Highland Park section of Detroit in 1933 by Harry Mondry. After World War II, Highland prospered by offering customers discounted prices on home appliances including dishwashers and laundry machines, while insisting on offering a broad selection of merchandise. Highland slowly expanded from its one-store presence in 1951 to 18 stores by the end of the 1970s.
  
  Neither David nor Eugene had a formal business education, but that didn’t prevent them from guiding Highland through a period of unprecedented prosperity as sales reached nearly $1 billion. This prosperity was driven by the Mondrys’ understanding of the demand for such products as color televisions, stereos, microwave ovens and later, the videocassette recorder (VCR). Highland capitalized on the popularity of the VCR, realizing that the new technology had the potential to fuel sales of additional devices such as new TVs and audio equipment.
  
  Highland was best known for its creative and highly entertaining television and radio ads, which won several Clio advertising awards. Additionally, Highland remained on the cutting-edge of management by installing computer systems to better handle store inventory, minimizing holding costs while maintaining enough stock for increased demand.
  
  Eugene Mondry served as president of the chain while David served as Highland’s chairman. By 1983, Highland had 25 stores and was still growing. Continuing in the family tradition, David and Eugene’s sons also came to work at Highland. David’s son Ira served as chief operating officer and Eugene’s son, Mitchell, took on the role of vice president of stores and customer service, and Josh worked in store operations. At the peak of its prosperity, Highland had 92 locations and reached sales of $910.8 million in 1988.
  
  By the early nineties, increased competition and the lack of new hot products began to take a toll on Highland Superstores. In 1991, Highland trimmed management and closed 32 of its locations in order to avoid bankruptcy. Highland left a strong legacy as one of the earliest appliance store discounters.
  
  David Mondry passed away in 1997, and Eugene in May of 2008.
  

  
• Frederik Philips

  Frederik Philips

  Philips
  President

  Frederik Philips Frederik Jacques Philips was born in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in 1905 to Anton Philips and Anne Henriette Elisabeth Maria de Jongh. Frederik Philips’ father, Anton was responsible for the tremendous growth of the Philips company — originally started as a lightbulb factory by Frederik’s uncle, Gerard Philips, in 1891. Frederik studied at the Delft University of Technology in South Holland from 1923 until 1929, earning a degree in mechanical engineering. In his second year at Delft University, Philips met Sylvia van Lennep, whom he married in 1929. Frederik and Sylvia had seven children.
  
  Joining the Philips company in 1930, Frederik became vice-director and member of the board at Philips in 1935. During the Second World War, in 1940 when Germany occupied the Netherlands, Frederik stayed behind when many of the company’s senior managers left for the United States. Nazi occupiers pressured Philips to open a factory inside the concentration camp at the town of Vught in 1943. However, due to a strike at another Philips factory, Philips was imprisoned at the Vught concentration camp from May 30 until September 30, 1942. By insisting that they were indispensable to the production process, Philips saved the lives of 382 Jewish workers. In 1996, Israel awarded him the Yad Vashem reward, given to non-jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
  
  After the war, Frederik stayed with the company and in 1961, he was made president. Making no distinction between factory workers and members of the board, Frederik was beloved by the city of Eindhoven, and was commonly known as “Meneer Frits” (Mister Frits). Mister Frits helped build houses for employees, in addition to sports clubs and cultural institutions. In 1966, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Philips company, he gave the city of Eindhoven the ‘Evoluon’. the Evoluon, a building based on a sketch Frits made on a napkin, was an educational center for science and technology.
  
  Frederik remained president of Philips until 1971. During the ten years he led the company, revenue tripled and the workforce grew from 226,000 to 367,000 employees. Philips launched television factories in Asia and Latin America, and entered into a partnership with Osaka, Japan-based Matsushita, manufacturing cathode-ray tubes.
  
  In 1971, the same year Frits was succeeded as president by Henk van Riemsdijk, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) announced the IEEE Frederik Philips Award, to be awarded for “outstanding accomplishments in the management of research and development resulting in effective innovation in the electrical and electronics industry.”
  
  A strong supporter of Eindhoven’s soccer team, Philips Sport Vereniging (PSV), Mr. Frits rarely missed a game, including those that took place after his 100th birthday — which was celebrated by all of Eindhoven, and attended by the Dutch Prime Minister. He was known to always sit in the crowd, rather than in the stadium’s business lounge.
  
  Frederik “Frits” Philips passed away in December of 2005 at the age of 100. Prior to PSV’s match that evening, supporters paid tribute to Mr. Frits with a minute of silence, and the team wore black armbands to mourn Eindhoven’s loss.
  

  
• Al Sotoloff

  Al Sotoloff

  Silo Appliance City
  Executive Vice President

  Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1931, Al Sotoloff’s experience with photography and the consumer electronics industry helped fuel Silo Appliance City’s existence as one of the first big-box electronics chains.
  
  Sotoloff was working for Snellenburger’s department store in Philadelphia when he met his wife, Laurette, in 1954. Laurette’s uncle, who owned Service Photo, saw potential in Sotoloff and recruited him as a sales associate for the Philadelphia area. Working as a sales representative for Service Photo, and later Arel Inc. gave Sotoloff the experience he needed to open the photo department for the Silo Appliance City electronics retailing chain.
  
  Sotoloff joined Silo in 1962, and became a photo equipment and appliance buyer. He moved up to major appliance buyer, then to vice president, eventually becoming executive vice president at Silo. Sotoloff handled buying for all members of the NATM Buying Corp., a national buying co-op for the appliance and electronics industries. Sotoloff remained at Silo for 20 years before retiring in 1982.
  
  After retiring from Silo, Sotoloff, along with Stuart Rose purchased the bankrupt chain of Kelley and Cohen Appliance Inc. After he took over, the Kelley and Cohen chain became profitable in just two months. Two years later, Rose and Sotoloff merged Kelley and Cohen Appliance Inc. with Stuart’s Rex Radio & TV and TV & Stereo Town stores. The new company went public under the name of Audio/Video Affiliates Inc. and Sotoloff served as president of the company until his retirement in 1990.
  
  Sotoloff passed away in September of 2009. He is survived by his wife Laurette, his three children Steven, Debra and Brad, six grandchildren and one great grandchild.
  

  
• Cynthia Upson

  Cynthia Upson

  CEA
  Vice President of CEA’s Communications Department from 1991 to 1998

  Cynthia Upson defined an era at the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), and ushered a number of promising new technologies into the CE industry. Her passion and her laughter will forever be a part of the association’s achievements and history.
  
  Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Upson earned her bachelor’s of communications from D.C.’s American University, graduating in 1985. She joined CEA’s communications department after graduation in 1985, and worked to promote the CE industry as well as the industry’s tradeshow, the International CES. Upson was named vice president of the department in 1991. Under her leadership, the International CES became an indispensable event for media and industry alike. During her time at CEA, a number of landmark technologies debuted, and Upson helped the industry promote them.
  
  Upson guided a number of award-winning public relations campaigns including V-chip technology for parental controls on televisions, portable audio and mobile technologies, as well as home theater. Americans became familiar with the idea of a home theater thanks in part to public relations efforts led by Upson. In addition to home theater, Upson was heavily involved in the decade-long effort to make digital television (DTV) a reality. She also was a founding member of the Academy of Digital Television Pioneers.
  
  Upson moved to Richmond in 1998 when her husband, Donald W. Upson, was named Virginia’s first secretary of technology, but she remained on as a consultant to CEA. In addition to CEA, Upson lent her public relations talents to a number of charitable causes and political organizations such as the Lung Cancer Alliance, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
  
  In 2006, CEA formally recognized Upson’s achievements in bringing DTV to the nation when she was awarded the DTV Academy Award for Outstanding Service. Upson passed away in 2007 after a battle with lung cancer.
  
  Upson had hundreds of industry friends and admirers. She was known inside and outside the association as exceptionally competent, a phenomenal project manager and a seasoned diplomat who could navigate among those with opposing views. She was the rare industry leader truly beloved by all.
  

  
• Dr. Larry Weber

  Dr. Larry Weber

  Plasmaco
  Founder

  A recognized leader in the display community, Dr. Larry Weber can be thanked for bringing a number of plasma display technologies to the CE industry. In 1967 Dr. Weber first met Donald Bitzer and Gene Slottow, the engineers credited with the 1964 invention of the plasma display technology. Weber studied under Drs. Bitzer and Slottow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he received his B.S., M.S. and PhD degrees in electrical engineering. After graduation, Weber stayed on at the University of Illinois as an associate professor and directed the Plasma Display Research Group.
  
  Dr. Weber had long focused on the power consumption of plasma displays, a motivation that led him to create the energy recovery sustain circuit, cutting power consumption by as much as half. Dr. Weber was a founder of Plasmaco in 1987 and served as senior vice president and chief technology officer from 1987 to 1993. In 1993 Dr. Weber became president. Once founded, Plasmaco began manufacturing small monochrome displays featuring his energy recovery sustain circuit.
  
  A longtime believer in the technology, Dr. Weber’s work on plasma display efficiency and his later efforts in 1994 towards creating a color plasma display are often believed to have kept the plasma industry alive in the face of tough competition. The industry took notice of plasma display technology, as well as plasma’s impressive contrast ratio provided by one of Dr. Weber’s key inventions, and in 1996 Plasmaco became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Panasonic. Once acquired, Dr. Weber was named president and CEO of Plasmaco.
  
  Plasma was able to effectively compete with other technologies based on size, due to the fact that plasma displays more easily scaled to larger sizes. Dr. Weber was the first to demonstrate a high-quality 60-inch plasma HDTV in 1999.
  
  Dr. Weber continues to work on plasma displays. From 2006 to 2008, Dr. Weber served as the President of the Society for Information Display (SID). Dr. Weber has published more than 40 papers and holds 15 patents on plasma displays, including the energy recovery sustain circuit and the high contrast ratio method.
  

  
• Dr. Ivan Getting

  Dr. Ivan Getting

  Co-Founder of GPS

  Born January 18, 1912, Dr. Ivan Getting grew up in Pittsburgh, PA. After receiving his bachelors of Science from MIT, Getting went on to attend Oxford University until 1935, where he received his doctorate of philosophy in astrophysics. Over the next 15 years, Dr. Getting worked as a junior fellow at Harvard University on nuclear instrumentation and cosmic rays, then as director of the Division on Fire Control and Army radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory.
  
  During the Second World War, Dr. Getting served as a special consultant to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson on the Army’s use of radar. While at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, he led the development of the SCR-584, the first microwave-tracking gunfire-control radar. The SCR-584′s ability to track V-1 flying bombs made it indispensable during the war. The SCR-584 is credited with saving thousands of lives during the 1944-1945 period in which the Germans launched V-1 flying bombs against England. Thanks to the SCR-584, on the last day on which significant numbers of V-1s were launched against London, of 104 fired, 68 were destroyed by artillery, 16 by other means and 16 crashed.
  
  In 1951, Dr. Getting became vice president of engineering and research at the Raytheon Corp. During Dr. Getting’s nine years at Raytheon, the company became the first to produce transistors commercially. While at Raytheon, in response to an Air Force requirement for a guidance system for proposed Intercontinental Ballistic Missles, Dr. Getting oversaw the development of the first three-dimensional, time-difference-of-arrival position-finding system. In 1960 he became the founding president of The Aerospace Corp., where he remained until 1977. The Aerospace Corp. was established as a non-profit organization to apply “the full resources of modern science and technology to the problem of achieving those continued advances in ballistic missiles and space systems, which are basic to national security”.
  
