A Midcentury GE Superstar Returns to the Limelight

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.