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Movies

A Midcentury GE Superstar Returns to the Limelight

GE Reports Staff
March 08, 2023

In Steven Spielberg’s latest film, The Fabelmans, the director brings it all back home with a largely fact-based portrayal of his upbringing in New Jersey, Arizona, and Northern California. Burt Fabelman, as many GE history buffs could tell you, is based on the very real Arnold Spielberg, Steven’s father, who worked for the company in Phoenix in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where he developed one of the first mainframe computers and helped pave the way for the programming of the BASIC computer language, which ushered in personal computing.

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computers

Computer Pioneer Arnold Spielberg Dies At 103. He Helped Build GE's First Digital Blockbuster

Tomas Kellner
August 27, 2020

One day, when he was still barely a teenager, the film director Steven Spielberg came to visit his father, Arnold, at work. It was the late 1950s and the elder Spielberg was building computers for GE in Phoenix. His designs included a revolutionary machine that a group of computer scientists at Dartmouth College later used to write BASIC, the programming language that revolutionized personal computing.

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computers

BASIC Necessities: How GE Helped Launch The Computing Language That Changed The World

Liz Wishaw
Tomas Kellner
October 11, 2019
In the wee hours on May 1, 1964, in the basement of Dartmouth’s College Hall, something extraordinary happened. Professor John Kemeny and a student typed a single-word command, “RUN,” from two separate computer terminals at the same time, and the program executed flawlessly. “That marriage of simultaneity and simple language is the birth of BASIC,” said Dan Rockmore, a professor in Dartmouth’s mathematics and computer science department. 
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computers

Happy Birthday, Mr. Spielberg: Computer Pioneer Who Helped Design GE’s First Computers Turns 100 On Monday

Tomas Kellner
February 05, 2017

The name Spielberg brings to mind a movie magician whose blockbusters changed storytelling forever. But Steven Spielberg isn’t the first disruptor in the family. His father, Arnold, who turns 100 on Monday, helped mold computing — a field whose rise and dominance over all areas of life has no peer in the history of mankind.

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History

GE At 125: These Pioneers Helped Shape The Way We Live [Video]

Tomas Kellner
December 27, 2016
GE will be 125 years old in 2017, and the company has shaped many aspects of modernity we now take for granted. Over the last few years, we’ve visited pioneers such as Nick Holonyak, who developed in GE labs the first LED that emitted visible light, Joseph Sorota, who helped build the first American jet engine at GE Aviation, and Arnold Spielberg, who designed the computer that ran the first version of BASIC, the programming language that helped launch home computing.
computers

Jurassic Hardware: Steven Spielberg’s Father Was A Computing Pioneer

Tomas Kellner
May 10, 2016
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From Thomas Edison to former President Ronald Reagan and novelist Kurt Vonnegut, GE has employed a number of luminaries since its founding 124 years ago. One famous name missing from this list was Spielberg.

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BASIC, Woz and How GE's Mainframe Midwifed Modern Computing

May 07, 2014
Fifty years ago, on May 1, 1964, two Dartmouth professors and their students developed the BASIC programming language and supercharged the information age.
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