  At the Aerospace Corp. he continued his work on satellite-based navigation, researching the use of satellites in three-dimensional navigation systems for fast-travelling vehicles. Dr. Getting’s early work on satellite-based navigation systems were the foundation for the deployment of GPS. Dr. Getting was a major advocate of the earliest iterations of GPS systems, in promoting the technology to the Pentagon, and the Aerospace Corp.’s concept was eventually selected by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDRE).
  
  Dr. Getting passed away in October of 2003. Prior to his death, he was co-recipient of the Charles Stark Draper prize alongside Dr. Bradford Parkinson.
  

  
• Dr. Bradford Parkinson

  Dr. Bradford Parkinson

  Co-Founder of GPS

  People often take for granted that they know precisely where they are — land, sea and air. This is because of our society’s widespread use of the global positioning system (GPS), developed in part by Bradford Parkinson.
  
  Bradford Parkinson was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1935. Parkinson received his Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the Naval Academy, graduating in 1957. After Graduating, Parkinson accepted a commission with the Air Force rather than the Navy due to an interest in controls engineering — a research area not offered by the Navy at that time. Parkinson went on to obtain his Masters of Science in Aeronautics from MIT, graduating in 1961, then spent three years working at the Central Inertial Guidance Test Facility at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where he studied inertial guidance and electrical and controls engineering.
  
  After earning his PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 1966, Dr. Parkinson became manager of the Air Force’s NAVSTAR GPS development program in 1973. Under his leadership, the GPS satellites were produced and launched in 44 months. Simultaneously, a ground control system was developed and deployed to upload to the satellites.
  
  Dr. Parkinson remained with the NAVSTAR program until 1978, when he retired from the Air Force as a Colonel.
  
  Dr. Parkinson led a Stanford research group to develop innovative uses for GPS for aviation and other areas. He pioneered new applications, including precision farm tractor control (to about three inches on a rough field) that is now a $500 million a year worldwide market. His group pioneered the wide area augmentation system (WAAS) that is now deployed by the FAA, and also demonstrated full blind landings of a Boeing 737, using GPS alone. He is co-principal investigator and associate program manager of the NASA/Stanford Relativity Gyroscope Experiment Gravity Probe B program, a test effort to validate Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity using orbiting gyroscopes.
  
  In 2003, he was co-recipient of the Charles Stark Draper Prize, which is widely considered the Nobel equivalent for Engineering along with Dr. Getting.
  

  

2009 Inductees

• Maurice Cohen

  Maurice Cohen

  Lechmere
  Co-owner

  Three brothers turned what was literally a horse and buggy business into Lechmere, the well-known New England retail chain. The audio/video/appliance retailer operated for more than 20 years and at its height operated 33 stores in five states.
  
  It all began in 1913 when Russian immigrant Abraham “Pop” Cohen opened a hand-made harness shop called Lechmere, located in Lechmere Square, a section of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and his wife, Tillie, had a daughter Nan, and four sons; Maurice, Philip and Norman. After graduating from high school, the kids worked with their father patching tire tubes.
  
  World War II rationing drastically reduced the supply of tires and the Lechmere Tire Company suffered. Maurice and Philip served in the Army and Navy, respectively. Norman, the youngest, stayed home to work with their father in the tire shop. After the war, industries converted back to manufacturing consumer goods and returning GIs started families. To fill the increasing demand, the brothers began to stock appliances, buying wherever they could find them - a refrigerator from one distributor and a toaster from another. The Cohen brothers also played a major role in the founding group of the National Appliance and TV Merchandisers (NATM).
  
  To increase sales volume and build a customer base, the brothers called on companies, making deals to sell appliances to their customers at below list prices. They also renamed the business Lechmere Sales. The brothers were store salesmen by day and appliance delivery men by night while their sister ran the office. Their combination of market inventiveness, aggressiveness and savvy enabled the brothers to continually grow the business.
  
  In the late 1940s, they added 6,000 square feet of sales space to their three-story building at 4 Cambridge Street. Because space was limited, they kept only samples on the floor and introduced the in-store pick-up counter, where the customer’s product was delivered by conveyor belts from the stockrooms upstairs. By 1952, sales volume had reached $2 million. In 1956, the brothers bought the former Scully bus garage that was then converted into Lechmere’s main retail location. The Cohen’s again expanded to include televisions, records, jewelry, sporting goods, luggage and housewares.
  
  To promote the expansion, the brothers printed their own 64-page newspaper, which they mailed to 100,000 homes. To help customers remember the address, the brothers famously priced everything to end with 88 cents. Lechmere was also one of the first local retailers to advertise extensively on television.
  
  The Cohen brothers were as well known for their promotions as for their merchandise. For instance, every year on Washington’s Birthday they sold thousands of cherry pies for 22 cents. In 1956, the brothers distributed $15,000 worth of tickets to the movie “Around the World in Eighty Days.” They bought out the Ringling Brothers’ circus one night each year, and sold the tickets to “Lechmere Night at the Circus” below cost to their customers. Even the elephant carried a sign reading “I bought my trunk at Lechmere.” Despite a recession in the late 1950s, Lechmere’s sales increased 23 percent. Equally famous were the brothers’ “picnic sales” each spring, when the entire store’s merchandise was moved into the parking lot, and the once-a-year Saturday night “private sale.”
  
  The brothers doubled Lechmere’s space with a steel-framed 100,000 square foot building in 1963 so they could expand Lechmere’s selection to include office equipment, bath accessories, books and greeting cards. They also sold tires in the four-bay car servicing garage. Lechmere became such a well-known fixture in the Boston area that many residents believed the local commuter train station was named for the store, rather than vice versa.
  
  The brothers’ first store outside Cambridge opened in Dedham in 1965. To fund further expansion, the Cohen’s sold the business to Dayton Hudson in 1969. In the next two years, two more Lechmere stores opened, one in Danvers and another in Springfield. Mass.; a fifth store opened in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1977. The chain expanded to more than two dozen locations, was again sold, first to Berkshire Partners in 1989, then in 1994 to Montgomery Ward, which could not maintain what was special about Lechmere, and closed the business three years later. A 2009 survey in Boston found that Lechmere’s was the most missed defunct store in the region. By the mid 1970s, all three Cohen brothers had retired.
  
  Maurice and his wife, Marilyn, established the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University where he was a trustee until his death in 1995. Norman focused his energy on the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel until his death in 2008. Philip and his wife Bella established a scholarship program for Hebrew University among other philanthropies and reside in South Florida.
  

  
• Norman Cohen

  Norman Cohen

  Lechmere
  Co-owner

  Three brothers turned what was literally a horse and buggy business into Lechmere, the well-known New England retail chain. The audio/video/appliance retailer operated for more than 20 years and at its height operated 33 stores in five states.
  
  It all began in 1913 when Russian immigrant Abraham “Pop” Cohen opened a hand-made harness shop called Lechmere, located in Lechmere Square, a section of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and his wife, Tillie, had a daughter Nan, and four sons; Maurice, Philip and Norman. After graduating from high school, the kids worked with their father patching tire tubes.
  
  World War II rationing drastically reduced the supply of tires and the Lechmere Tire Company suffered. Maurice and Philip served in the Army and Navy, respectively. Norman, the youngest, stayed home to work with their father in the tire shop. After the war, industries converted back to manufacturing consumer goods and returning GIs started families. To fill the increasing demand, the brothers began to stock appliances, buying wherever they could find them - a refrigerator from one distributor and a toaster from another. The Cohen brothers also played a major role in the founding group of the National Appliance and TV Merchandisers (NATM).
  
  To increase sales volume and build a customer base, the brothers called on companies, making deals to sell appliances to their customers at below list prices. They also renamed the business Lechmere Sales. The brothers were store salesmen by day and appliance delivery men by night while their sister ran the office. Their combination of market inventiveness, aggressiveness and savvy enabled the brothers to continually grow the business.
  
  In the late 1940s, they added 6,000 square feet of sales space to their three-story building at 4 Cambridge Street. Because space was limited, they kept only samples on the floor and introduced the in-store pick-up counter, where the customer’s product was delivered by conveyor belts from the stockrooms upstairs. By 1952, sales volume had reached $2 million. In 1956, the brothers bought the former Scully bus garage that was then converted into Lechmere’s main retail location. The Cohen’s again expanded to include televisions, records, jewelry, sporting goods, luggage and housewares.
  
  To promote the expansion, the brothers printed their own 64-page newspaper, which they mailed to 100,000 homes. To help customers remember the address, the brothers famously priced everything to end with 88 cents. Lechmere was also one of the first local retailers to advertise extensively on television.
  
  The Cohen brothers were as well known for their promotions as for their merchandise. For instance, every year on Washington’s Birthday they sold thousands of cherry pies for 22 cents. In 1956, the brothers distributed $15,000 worth of tickets to the movie “Around the World in Eighty Days.” They bought out the Ringling Brothers’ circus one night each year, and sold the tickets to “Lechmere Night at the Circus” below cost to their customers. Even the elephant carried a sign reading “I bought my trunk at Lechmere.” Despite a recession in the late 1950s, Lechmere’s sales increased 23 percent. Equally famous were the brothers’ “picnic sales” each spring, when the entire store’s merchandise was moved into the parking lot, and the once-a-year Saturday night “private sale.”
  
  The brothers doubled Lechmere’s space with a steel-framed 100,000 square foot building in 1963 so they could expand Lechmere’s selection to include office equipment, bath accessories, books and greeting cards. They also sold tires in the four-bay car servicing garage. Lechmere became such a well-known fixture in the Boston area that many residents believed the local commuter train station was named for the store, rather than vice versa.
  
  The brothers’ first store outside Cambridge opened in Dedham in 1965. To fund further expansion, the Cohen’s sold the business to Dayton Hudson in 1969. In the next two years, two more Lechmere stores opened, one in Danvers and another in Springfield. Mass.; a fifth store opened in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1977. The chain expanded to more than two dozen locations, was again sold, first to Berkshire Partners in 1989, then in 1994 to Montgomery Ward, which could not maintain what was special about Lechmere, and closed the business three years later. A 2009 survey in Boston found that Lechmere’s was the most missed defunct store in the region. By the mid 1970s, all three Cohen brothers had retired.
  
  Maurice and his wife, Marilyn, established the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University where he was a trustee until his death in 1995. Norman focused his energy on the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel until his death in 2008. Philip and his wife Bella established a scholarship program for Hebrew University among other philanthropies and reside in South Florida.

  
• Philip Cohen

  Philip Cohen

  Lechmere
  Co-owner

  Three brothers turned what was literally a horse and buggy business into Lechmere, the well-known New England retail chain. The audio/video/appliance retailer operated for more than 20 years and at its height operated 33 stores in five states.
  
  It all began in 1913 when Russian immigrant Abraham “Pop” Cohen opened a hand-made harness shop called Lechmere, located in Lechmere Square, a section of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and his wife, Tillie, had a daughter Nan, and four sons; Maurice, Philip and Norman. After graduating from high school, the kids worked with their father patching tire tubes.
  
  World War II rationing drastically reduced the supply of tires and the Lechmere Tire Company suffered. Maurice and Philip served in the Army and Navy, respectively. Norman, the youngest, stayed home to work with their father in the tire shop. After the war, industries converted back to manufacturing consumer goods and returning GIs started families. To fill the increasing demand, the brothers began to stock appliances, buying wherever they could find them - a refrigerator from one distributor and a toaster from another. The Cohen brothers also played a major role in the founding group of the National Appliance and TV Merchandisers (NATM).
  
