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.
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.
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.
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.