  To increase sales volume and build a customer base, the brothers called on companies, making deals to sell appliances to their customers at below list prices. They also renamed the business Lechmere Sales. The brothers were store salesmen by day and appliance delivery men by night while their sister ran the office. Their combination of market inventiveness, aggressiveness and savvy enabled the brothers to continually grow the business.
  
  In the late 1940s, they added 6,000 square feet of sales space to their three-story building at 4 Cambridge Street. Because space was limited, they kept only samples on the floor and introduced the in-store pick-up counter, where the customer’s product was delivered by conveyor belts from the stockrooms upstairs. By 1952, sales volume had reached $2 million. In 1956, the brothers bought the former Scully bus garage that was then converted into Lechmere’s main retail location. The Cohen’s again expanded to include televisions, records, jewelry, sporting goods, luggage and housewares.
  
  To promote the expansion, the brothers printed their own 64-page newspaper, which they mailed to 100,000 homes. To help customers remember the address, the brothers famously priced everything to end with 88 cents. Lechmere was also one of the first local retailers to advertise extensively on television.
  
  The Cohen brothers were as well known for their promotions as for their merchandise. For instance, every year on Washington’s Birthday they sold thousands of cherry pies for 22 cents. In 1956, the brothers distributed $15,000 worth of tickets to the movie “Around the World in Eighty Days.” They bought out the Ringling Brothers’ circus one night each year, and sold the tickets to “Lechmere Night at the Circus” below cost to their customers. Even the elephant carried a sign reading “I bought my trunk at Lechmere.” Despite a recession in the late 1950s, Lechmere’s sales increased 23 percent. Equally famous were the brothers’ “picnic sales” each spring, when the entire store’s merchandise was moved into the parking lot, and the once-a-year Saturday night “private sale.”
  
  The brothers doubled Lechmere’s space with a steel-framed 100,000 square foot building in 1963 so they could expand Lechmere’s selection to include office equipment, bath accessories, books and greeting cards. They also sold tires in the four-bay car servicing garage. Lechmere became such a well-known fixture in the Boston area that many residents believed the local commuter train station was named for the store, rather than vice versa.
  
  The brothers’ first store outside Cambridge opened in Dedham in 1965. To fund further expansion, the Cohen’s sold the business to Dayton Hudson in 1969. In the next two years, two more Lechmere stores opened, one in Danvers and another in Springfield. Mass.; a fifth store opened in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1977. The chain expanded to more than two dozen locations, was again sold, first to Berkshire Partners in 1989, then in 1994 to Montgomery Ward, which could not maintain what was special about Lechmere, and closed the business three years later. A 2009 survey in Boston found that Lechmere’s was the most missed defunct store in the region. By the mid 1970s, all three Cohen brothers had retired.
  
  Maurice and his wife, Marilyn, established the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University where he was a trustee until his death in 1995. Norman focused his energy on the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel until his death in 2008. Philip and his wife Bella established a scholarship program for Hebrew University among other philanthropies and reside in South Florida.

  
• Dr. Joseph Flaherty

  Dr. Joseph Flaherty

  HDTV Pioneer

  Best known as the developer of electronic news gathering (ENG) technology and father of high-definition television (HDTV), Dr. Joseph Flaherty has been involved in these and many other broadcasting technologies and committees for over half a century.
  
  He was born on Christmas Day 1930 in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, Joseph A. Flaherty Sr., was chief engineer of WDAF and WDAF-TV, the radio and then television stations of the Kansas City Star newspaper from the 1930s until his retirement.
  
  Under his father’s tutelage, Flaherty was issued a ham radio license, K2IQN, in 1948. He graduated from the University of Rockhurst in Kansas City, in 1952 and then served two years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. During the Korean conflict, Flaherty built the first TV studio for the Army at the Signal Corps Pictorial Center in New York to produce training programs using television rather than film technology.
  
  Flaherty began his professional career in 1955 with NBC in New York City as a television engineer, before moving to CBS in 1957. Two years later, he became the network’s Director of Technical Facilities Planning. In 1967, he was promoted to general manager, and then subsequently appointed vice president and general manager of CBS’ Engineering and Development Department. During his 23-year tenure in this position, Flaherty was responsible for a plethora of innovations in television technology including electronic news gathering (ENG), off-line video tape editing and electronic cinema.
  
  During the development of HDTV in the early 1980s, Joe Flaherty got U.S. broadcasters interested in high-definition TV developments and the early analog Muse HDTV transmission system developed in Japan. By 1987, he was Chairman Dick Wiley’s right-hand man on the FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS), serving as chairman of the ACATS Planning Committee and its Technology Sub-group. The ACATS process pitted competing HDTV systems against each other to help assure the best HDTV system for the U.S.
  
  Considered the dean of broadcasting engineers, Flaherty, along with Wiley and key members of ACATS and HDTV system proponents, directed the rollout of the ACATS competitive development plan. In his ACATS position and as a member of the Advanced Television Test Center (ATTC) board of directors, Flaherty helped oversee the test operations of all the digital HDTV systems.
  
  Flaherty worked with Wiley throughout the nine-year HDTV development period, helping to achieve approval of the full ACATS Committee of what is now the U.S. DTV broadcast standard, which leads the world in HDTV.
  
  Even though he was the first to recognize the potential of HDTV and a digital approach, Flaherty was famously quoted as saying “We’ll have digital television in a standard 6 MHz channel the same day we have a gravity insulator.” The quote, however, is usually misinterpreted as sounding as if he thought digital HDTV was an impossibility. He was against the idea of stopping the then-current HDTV development process, opining that a practical gravity insulator could have been developed in the time it would take an ad hoc group to devise an all-digital HDTV system. Flaherty’s fantasy device development analogy helped convince the broadcasting cognoscenti to plow ahead in the competitive development process.
  
  Currently, Flaherty is senior vice president of technology for CBS Broadcasting, responsible for international standards and TV technology applied to CBS broadcasting.
  
  Flaherty also continues his HDTV work in the ITU-R and as a member of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) and the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA) boards of directors.
  
  Among the honors and awards Flaherty has earned in broadcasting are two lifetime achievement Emmys, one for “Lifetime Achievement in Contributions to the Development and Improvement of the Science and Technology of Television” in October 1994, and the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award, in November 1996. In 2002, he was decorated by the President of France as an Officer of the French Legion of Honor and, in April 2006, Flaherty was presented the NAB Award of Honor for “Introducing High-Definition Television to the World.”
  

  
• Karl Hassel

  Karl Hassel

  Co-Founder, Zenith

  Karl Hassel, born January 25, 1896 in Sharon, PA, displayed a passion for the hottest new technology at the turn of the century - radio. It was this passion that would lead him to co-found the company that would later become Zenith.
  
  Hassel was granted his amateur radio license in 1912, and went on to attend Westminster College from 1914 to 1915 before he transferred to the University of Pittsburgh. At Pittsburgh, Hassel made use of his knowledge of his hobby to operate the campus radio transmitter, 8XI, one of the most powerful in the country at that time. He got the job because he was the only one on campus able to operate the equipment. After the U.S. entry into World War I in April 1917, the government shut down all amateur stations. Hassel was one of three operators to pass the government test, and ran the station until it was shut down a year later.
  
  With the end of amateur radio broadcasting, Hassel decided to join the U.S. Navy. He became a radio code instructor at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago where he befriended Ralph H.G. Mathews. Thanks to their radio expertise, the two were then transferred to Naval Intelligence, which operated out of the Commonwealth Edison Building in Chicago.
  
  After leaving the Navy, the two friends decided to go into business together. They founded the Chicago Radio Laboratory (CRL) in late 1918, and began to manufacture amateur radio gear based on Mathews’ earlier creations. The company’s first products, made with help from friends M.B. Lowe and Larry Dutton, were built on the kitchen table of the Mathews’ family home in Chicago.
  
  CRL soon grew, and the pair moved their operations into a two-car garage located a few blocks away. Half of the garage was devoted to manufacturing, while the other half to Mathews’ amateur radio station, “9ZN”. The station was soon able to be heard worldwide.
  
  The company was further expanded by an investment by Eugene F. McDonald, Jr., and began producing up to 15 “Z-Nith” brand two component (the Amplifigon detector and amplifier and the Paragon tuner) regenerative receivers per day. By 1921, CRL moved into a 3,000-square foot factory at 6433 Ravenswood Ave in Chicago. Zenith Radio Corporation was officially incorporated on June 30, 1923, with capital of $500,000, with an exclusive sales and marketing agreement with CRL. Mathews and Hassel signed 10-year contracts with CRL. Two years later, Zenith acquired CRL’s assets, creating one unified company. In late 1924, the company moved again to a large factory on the 3600 block of South Iron Street in Chicago.
  
  Under McDonald’s leadership, the company began its run as a pioneering radio manufacturer, beginning in 1924 with the Companion, considered the first modern portable radio, and in 1926, Model 27, its first radio powered by AC instead of batteries.
  
  Zenith annual sales grew from about $5 million in 1928 to $11 million in 1930, when it employed around 450 workers. During World War II, the company expanded thanks to military contracts for bomb fuses and other devices. In the late 1940s, Zenith went into TV manufacturing and became the number one maker of black-and-white sets throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Annual sales reached $100 million in 1950 and approached $500 million by the mid-1960s, when the company had more than 15,000 employees.
  
  Mathews and Hassel shared more than an enthusiasm for radio - they both were married to the same woman. Mathews married Mildred Josephine Finn, but the two divorced in the mid-1920s. Hassel married her in January 1926, a union that lasted until his death in 1975. Hassel’s five decades of association with Zenith included 40 years as a member of the company’s board of directors.
  

  
• Dr. Irwin M. Jacobs

  Dr. Irwin M. Jacobs

  Co-Founder of Qualcomm/CDMA Technology

  A childhood filled with assembling contraptions out of milk bottles, lights and electric motors led to a career in engineering, and the discovery of an arcane World War II technology that led Dr. Irwin Jacobs to create CDMA, the dominant cell phone technology in the U.S., and found Qualcomm, the largest cell phone chip maker in the world.
  
  Born in New Bedford, MA, on October 18, 1933, and a tinkerer since the age of eight, Jacobs’ interest in science was further stoked by a high school chemistry and math teacher. A photography buff, Jacobs also earned money by developing film in a makeshift darkroom at his family’s home.
  
  He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1956 from Cornell University, then a master’s of science in 1957 and doctor of science degrees in electrical engineering from MIT in 1959. After graduation, Jacobs was hired as an assistant/associate professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he co-authored a basic textbook on digital communications, “Principles of Communication Engineering,” which remains in use today. From 1966 to 1972 he taught computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego.
  
  In Los Angeles in 1968, while still teaching, Jacobs, along with Andrew Viterbi and Leonard Kleinrock, formed Linkabit, a communications technology consulting company. Linkabit worked primarily on defense communications for the government. Linkabit started as a once-a-week consulting company, but after a few months it was clear the company required more attention introducing the first of Ku-band Very Small Aperture Earth Terminals (VSATs), commercial TDMA wireless phones, and the VideoCipher satellite-to-home TV system.
  
  When Linkabit grew from a few part-timers to more than 1,000 employees, Jacobs quit his teaching job for full time corporate life. He spent the next decade-plus running and growing Linkabit. In August 1980, Linkabit was sold to M/A-COM for $25 million, and Jacobs served on the merged company’s board of directors. In April 1985, Jacobs retired.
  
  His retirement was short-lived. On July 1, 1985, 20 months after the first cell phone networks went live, Jacobs convened a meeting with six former Linkabit employees – Linkabit co-founder Viterbi, Franklin Antonio, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen and Harvey White – at his San Diego home. The group decided to build a “QUALity COMMunications” company. Jacobs became chairman and CEO of the new Qualcomm.
  
  The company started out providing contract research and development services, with limited product manufacturing, for the wireless telecommunications market. One of the company’s goals was to develop a commercial product, which eventually resulted in OmniTRACS tracking system for trucks in1988. OmniTRACS has since grown into the largest satellite-based commercial mobile system for the transportation industry.
  
  Heading home from a consulting job in 1985, it dawned on Jacobs that a World War II technology developed by movie star Hedy Lamarr and music composer George Antheil based on Nikola Tesla’s frequency hopping concept that postulated that multiple frequencies could be used to send a single radio transmission could be used for communications. Initially developed by Lamarr and Antheil as a method to make radio-guided torpedoes more difficult to jam, Jacobs believed this secure radio communications technology could be used for cell phones. He asked Qualcomm co-founder Klein Gilhousen, to explore the idea.
  
  In 1989, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) endorsed a digital technology called time division multiple access (TDMA). Three months later, Qualcomm introduced the result of Jacobs’ brainstorm, code division multiple access (CDMA), which Jacobs believed was superior. Initially, CDMA was dismissed as inferior to TDMA and, for a few years, CDMA-based carriers battled with TDMA carriers. But CDMA phones proved to provide better clarity and higher security.
  
  Under Jacob’s leadership, Qualcomm has become the top chipset supplier in the wireless industry with more than 15,000 employees worldwide at 144 locations generating $3 billion. As of April 24, 2009, there were more than 780 million 3G CDMA subscribers worldwide, which include 40 percent of cell phone subscribers in the U.S. Qualcomm also has developed 3G versions of CDMA, CDMA2000 and W-CDMA, which could increase the number of CDMA-based cell phones.
  Jacobs served as chief executive officer of the Qualcomm until July 2005 when he was succeeded by his son, Paul, and was chairman of the company’s board of directors until March 2009.
  

  
• Steve Jobs

  Steve Jobs

  Co-Founder, Apple

  One of the most iconic figures in the world of high technology, Steve Jobs co-founded the company that ignited the PC business, revolutionized portable music and how we buy music, and remade the cell phone industry - while helping to create the leading animation movie studio in the world.
  
  Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 and raised in the area he would help make famous as Silicon Valley. He was adopted and named Steven Paul by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, CA. The Jobs family moved to nearby Los Altos, where Jobs attended Homestead High. He worked summers at Hewlett-Packard, where he met a recent dropout of the University of California at Berkeley, Steve Wozniak. After graduating high school, Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for a semester, but dropped out. While auditing philosophy classes he also worked in an apple orchard. In 1974, he went to work for video game pioneer Atari.
  
  After saving some money, Jobs went on a spiritual journey to India. When he returned, he began to attend meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, where he and Wozniak set out to build and market a computer for the home. To fund the new company named Apple in honor of Jobs’ orchard work, Jobs sold his VW microbus and Wozniak his HP calculator.
  
  The Apple I sold for $666 in 1976 and was essentially a single motherboard, a video interface and some ROM into which programs could be loaded. Apple I earned Jobs and Wozniak $774,000, which the pair plowed into their next product, the Apple II, introduced in April 1977. Considered one of the first PCs, the Apple II was comprised of a CPU, keyboard and disk drives and could be connected to a color TV.
  
  Jobs recruited marketing muscle well as venture capitalists. In three years, the Apple II and its successors earned the company $139 million and made Apple, Jobs and Wozniak instant icons. Apple went public in 1980 and, two years later, its sales reached $583 million.
  
  In the early 1980s, Apple suffered the failures of the Apple III and the $10,000 Lisa, which was the first PC to use a mouse and a graphic user interface, developed by PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center. In 1984, Apple produced the Macintosh, introduced by an Orwellian SuperBowl ad. However, the Macintosh’s success led to conflict within Apple. Jobs saw his role marginalized and he resigned in 1985.
  
  During the next decade, Jobs created a computer company called NeXT and also bought a Lucasfilm company called The Graphics Group, later renamed Pixar. Pixar’s pioneering computer animated films have won numerous Oscars and have grossed more than $4 billion worldwide. In 2006, Pixar merged with The Walt Disney Company, with Jobs becoming the largest shareholder.
  
  Jobs returned to an ailing Apple in 1996 to become interim CEO. He opened the first Apple retail stores in 1997 and the all-in-one iMac computer in 1998, re-energizing the company, its stock price and its reputation. In 2000, the “interim” was removed from Jobs’ CEO title.
  
  A year later, Apple introduced the iPod, the first commercially successful digital music player. Apple linked the iPod to iTunes, software which combined digital music management with an online music store to create a hardware/content “ecosystem” that enabled Apple to capture and maintain a dominant share in both the hardware and music businesses. Apple has sold more than 200 million iPods and in April 2008, Apple, a PC company, became the country’s largest music retailer. The iPod also spawned a cottage industry in add-on products such as cases, auto connectors and speakers. As a result, the iPod has become the most accessorized product in CE history.
  
  In 2007, Apple revolutionized the cell phone industry with its iPhone that also had a hardware/software ecosystem. Apple encouraged third-party developers to create small applications, or apps, for both the iPhone and the iPod. Today there are more than 50,000 iPhone apps available. Within two years, Apple sold more than 15 million iPhones, making Apple the world’s third largest cell phone maker. iPhone’s touchscreen smartphone/application store model was quickly emulated by several cell phone makers.
  
  In early 2009, Jobs had a liver transplant but returned to work in June 2009. He passed away on October 5, 2011.
  

  
• Ralph H.G. Mathews

  Ralph H.G. Mathews

  Co-Founder, Zenith

  Born almost exactly one year after his future business partner Karl Hassel, Ralph H.G. Mathews shared Hassel’s enthusiasm for radio. Born in 1897, Mathews had built his first amateur radio station in Springfield, Ohio, in 1908. While attending Lane Technical High School in Chicago, Mathews built his first radio transmitter in 1912.
  
  Also while in school, Mathews perfected a distinctive aluminum saw-tooth rotary spark gap that produced a distinctive sound instantly recognizable to other hobbyists. The popularity of the spark gap disk led to a small post-graduation business building radio components for amateurs and helped him raise funds for college. Mathews supplemented this income by working during summers between 1915 and 1917 as a shipboard radio operator for $25-$30 a month. He was appointed trunk line manager for the center region of the U.S. in the new Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) in March 1916, and was elected to the ARRL Board of Directors in February 1917. Known by other amateur radio operators as “Matty,” Mathews also changed his radio call letters from 9IK to 9ZN, which was the origin of the famous Zenith trademark.
  
  Like Hassel, Mathews eventually shifted to the U.S. Navy when amateur broadcasts were shut down in 1917. The two became friends in the Navy, united by their love of radio. When they decided to go into business to form the Chicago Radio Laboratory (CRL) in late 1918, they first lived and worked at 1316 Carmen Ave. in Chicago, Mathews’ parents’ home. Their first products were built on the kitchen table, and Mathews’ father, who worked for a printing company, printed the first CRL catalog in mid-1919. The two focused on manufacturing a more developed version of Mathews’ spark gap disk and other amateur radio gear.
  
  Although literally a tabletop operation, the nascent company owned a valuable Armstrong regenerative receiver patent license, which was negotiated by Mathews in 1920. The company had no inventory - they manufactured product as orders came in. Along with three workmen, they built 12 radios at a time, which took two to three weeks, with oak ply cabinets made by a cabinet maker on Clark Street.
  
  Following an investment by Commander Eugene F. McDonald, Jr., CRL grew, and was later merged with Zenith Radio Corp., a sales and marketing firm created by McDonald in 1923. Along with the size of the company, the volume of radios manufactured also increased. By the mid-1960s, the company had more than 15,000 employees.
  
  Mathews, however, didn’t stay with the company long enough to enjoy its later success. Mathews gave up day-to-day responsibilities at Zenith in 1928 and established R.G.H. Mathews & Associates Sales Engineering Consultants. In 1933, now officially an ex-Zenith employee, he created Ford, Browne & Mathews Advertising Agency of Chicago. He then re-joined the Navy during WW II, assisting with recruiting. In 1954, he joined Magnavox and then worked for Westinghouse starting in 1957. After stints at several other companies during the next decade, he retired in 1967.
  
  Mathews and Hassel shared more than an enthusiasm for radio - they both were married to the same woman. Mathews married Mildred Josephine Finn, but the two divorced in the mid-1920s. Hassel married her in January, 1925, a union that lasted until his death in 1975.
  
  After retiring, Mathews moved to Mexico, where he was a lay leader of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Chapala, Jalisco. He died in 1982.
  

  
• Aaron Neretin

  Aaron Neretin

  Editor and Publisher, HFD and Merchandising Magazine

  A fixture at consumer electronics shows for more than a half century, trade editor, publisher and market analyst Aaron Neretin has been and remains an integral member of the consumer electronics community.
  
  Born in Manhattan, NY on May 30, 1928, the son of Minnie and Hillel, a stationer and glazier, Neretin was raised primarily in the Crotona Park section of the Bronx. Attending Bronx High School of Science, he showed an early interest in becoming a doctor. But while growing up, he also dabbled in creative writing, composing short stories about neighborhood life that drew praise and encouragement from his parents.
  
  After a three-year stint in the Army, serving in Japan during the U.S. occupation from 1945 to 1948 and then graduating from New York University on the GI Bill, Neretin decided to pursue a career in writing.
  
  Neretin started by applying first at The New York Times. After being turned down, Neretin applied at a number of newspaper publishers. At Fairchild Publications in 1950, Neretin took what job he was offered - copy boy for all the company’s trade publications.
  After spending a year or so as a copy boy, a position opened up on the copy desk at Retailing Daily. Neretin advanced quickly, moving from the copy desk to reporter to major appliances section editor to city editor for the publication, which first morphed into Home Furnishings Daily, then simply to HFD in 1952.
  
  In 1965, Neretin was recruited by Billboard Publications to become editor and publisher of Merchandising Magazine.
  
  Neretin remained editor and publisher after Gralla Publications bought Merchandising Magazine in 1973, and left the publication five years later when it was sold to NAPCO.
  
  After leaving Merchandising in 1978, Neretin formed his own company, Neretin Associates, which provides retail market intelligence to industry executives via interviews with key electronics retailers and marketplace research. The firm remains active today as a major source of CE retail research at the retail level.
  
  Neretin has received numerous industry awards, such as the NAME from the UJA and from the Consumer Electronics Association.
  

  
• John Shalam

  John Shalam

  Chairman and Founder, Audiovox Corp.

  John Shalam is the epitome of the American dream. In 1948, the 14-year-old Shalam, his parents and three sisters sailed past the Statue of Liberty ready to start a new life in America. Today, more than 60 years later, he continues to lead Audiovox, the $600 million company he built that is one of the strongest mobile and consumer electronics entities in the market today.
  
  Born December 10, 1933 in Alexandria, Egypt, Shalam was the only son of Vicky and Murad Shalam, one of the city’s more successful merchants. He grew up watching his father build his own import/export business. Were it not for the growing anti-Semitism in Egypt precipitated by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Shalam would likely have taken his family business to the next level.
  
  The family took up residence in New York in 1948, and Shalam attended the Peekskill Military Academy and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with a BS in economics in 1954.
  
  Shalam began his career working for the Continental Grain Company in New York. It did not take long for the entrepreneur in him to take over and, within four years, he partnered with a friend to form his own small trading company, which handled sales of equipment to schools and other institutions. Four years later, he founded the Custom Imports Company, which sold Japanese-made goods such as baseball gloves, fishing reels, porcelain dinnerware, photo albums, transistor radios and, in 1965, 2,000 car radios.
  
  Those 2,000 car radios would be the cosmic accident from which Audiovox would be born. Stuck with a shipment that a client had ordered and then cancelled, Shalam faced his first excess inventory problem. He pounded the pavement until he unloaded the radios and, satisfied he was out of the car audio business, celebrated with a ski trip to Vermont and treated himself to a champagne toast.
  
  But customers started calling looking for more car radios. He initially told each he was out of the car radio business, but by the fourth call he realized maybe he ought not to be and Audiovox was born. Audiovox went on to play a key role in establishing the after-market car audio, security and mobile video businesses.
  
  Audiovox has ridden the wave of technological innovation from its inception from simple car radios to four- and eight-track tape players to cassette and CD players to today’s iPod/Bluetooth/navigation-ready systems. By 1975, Audiovox crossed the $100 million sales threshold and moved beyond the core car audio market into car security products and then cellular phones. To fuel the rapid growth of the Company, Audiovox went public in 1987 on the American Stock Exchange and moved to NASDAQ in 2000. By 1998, the company had sold one million handsets and a year later reached $1 billion in sales.
  
  In 2004, Shalam was instrumental in the sale of the company’s cellular division for $323 million, and Audiovox has since been busy expanding its CE business, acquiring some of the most respected brands in the industry including RCA, Acoustic Research, Jensen, Advent, Phase Linear, Code Alarm and Terk.
  
  Although Shalam passed the day-to-day control of Audiovox to his son, he is the company’s majority share holder and continues to play a significant role in guiding the company’s strategic direction, such as the decision to expand into the accessory market as well as to establish a presence in Europe, Latin America and, most recently, Asia.
  
  Shalam continues to serve on several CEA committees, and is chairman of the Investment Committee. He also was instrumental in CEA expanding into the cellular industry. He established CEA’s Wireless Communications Division in 2001, and served as its first chairman.
  
  Married to Jane for 40 years, the Shalams have three sons Ari, David and Marc and six grandchildren. In the New York area, the family is known for its support of a variety of philanthropic causes. Shalam also is an avid horseman.
  
  In 1997, in the shadow of that same Statue of Liberty, Shalam, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, given to U.S. citizens who exhibit outstanding personal and professional qualities while maintaining the richness of their heritage.
  

  
• Walton Stinson

  Walton Stinson

  Co-founder and president, ListenUp; co-founder PARA

  Being the co-founder of one of the most successful A/V specialty retailers in the country, ListenUp, based in Denver, Colorado, would be considered an achievement, but Walt Stinson also is the co-founder and the first president of the Professional Audio/Video Retailers’ Association, (PARA), the trade association for 250 professional audio, video, home theater and custom electronics specialty dealers. Stinson has been dubbed the dean of A/V specialty retailers.
  
  He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on July 2, 1948. At age 10 he heard his first shortwave receiver and a year later enrolled in a summer program in electronics. At Webster Groves High School Stinson had his own ham radio station before earning a technical diploma in electronics. He attended Knox College in Galesburg, IL, where he built and repaired stereo systems and, during summers, worked as a customer engineer for IBM.
  
  He graduated from Knox in 1970, where he met his future partner, Steve Weiner. In 1971, he landed a job at LaSalle Electronics, a western Illinois parts distributor, where Weiner, also worked. Both migrated to electronics when the company’s component stereo department opened. In 1972, Stinson left LaSalle and founded KVR Research with Weiner to study sound reproduction, psychoacoustics and the CE market.
  
  It was while exploring career opportunities at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 1972 that Stinson decided to open a store. Stinson, Weiner and Stinson’s wife, Mary Kay, drove to 15 major markets gathering demographic projections from chambers of commerce and information about existing audio retailers. Back in Galesburg, the trio selected Denver as the most appealing market. ListenUp was incorporated on October 10, 1972 and the store opened with just $10,000 in capital. Mary Kay joined the business in 1974 and the three remain involved in the company’s management.
  
  The first year was slow but Stinson’s radio and electronics background launched the company into high gear when he bartered broadcast engineering services for radio advertising time in 1973. Stinson and ListenUp produced hundreds of recordings of jazz, rock and blues legends such as Miles Davis, BB King and Bob Dylan. The tag line, “Sound by ListenUp,” was ubiquitous on the radio and at concert venues and established the retailer as a major CE player in Colorado. This led in 1978 to the ListenUp commercial division, which designs, sells and services large scale audio video and control systems for commercial and institutional clients, as well as performance venues, including the famed Mile High Stadium, Folsom Field and the Rainbow Music Hall. Meanwhile, ListenUp sales grew 30 percent per year for the first seven years.
  
  In 1979, Stinson received a letter from retailer David Beatty, owner of Beatty Electronics proposing a meeting to discuss the challenges facing independent audio dealers. On October 17 dealers gathered at the Airport Hilton in Kansas City to form PARA. Beatty was elected PARA president, Stinson vice president. When Beatty retired six months later, Stinson assumed the PARA presidency, serving out Beatty’s term, then was re-elected to a two-year term in 1981. He also served as PARA’s chairman from 1983-1985 and as general advisor to the board from 1996-2002. In 1999, he received the first PARA Founders Award. PARA merged with CEA in 2004.
  
  In 1982, Stinson set a world record in the American Radio Relay League International DX Morse Code competition, and also founded Retail Computer Management Systems, a dealer-owned developer of enterprise software. In 1984, he co-founded Assured Systems, a dealer-owned distribution and marketing company. Assured merged with AudioVideo Independent Dealers (AVID) in 2002 to create Home Entertainment Source (HES), a division of the $4 billion AVB/Brand Source buying group.
  
  In 1983 and 1984, Stinson helped to launch the CD in the U.S., serving as a delegate to the Compact Disc Group and appearing frequently in the media. Returning from Japan in 1983, he was questioned by U.S. Customs about the shiny discs in his luggage. Stinson’s gamble on CDs paid off - ListenUp’s revenue doubled in the next three years to $10 million.
  
  In 1983 Stinson enrolled in the University of Colorado Executive Program, where he earned his MBA. From 1989 to 1994, Stinson was a director at the Madrigal Audio Labs and, from 1998 to 2004, was a director of the American Radio Relay League. Since 2004, Stinson has served as vice president and secretary/treasurer of the Progressive Retailers Organization (PRO GROUP), a $2 billion annual buying group. Today, ListenUp has six stores in Colorado and Oregon with 110 employees.
  

  
• Neil Terk

  Neil Terk

  Founder, Terk Technologies

  He designed award-winning record album covers but in the middle of a successful career as a graphics designer and photographer, Neil Terk decided to take a left turn into the consumer electronics industry, founding a company that became the most recognizable name in radio and TV antennas.
  
  A native New Yorker, Terk was born on December 5, 1947 in Manhattan, but grew up in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens. After attending P.S. 164, Terk spent grades 7-12 at the now-defunct Rhodes Prep school in Manhattan. He majored in architecture at Temple University for a year before transferring to the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA), and was graduated with a degree in industrial design.
  
  After a brief tenure in Zurich where he became a convert to the Bauhaus design philosophy, he sent out a resume consisting of a glossy nude of himself with a dollar bill glued across his private parts and his accomplishments pasted on the flip side. This unusual self-advertisement got him a job designing photo equipment in New Jersey.
  
  A year later, Terk got a job as creative director for Chess Janus Records in 1972. He designed more than 500 album covers including Cosmic Slop by Funkadelic, Big Bad Bo by Bo Diddley, Music to Make Love By by Solomon Burke, and Making Music by Dire Straits, as well as albums from Chuck Berry, Etta James, Aretha Franklin and Bob Marley.
  
  In the mid-1970s, Terk founded two design companies: Paper Faces, where he designed and created composite sheets and catalog books for large fashion model agencies including Ford, Elle and Wilhelmina, and, Neil Terk & Co., a production company. He also worked as a consultant to such companies as Pepsi, Playtex and Blimpie, designing logos, packaging, catalogs, point-of-purchase materials and store interiors. When computer-based desktop publishing came into vogue, Terk sold the companies.
  
  In 1985, Cobra approached Terk about distributing a new FM antenna the Italian company planned on selling in the U.S. Terk convinced Cobra if the antenna looked better, it would sell better. Cobra agreed. Terk applied his experience in modern industrial design and reworked the antenna under the auspices of the new Terk Technologies.
  
  When this re-designed antenna sold well, Terk realized he’d found his calling. His goal was to design antennas so beautiful that consumers would be eager to display them. Two years later, Terk unveiled the company’s first product, the Terk Pi AM/FM antenna. The two-piece Pi was the better mouse trap of radio antennas. Its outer six-inch adjustable diameter directional loop AM antenna combined with a concentric fixed disk FM antenna, and included an amplifier to help boost weak radio signals and a noise-free transistor. This unique physical and technical configuration represented a departure from old-fashioned rabbit ears.
  
  The powerful Pi - the Greek letter for determining the circumference of a circle - could pull in signals from radio stations as far as 50 miles away. The Pi was as successful commercially as it was technically and aesthetically, selling in the hundreds of thousands. Not only did the Pi fulfill Terk’s technical and design goals, it was so beautiful it was selected to be sold through the Museum of Modern Art in 1988. To better handle masses of nearby signals in urban areas, Terk later unveiled the $20 FM+.
  Over the next 14 years, Terk created and sold indoor and outdoor antennas for HDTV and analog TV, XM satellite radio, Lojack, in-car cell, DirecTV, as well as a full line of installation hardware products and kits and the Leapfrog wireless multi-room A/V distribution and control systems. By the mid 1990s, Terk’s sales reached $50 million. In 1997, Terk moved his company to Hauppauge Industrial Park.
  
  Also an innovator, Terk created new CE categories that solved problems such as the Volume Regulator, which kept TV volume of normally louder commercials at the same volume as regular programming, while taking interior design into consideration. This successful combination of form and function heavily influenced other gadget makers. Terk also was involved in the industry, serving on the CEA executive board, its board of directors, and as chairman for both the Accessories Division and Antenna Subdivision.
  In 2001, Terk sold half interest in his company to Topspin, a venture capital firm. A few months later, the non-smoker Terk was diagnosed with lung cancer and passed away in 2003. Terk Technologies is now a subsidiary of Audiovox.
  

  
• Richard E. Wiley

  Richard E. Wiley

  FCC Chairman, ACATS Chairman

  Richard Wiley did not own a company or retail outlet and did not invent a device or technology. But as chairman of a federal advisory panel, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission played a pivotal role in the development and subsequent adoption of the U.S. digital television (DTV) broadcast standard by championing HDTV, advocating an all-digital system and creating the cooperative Grand Alliance that developed today’s digital and high-definition television standards.
  
  Dick Wiley was born in Peoria, Illinois, on July 20, 1934, and grew up in Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago. Wiley got his introduction to TV when his father, Joseph, a manufacturer’s agent for Edison electronics products, bought the family a Philco set in the early 1950s.
  While in college, Wiley planned to become a history and political science teacher when a professor suggested he take the LSAT and pursue a law career. After passing the test, Wiley got a full scholarship to Northwestern University. After receiving both his B.S. and J.D. from Northwestern, Wiley married, then joined the U.S. Army and served in the Judge Advocate’s Corp as an appellate specialist at the Pentagon from 1959-1962. He then earned his LL.M from Georgetown in 1962.
  
  Interested in regulatory law, Wiley got his first job in the private sector at a Chicago firm with a large anti-trust specialty. He practiced successfully for eight years when he traveled to Washington, D.C., to apply for the job as FTC general counsel. That job wasn’t open, however, but was told the same position at the FCC would be open a few months later. In October 1970, he got the job. Two years later, then-President Nixon nominated Wiley as an FCC commissioner and, in 1974, he was appointed chairman. Wiley served under three presidents - Nixon, Ford and Carter - during his tenure at the FCC.
  
  As chairman, Wiley believed that competition fostered innovation and worked to open up closed industries. He was instrumental in opening both landline telephone and the nascent cell phone businesses to multiple carriers, allowing Sprint and MCI to compete and the cell phone industry to explode, and helped give birth to the modern satellite and cable TV businesses. Wiley retired as FCC chairman in October 1977.
  
  From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, wireless telephone companies such as Motorola petitioned the FCC to open up more spectrum sliced from local television spectrum. Broadcasters kept their spectrum by claiming they would develop high-definition television. In mid 1987, the FCC asked Wiley to chair the newly-formed Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS), which would oversee and adjudicate the varying DTV development efforts.
  
  Known today in Washington circles as the father of the nation’s transition to digital TV, Wiley recommended that the changeover to digital transmission employ simulcasting to maintain the current six MHz analog television channel while transitioning the country to a second digital channel. Equally significant, he defined what HDTV would require: at least twice the number of scanning lines of conventional television.
  
  After six years of competitive development and testing, Wiley proposed in May 1993 that the remaining proponents in the race come together in a “Grand Alliance” to develop the final all-digital standard. Wiley also had to cope with complaints and suggestions from Hollywood as well as the computer industry as the standard was being defined. On November 28, 1995, with the technical work on the DTV standards completed, Wiley chaired the final ACATS meeting, and his committee made its final recommendation to the FCC. After jockeying by both the FCC and the Congress, the DTV standard was adopted by the commission on Christmas Eve 1996, more than nine years after Wiley began his work at ACATS.
  
  In 1997, Wiley was awarded an Emmy for his work on HDTV. In 1993, he was named to the Broadcasting & Cable magazine Hall of Fame, and in 1999, he was named one of the top 100 Men of the Century by the magazine. In 1996, he was recognized by EIA with a medal of honor and, in 2002, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Award by the National Association of Broadcasters.
  
  Since 1983, Wiley has been managing partner of Wiley Rein LLP, a Washington, D.C. law firm with nearly 300 lawyers and some 80 communications law professionals. He says he has no plans to retire.
  

  

2008 Inductees

• Jewel and David Abt

  Jewel and David Abt

  Founders, Abt Electronics

  With an $800 “loan” from wife to husband, David and Jewel Abt founded Abt Radio in 1936 on that shoestring budget with three employees — including David and Jewel — in a small storefront in the Logan Square section of Chicago. Abt Electronics is now the largest, single-store appliance and consumer electronics store in the country, and was one of the early online retailing pioneers, which gave Abt a national presence.
  
  Jewel Fischmann Abt was born in Korompa, Hungary, and emigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was six years old. Her family settled in Chicago, starting out in typical immigrant fashion of the time by selling vegetables from a wagon. After graduating from high school, she earned a two-year degree in accounting and then worked in the family’s grocery business. She was one of a few women to drive a car in the mid-1920s and went to Cuba by herself when she was 26 years old.
  
  David Abt was born in 1905 in Oak Park, Illinois. He did not go to high school, but he had two important sales attributes: creative talent and a good smile. Dave worked as a salesman at the Fair Department Store on State Street in Chicago selling electronics.
  
  The Abts and the Fischmanns were friendly and David and Jewel knew each other as teenagers. Jewel’s family eventually owned a half a dozen grocery stores. Since Dave knew electronics, which at that time was crystal radios, they decided to start a company soon after they married in 1934.
  
  They decided to name the store using their last name, calling it Abt Radio. David had taken a few courses at the Art Institute of Chicago and designed the company’s lightning bolt logo, which is still used today. They had their warehouse in the family garage and borrowed Jewel’s brother’s truck to make deliveries.
  
  For many years Dave worked from dawn ’til dusk doing the various jobs needed for their business to survive and grow. Each morning before going to work, he would fill up his truck with product from his garage which doubled as the business’s warehouse, and set out for the store’s daily deliveries. With his foresight, David knew the right time to move the family business to larger, more modern locations.
  
  Seven decades later, Abt Radio has become Abt Electronics, located in its fifth location, a 350,000 square foot facility in Glenview, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, with more than 1,100 employees. Many of Abt’s current customers are the grandchildren of customers who made purchases from Abt Radio in 1936.
  
  Dave and Jewel continued to be active in the business well into their 70s. Their grandsons, Michael, Ricky, Jon and Billy, and son, Bob, now run the family business and have the same dedication that motivated Jewel and Dave.
  
  After 72 years, Abt has survived the incursion of a host of competitors and big-box retailers, thanks to a concentration on its local roots and quality personalized service. Abt has expanded into high-end electronics and appliances, hewing to the philosophies of Jewel and Dave: “everything in-house,” the reason that Abt Electronics has not only remained in business, but has exponentially grown. In 2005, the Chicago block at Wolfram and Milwaukee Avenues, where the first Abt store was located, was dedicated to and renamed “Jewel and David Abt Way.”
  

  
• Joe Clayton

  Joe Clayton

  RCA Executive; Chairman, Sirius Satellite Radio

  F. Scott Fitzgerald famously intoned that there were no second acts in American life. Fitzgerald never counted on Joe Clayton. The long-time executive would have been elected to the CE Hall of Fame based on his distinguished 25-year career at RCA, which included shepherding RCA’s launch of DirecTV. But Clayton then re-emerged five years after leaving RCA as the CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio.
  
  Clayton was born October 11, 1949, in Louisville, Kentucky. His father owned a liquor store and Clayton always assumed he would earn his bachelor and master’s degrees, then return to Kentucky to sell whiskey. As planned, he graduated magna cum laude with a BA in business administration from Bellarmine University in Louisville, then earned an MBA from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. But he never got back to Kentucky.
  
  Instead, Clayton started his career with RCA in New York in February 1973 as a marketing associate. A year later at RCA’s Indianapolis headquarters, he was named the company’s color television product manager, then took on successive national merchandising responsibilities for RCA’s black & white TVs, its new line of VHS VCRs, and finally, all of its TV products in 1978. Clayton then moved to the sales side, first tackling Detroit, then New York City, Chicago and then San Francisco. In 1985, Clayton went back to Indianapolis as VP of marketing operations, then video product marketing, then was named senior VP of all TV business in North and South America. In 1992, he was named executive VP of sales for the Americas and Asia for RCA’s new parent company, Thomson.
  
  Under his direction, RCA launched DirecTV with Hughes, starting with a grandiose event at Jackson, Mississippi retailer “Cowboy Maloney’s” in June 1994. RCA also pioneered on-screen guide services with Gemstar, TV-centric Internet services with WebTV, TV/PC convergence with Compaq and interactive TV services with Sun Microsystems.
  
  Clayton also resurrected RCA’s long-dormant “His Master’s Voice” dog icon Nipper and added the puppy Chipper, in all RCA marketing. Revenues more than doubled under Clayton’s stewardship, and the company’s market share in TV, camcorders and VCRs rose to more than 20 percent in each category. Clayton became a familiar face at industry events, famously invoking the bucolic scenes of Indiana’s cornfields before launching into presentations.
  
  Clayton resigned from what was left of a dismembered RCA in 1996, but wasn’t idle for long. In 1997, he was named president and CEO of Frontier Communications, a Rochester, New York-based provider of integrated telecommunications services. The company’s stock price quickly appreciated more than 200 percent, and its market cap grew from $3 billion to $10 billion. Clayton drove the strategic direction of the company while working as a hands-on leader of Frontier’s executive management team. In 1999, Global Crossing acquired Frontier and Clayton was named Vice Chairman of Global Crossing and President of the company’s North American region.
  
  In November 2001, Clayton began his second life in the CE industry when he was brought in to run Sirius Satellite Radio. As president and CEO, Clayton launched Sirius’ service and expanded its retail presence to 25,000 locations and to the first one million subscribers, and increased Sirius’ market valuation from $40 million to $5 billion. Among Clayton’s high-profile moves: making exclusive content and marketing deals with the NFL, NBA, the NHL, the NCAA Final Four and signing radio’s number one personality, Howard Stern. Clayton became chairman in 2004.
  
  Clayton served as CEA chairman from 1995-96. He also was a director for E.W. Scripps, The Good Guys, Global Crossing, Frontier Corp., Transcend Corp., Infogear and Sirius. In 2007, Clayton was inducted into Indiana University’s School of Business Hall of Fame.
  

  
• Martin Cooper

  Martin Cooper

  Co-Developer, Cell Phone

  It was desperation, not necessity that propelled Marty Cooper, vice president and general manager of Motorola’s communications systems division, to initiate the development of the cell phone. Cooper needed to convince the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) not to award a monopoly to AT&T for the new cellular spectrum to be used with car phones at hearings scheduled for May 1973. In November 1972, Cooper ordered the crash development of a handheld portable phone to illustrate how competition could spur innovation and placed Motorola engineer Don Linder in charge. By the following April, two models had been built and Cooper proudly demonstrated them to the media and the FCC.
  
  Cooper was the son of Russian immigrants, born in Chicago the day after Christmas in 1928. After graduating from college, Cooper served as a submarine officer in the Navy for three years, then earned a masters degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He joined Motorola in 1954 after a year as a research engineer at Teletype Corp. Cooper started as a senior development engineer in Motorola’s mobile equipment group, slowly moving up through the ranks as a senior development engineer, chief engineer, product manager, operations manager, vice president and division manager, and finally corporate director of R&D.
  
  In the years after World War II, Motorola became the leading equipment supplier in the so-called “land-mobile” industry, better known as the car phone business. During the same time, AT&T had been developing cellular. In 1968, the FCC allotted 800 MHz spectrum for this new cellular program. AT&T, which already controlled the nation’s landline phone network, petitioned for exclusive control of this new spectrum.
  
  Motorola reacted by developing DynaTAC, a competing 900 MHz cellular system. But Cooper realized that Motorola would need a flashy equipment breakthrough to convince the FCC not to award AT&T another phone monopoly and initiated a crash development program.
  
  The fundamental technologies of a handheld phone were well-known by Cooper and Motorola. But Cooper and Linder’s engineering team quickly overcame a plethora of technical challenges. One of these was Cooper commandeering newly developed chip sets destined for another car phone product for use in the two model phones Linder and his group were building.
  
  On Tuesday morning, April 3, 1973, at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan, Cooper and fellow Motorola executive John Mitchell demonstrated the two working phones to the media. While it is debatable how much influence this public demonstration had, a year later the FCC turned down AT&T’s request for exclusivity and awarded multiple licenses in each metropolitan market, and Motorola established itself as the nation’s premier wireless handset supplier.
  
  Cooper also formulated the Law of Spectral Efficiency, otherwise known as Cooper’s Law, which states the maximum number of voice conversations or equivalent data transactions that can be conducted in all of the useful radio spectrum over a given area doubles every 30 months.
  
  Cooper left Motorola in 1983 but did not retire. Cooper co-founded Cellular Business Systems in 1986 and co-founded Cellular Payphone, the parent company of Jitterbug, a cell phone service and equipment supplier targeted to senior citizens. In 1993, Cooper co-founded cellular antenna company ArrayComm, serving as its CEO through 2002, and is now executive chairman. He also serves on a number of public and private company boards of directors. Last year, Cooper, Don Linder and the cell phone development team were awarded the Great Moments Engineering Award from GlobalSpec.
  

  
• Dean Dunlavey

  Dean Dunlavey

  Home Recording Rights Attorney

  Dean Dunlavey was not an inventor or a consumer electronics executive, but he is arguably singularly responsible for the home video revolution. In 1984, Dunlavey, working as an attorney representing Sony, successfully argued the so-called “Betamax” case before the United States Supreme Court. As a result of Dunlavey’s arguments, the court ruled that Americans had the right to record programs broadcast on TV. This landmark decision made it legal for manufacturers to produce, and consumers to use, the VCR.
  
  Dunlavey was born in Waterloo, Iowa, on October 31, 1925. After a year at Iowa State University, Dunlavey volunteered for the Army when WWII broke out, serving in the Philippines as a captain in the infantry.
  
  After the war, Dunlavey earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1949 from Harvard on the GI Bill and then received a doctorate in nuclear chemistry from Berkeley in 1952. Even though he worked with Nobel Prize winner Glenn T. Seaborg at Berkeley on creating transuranic elements, Dunlavey felt stifled in the lab and discovered he yearned for a more confrontational profession.
  
  Dunlavey stayed at Berkeley where he earned his law degree from Boult Hall, finishing first in his class in 1955. He served as editor-in-chief of the California Law Review and was made a member of the Order of the Coif. While teaching at Harvard Law School he simultaneously earned his master’s degree. He then joined Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in 1956. In 1970, he was named a fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers.
  
  Soon after the Betamax was introduced in 1976, Universal City Studios and Walt Disney Productions sued Sony, several retailers who sold the Betamax, Sony’s advertising agency and a representative consumer named William Gibson for copyright infringement. A district court ruled for Sony, a decision that was overturned in 1981 by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The case then went to the U.S. Supreme Court.
  
  The down-to-earth Dunlavey argued the case twice before the Supreme Court in 1983, once on January 18, and again on October 3. Both times, Dunlavey contended that the studios were paid for selling their product to television networks and were not entitled to additional compensation if a consumer recorded them for personal viewing.
  
  In January 1984, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of a consumer’s right to record. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, concluded “[t]he sale of the VTR’s [video tape recorders] to the general public does not constitute contributory infringement of [Universal's] copyrights.” A memo circulated at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher after the decision noted it was “universally agreed by all Supreme Court watchers that Dean’s oral argument made all the difference.”
  
  While the decision was crucial to the consumer electronics industry, Dunlavey viewed it as just another case. During his 34-year career, Dunlavey tried nearly 100 cases, including several cases other then Sony v. Universal before the U.S. Supreme Court. He later told a reporter “I have done nothing but litigation since the day I walked in the door here. I can’t think of a better way of making a living than fighting with people and getting paid for it.”
  
  Dunlavey continued to represent Sony until he retired in 1990.
  

  
• Hans Fantel

  Hans Fantel

  Pioneering Consumer Electronics Journalist

  Even though he escaped Nazi-occupied Austria and came to the U.S. without knowing one word of English, Hans Fantel became one of the most influential consumer electronics journalists and a champion of classical music and audiophile equipment. He was a founding editor of Stereo Review, the bible of stereophile publications, and wrote a column on audio and video technology for The New York Times that was known for transforming technical jargon into concise prose.
  
  Fantel was born March 1, 1922, in Vienna, and was named after Hans Sachs, the character in Wagner’s “Meistersinger von Nurnberg.” His father, Fritz, owned the company which made the first home radio receivers in Austria, and sang in the Vienna Court Opera Chorus under Mahler.
  
  One Christmas, his father gave Fantel a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies, igniting the youngster’s love of classical music. In January 1938, two months before the Nazis occupied Austria, 16-year-old Fantel was taken by his father to a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter, a performance he later reminisced about in a column in The Times when the recorded performances came out on CD in 1989.
  
  Later in 1938, after the Anschluss, Fantel’s father was arrested by the Nazis for opposing Germany’s rearmament and was later executed. Authorities discovered that Fantel’s mother was Jewish and he was expelled from school. He escaped to Czechoslovakia, served in the underground there and hid in a remote village in the Tatra Mountains, then made his way to Tunis. The American consul, a fellow classical music lover, helped Fantel emigrate to the U.S. on a Red Cross ship in 1941.
  
  Fantel learned English by listening to radio broadcasts while working at a picture frame factory. He earned a biology degree from the University of Missouri, worked as a technical translator for the Air Force in Ohio and enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He moved to New York in the early 1950s where he met his wife, Shirley “Shea” Smith, a senior copy editor for Seventeen magazine, in Greenwich Village.
  
  Capitalizing on his love of classical music, Fantel, who spoke with a strong Austrian accent, was one of the founding editors of Stereo Review, which started life as Hi-Fi and Music Review, in February 1958. The magazine went through numerous name changes until settling on Stereo Review from 1968 to 1999 when the magazine was merged with Video Magazine and became Sound & Vision.
  
  Fantel started writing for The New York Times in 1961, and wrote two columns, one on audio and one on home video electronics, from 1977 to 1994. He was adamant about writing for a mainstream consumer publication rather than for audiophiles. In an interview he explained, “What I need to do for The Times is to alert people to the existence of good equipment. Most of them don’t know that it even exists — if they discover good, they can then discover better.”
  
  During his career Fantel wrote articles and books on a variety of subjects, electronics-related and not. He was the author of William Penn: Apostle of Dissent, The Waltz Kings, about the Strauss family, and several books on music and high-fidelity stereo equipment.
  
  In 1998, the government of Austria and city of Salzburg awarded Fantel medals of appreciation for his efforts at building goodwill between Austria and the U.S. Following his death in May 2006, his papers were donated to the University of Missouri in January 2007.
  

  
• Eddy Hartenstein

  Eddy Hartenstein

  Founder, Chairman & CEO, DirecTV

  Ever since DirecTV’s launch in 1990, Eddy Hartenstein has been the premier face of the satellite television business. Hartenstein presided over its birth and growth and, as founder, chairman and CEO of DirecTV, created the second-largest pay TV service in the U.S., while pioneering both the regulatory and technology shifts that led to the entry of the first small dish DBS service in North America.
  
  Hartenstein began a new phase of his career in August 2008 when he took on the role of publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times. Faced with the complex issues challenging newspaper and media companies in the digital age, he again finds himself forging an uncharted path. However, he is the first publisher with local roots since Otis Chandler resigned the post in 1980 and his familiarity with the region will inform how multimedia news, information and advertising could be delivered across Southern California.
  
  Born in 1950 in Alhambra, California, like many students of the era, Hartenstein’s interest in technology and aerospace/technology were sparked by the space race. Hartenstein earned bachelor’s of science degrees in aerospace engineering and mathematics from Cal State Polytech, Pomona then joined Hughes Aircraft in 1972. While at Hughes, Hartenstein earned a master’s of science from Cal Tech in applied mechanics. By 1981, Hartenstein had become vice president of Hughes Communications.
  
  In 1984, Hartenstein left Hughes to become president of Equatorial Communications Service. He returned to Hughes Communications in 1987 as a senior vice president. While at Hughes and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he demonstrated a knack for anticipating and actualizing future trends and held a number of increasingly high-profile positions. He was responsible for expanding Hughes’ acquisition and deployment of commercial communications satellites and directed the development and marketing of the original Galaxy satellite fleet, which served the fast-developing broadcast television and cable programming industries.
  
  In 1990, Hartenstein was named president of the new Hughes-owned subsidiary to develop direct-to-home satellite TV service. Hartenstein organized the new business, assembled the executive team and transformed a mere concept into DirecTV, one of the most successful new product launches in consumer electronics history.
  
  Under Hartenstein’s direction, DirecTV paved the way for digital television to be provided to millions of consumers worldwide without connection to a cable system. His vision and leadership resulted in a new outlet for broadcasting services, and provided a foundation for the launch of many new channels and programming choices for the public. He also led the regulatory push to allow local broadcast stations to be rebroadcast into local markets over DBS. He served as DirecTV chairman and CEO from 2001 to 2004.
  
  During his tenure, Hartenstein lead the regulatory push to change U.S. law to allow local broadcast stations to be rebroadcast into local markets over direct broadcast satellite and through DirecTV, lead the television industry to digital television. Hartenstein was named DirecTV’s chairman and CEO in 2001 and retired as vice chairman of the DirecTV group after the company’s sale to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in December 2004.
  
  Hartenstein sits on the board of directors of Broadcom Corp., XM Satellite Radio and SanDisk as well as the City of Hope. He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Class of 2001, and into two halls of fame, Broadcasting & Cable in 2002 and the Society of Satellite Professionals in 2005. In 2007, Hartenstein received a lifetime achievement Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
  

  
• Ken Kutaragi

  Ken Kutaragi

  In these days of faceless and nameless corporate product development, Ken Kutaragi stands out. As an engineer at Sony, he not only created the PlayStation, the first optical disc-based video game platform, but pushed an unwilling company to market it. By 2003, the game system was contributing 60 percent of the company’s operating profit and Kutaragi became a legend.
  
  Kutaragi was born in August 1950 in Tokyo. A straight-A student, he worked after school in his family’s printing business. But the budding engineer loved to tinker and built gadgets such as go-carts and amplifiers. In 1975, Kutaragi turned his childhood hobby into a degree in electrical engineering from Denki Tsushin University in Tokyo, and then joined Sony as a researcher in the company’s digital research labs.
  
  One of Kutaragi’s first experiences with Sony’s reticence about his ideas was his work on developing an LCD projector that the company did not approve. He also worked on Sony’s early Mavica digital camera and gained a reputation as a problem solver and a forward thinker.
  
  One day in the mid 1980s, Kutaragi watched his sons play with their Nintendo and believed there was an opportunity. Because gaming was considered beneath Sony, he worked in secret with Nintendo to develop a new sound chip for the gaming company’s new 16-bit Super NES platform. In 1988, after receiving support from Sony CEO Norio Ohga to finish development on the chip, the SPC700, Kutaragi fought for, and received, funding to develop his CD-ROM version of the Super NES, which used cartridges, for Nintendo.
  
  Corporate sparring and technology legal challenges forced Sony and Nintendo apart in 1991, and Kutaragi again convinced upper management to create a completely new Sony-branded CD-based game system. While many in Sony considered video game machines to be toys, Kutaragi insisted that he was actually building a computer.
  
  The PlayStation, or PSX, became available in December 1994 in Japan and in September 1995 in the U.S. PlayStation quickly became the best-selling video game system on the planet with more than 100 million units of this original system were sold until production ended in March 2006.
  
  PlayStation 2 appeared in 2000 and sold more than 125 million units and garnered a 70 percent market share. The PlayStation Portable, or PSP, arrived in November 2004, followed by the PlayStation 3 in November 2006. In 2000, BusinessWeek magazine dubbed him “Sony’s indispensable samurai.” Largely because of Kutaragi and the PlayStation, video games earn more money than theatrical films.
  
  According to one profile, Kutaragi’s management style was considered outspoken, and he was described by one co-worker as unusually animated and passionate. Legend has it he once offered to settle a PlayStation design argument by arm-wrestling.
  
  In addition to his being president of Sony’s Computer Entertainment division (SCEI) from 1999 to 2003, he was named executive deputy president in charge of the Game Business Group and the Broadband Network Company. In 2006 he became chairman of SCEI and retired in June 2007 as honorary chairman.
  
  In 2004, Time magazine listed Kutaragi on its “100 Most Influential People,” dubbing him the “Gutenberg of Video Games.”
  

  
• Warren Lieberfarb

  Warren Lieberfarb

  "Father of DVD"

  Content is king, and without Warren Lieberfarb’s aggressive corralling of Hollywood studio support, DVD may have been a playback technology without anything to play back. As chief of Warner Home Video, Lieberfarb pleaded, harangued, bargained and bullied his fellow home theater executives to bring their movies to DVD. As the driving force behind the format, he was dubbed “The Father of DVD” by Variety.
  
  Born September 28, 1943, Lieberfarb earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Wharton, a master’s from the University of Michigan, then spent three years at Ford after being chosen for a selective finance management program.
  
  Lieberfarb started his career in the entertainment business when he was hired as executive assistant to the president of Paramount Pictures in New York in 1970. Lieberfarb was then recruited by rival Twentieth Century Fox as vice president of telecommunications. He joined Warner Brothers in 1975 as vice president of marketing and held a series of other positions with the company during a tempestuous early few years. In 1982, Lieberfarb was appointed senior vice president of Warner Home Video (WHV) when the unit had total revenue of only $73 million. Two years later, he was named WHV president.
  
  During the next 18 years, Lieberfarb presided over explosive growth for WHV, packaging not only Warner’s vast library for VHS, but adding the pre-1986 MGM/UA library to the WHV portfolio. He also acquired distribution rights to programming from Lorimar, Turner, Castle Rock, Hanna Barbera, PBS, BBC, IMAX, National Geographic, New Line and HBO. By 2002, WHV revenues were more than $4 billion annually.
  
  By the early 1990s, however, the home video revolution began slowing and Lieberfarb, along with a number of hardware companies, began searching for a next-generation optical disc format. Toshiba had been developing a CD-sized optical disc format, while Sony-Philips proposed a competing alternative. Along with IBM, Lieberfarb helped broker a unified compromise format to avoid a Beta-VHS-like war.
  
  But Time-Warner owned many of the DVD patents and the other studios balked at paying royalties to a rival, as well as voicing concerns about piracy. Lieberfarb launched himself into the fray, brokering deals to mollify executive anxieties and get all the studios to release titles to make the format a success.
  
  And successful it was. Only five years after DVD made its debut, hardware and software revenues topped $30 billion. In recognition of his efforts, Lieberfarb, as well as executives at Toshiba, received an Emmy. In 2002, Lieberfarb became the first recipient of the Wharton/Infosys Technology Change Agent award. The following year, Lieberfarb was awarded a Legion of Arts and Letters award from France, Cannes Film Festival Medal du Festival, and the MIPCOM DVD Lifetime Achievement Award.
  
  Lieberfarb left Warner in 2002 and consulted with Toshiba and Microsoft on the HD-DVD format. In 2003, Lieberfarb founded the Los Angeles-based consulting and investment firm Warren N. Lieberfarb & Associates, LLC.
  

  
• Donald Linder

  Donald Linder

  Co-Inventor, Cell Phone

  When Motorola research engineer Don Linder was told on December 4, 1972, that he had eight weeks to develop the first handheld wireless phone, he was unfazed. Linder had worked on numerous crash development programs during his seven years at Motorola. Linder lead a team of more than a dozen engineers to develop the DynaTAC, the first mobile wireless phone, not just before the scheduled FCC hearings in May 1973 to decide if AT&T would get a monopoly for the new cellular spectrum, but by March, so he could take his annual skiing trip with his wife.
  
  Linder was born August 17, 1943, in Osceola and raised in Centerville, both small towns in Iowa. His father was an engineer for the local electric utility with an interest in radio, and father and son built “stuff” in their basement. In 1965, Linder graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He later earned his master’s from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1979. Thanks to the success of the manned space program, the country was science crazy. Linder received seven different job offers before accepting one in Motorola’s Applied Research division.
  
  For five years before Cooper knocked on his engineer’s bench, Linder had been designing frequency synthesizers, a method to generate multiple frequencies electronically from a single crystal, critical to developing smaller, lighter radio phones.
  
  When Linder got the handheld assignment, the frequency synthesizer was just one of a dozen components he and his team had to shrink to fit into a handheld portable. Under Linder’s leadership, the team designed and built two DynaTAC portable phones measuring 1-7/8 inches wide, 3-1/2 inches deep, 9-inches tall (not including the antenna), and weighing 45-ounces. Each accessed 380 duplex channels thanks to Linder’s frequency synthesizer, and the rechargeable nickel cadmium battery was good for 36 minutes talking and 12 hours in standby.
  
  Linder continued working on Motorola’s cell phones. In 1987, he was named vice president of the technical staff, then director of the Corporate Applied Research Labs in 1990. Linder joined the Cellular Subscriber Sector of Motorola in 1994, to found a research lab, which developed several generations of custom processors for CDMA digital signals, voice recognition technology for phone dialing, new product concepts that led to the first speakerphone in a portable, the use of GPS for cellular location and the physical design for Motorola’s RAZR phone.
  
  Linder retired in 2001 as vice president and director of Motorola’s cellular subscriber sector research lab. He has been awarded 13 patents, is a member of Motorola’s Science Advisory Board, and has received the Motorola Dan Noble Fellow award and the Motorola Distinguished Innovator award. Last year, Linder, Marty Cooper and the cell phone development team were awarded the Great Moments Engineering Award from GlobalSpec.
  

  
• Dr. Fritz Sennheiser

  Dr. Fritz Sennheiser

  Founder, Sennheiser

  In a farm house laboratory abandoned by the occupying British army a month after the end of World War II, Professor Dr. Fritz Sennheiser founded his “Laboratorium Wennebostel” or Lab W. During the next 60 years, what became Sennheiser electronic GmbH & Co. KG grew into a world-leading manufacturer of microphones, headphones and wireless transmission systems with almost 2,000 employees and a bevy of engineering honors including an Emmy, a Grammy and a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
  
  Fritz Sennheiser was born in the Karlshorst section of Berlin on May 9, 1912. As a young boy he loved plants, but the ravaged Weimar Republic economy was hardly conducive to a career in landscaping. Sennheiser instead pursued another boyhood interest, technology. At age 12, he built his own radio receiver from a slide coil and a crystal.
  
  During his electrical engineering and telecommunications studies at Berlin’s Technical University, Sennheiser went to work for the Heinrich Hertz Institute for Vibration Research, a Mecca for telecommunications research named for the man who discovered radio waves. Sennheiser also studied the technology of speech and music and, during his final exams, helped develop an electronic organ used at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1938, he followed one of his instructors to a new Institute for Radio Frequency Engineering and Electroacoustics at the University of Hanover and, in 1943, earned his doctorate.
  
  Allied bombing, however, destroyed most of the Institute’s research labs. Sennheiser located a former youth hostel in the small village of Wennebostel, just north of Hanover, and re-founded the Institute. At war’s end on May 8, only seven of the 50 employees of the Institute remained, and a British communications unit took over. When the British occupation unit left a few weeks later, Sennheiser moved back into the abandoned farm house and founded his Lab W.
  
  Lab W initially developed tube voltmeters for Siemens, and, one year later, started designing microphones following an urgent request from Siemens. In 1952, Lab W manufactured its first miniature magnetic headphone capsule, the HM 11, and the MD 21 microphone, which is still manufactured today. In 1954, Lab W unveiled the MD 81, the first modern shotgun microphone.
  
  The company was renamed after its founder in 1958, a year after the company exhibited the first RF wireless microphone system, the Mikroport, for professional TV and stage use. In 1968, the company developed both the first open-back headphone, the HD 414, of which more than 10 million were sold, and the MK 12, the first professional RF wireless condenser clip-on microphone. In 1977, the company unveiled the world’s first open electric headphones, the 2000.
  
  On Sennheiser’s 70th birthday in 1982, he handed the management of the company over to his son, Professor Dr. Jorg Sennheiser, who has continued to secure the company’s success and is today chairman of the supervisory board. Sennheiser himself remained a consultant and limited partner. That year he was made an honorary member of the German Electrical Industry Association where he had been a board member for 16 years.
  
  In 2002, Dr. Sennheiser was awarded the Gold Medal from the Audio Engineering Society in recognition of his lifetime contributions to the professional audio industry. The company still places great emphasis on its founder’s philosophy to give engineers free rein in their creative ideas, no matter how crazy those ideas might seem, as it is often these ideas that result in the best developments. Dr. Sennheiser passed away on May 17, 2010, and is survived by his son, Prof. Dr. Jorg Sennheiser.
  

  
• Richard Sharp

  Richard Sharp

  President, Circuit City

  It’s been said that life’s a circle, something Richard Sharp knows a lot about. As a boy, the budding electronics aficionado spent hours perusing the catalog of Lafayette Radio. Lafayette Radio was purchased by Wards TV. Wards TV turned into Circuit City. And the boy who flipped though the Lafayette catalog, as an adult, became president and CEO of Circuit City, leading the company through its period of greatest growth and helping to make it one of the nation’s premier big box superstore retailers.
  
  Sharp was born in Washington, D.C., in April 1947. He turned his boyhood passion for electronics into a vocation, studying electrical engineering at the University of Virginia (1965-1966) and computer science at The College of William and Mary. He later attended Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program.
  
  After starting his career as a computer programmer, Sharp founded Applied Systems Corp. (ACS) in 1975. Sharp was the sole shareholder and served as CEO, leading the company as it grew to more than 300 employees. ASC developed custom hardware and software business systems using mini and microcomputer technology, including a low cost online POS system especially well suited for big ticket retailers. In 1978 ASC sold one of its systems to Wards TV, which had been founded in Richmond, VA, in 1949. During the process of customizing and implementing the system, Sharp developed a strong relationship with Wards TV CEO Alan Wurtzel.
  
  Impressed by the management team and prospects for rapid growth in consumer electronics, Sharp joined Wards in 1982 as an executive vice president. In 1984, the company renamed itself Circuit City and Sharp was elected president. He was named CEO in 1986 and chairman and CEO in 1990. The following year, Circuit City entered the New York City market, using the remnants of the Lafayette Radio stores that it had bought in the early 1970s as a base.
  
  During his tenure, the number of Circuit City stores mushroomed from dozens to hundreds; revenues grew from $175 million to $12.6 billion and market capitalization increased from $18 million to more than $12 billion. Circuit City was one of the Good to Great companies described in Jim Collins’ 2001 best seller. Circuit City was also the number one performing stock on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1980s. One dollar invested January 1, 1980, returned more than $80 dollars just 10 years later.
  
  From 1990 to 2000, Sharp simultaneously served as chairman and CEO of Circuit City spin-off CarMax and led the team that created the consumer-friendly used car concept. CarMax is now America’s largest used car retailer with annual revenues exceeding $8 billion in 2007. He retired from Circuit City’s day-to-day management in 2000 and retired as CarMax’s chairman of the board in 2007.
  
  In 1992, Sharp was a founding investor and chairman of Flextronics, a leading electronics design and manufacturing company with annual revenues exceeding $30 billion. In 2005, he was a founding investor and chairman of Crocs Inc., the manufacturer of the now ubiquitous plastic shoes.
  
  In addition to his corporate success, Sharp has served on numerous other for-profit and non-profit boards, including time as chairman of the National Retail Federation, the Virginia Business Council and Children First America. He founded and was principal contributor to Children First Virginia, an organization that provides scholarships for low-income K-8 students. He also serves on the boards of Johns Hopkins and UVA Medicine, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Richmond and the VCU School of Engineering Foundation.
  

  

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