Huskey was born in
Whittier, in the
Smoky Mountains region of
North Carolina and grew up in
Idaho. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics at the
University of Idaho. He was the first member of his family to attend college. He gained his
Master's and then his
PhD in 1943 from the
Ohio State University on
Contributions to the Problem of Geöcze. Huskey taught
mathematics to U.S. Navy students at the
University of Pennsylvania and then worked part-time on the early
ENIAC and
EDVAC computers in 1945. This work represented his first formal introduction to computers, according to his obituary in
The New York Times. He visited the
National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the
United Kingdom for a year and worked on the
Pilot ACE computer with
Alan Turing and others. He was also involved with the
EDVAC and
SEAC computer projects. Huskey designed and managed the construction of the
Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) at the
National Bureau of Standards in
Los Angeles (1949–1953). He also designed the
G-15 computer for
Bendix Aviation Corporation, a machine, operable by one person. He had one at his home that is now in the
Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, D.C. After five years at the National Bureau of Standards, Huskey joined the faculty of the
University of California, Berkeley in 1954 and then
University of California, Santa Cruz from 1966. He cofounded the computer and information science program at UC Santa Cruz in 1967. He became director of its computer center. In 1986, UC Santa Cruz named him professor emeritus. While at Berkeley, he supervised the research of pioneering programming language designer
Niklaus Wirth, who gained his PhD in 1963. During 1963-1964 Prof. Huskey participated in establishing the Computer Center at
IIT Kanpur and convened a meeting there with many pioneers of computing technology. Participants included
Forman Acton of
Princeton University,
Robert Archer of
Case Institute of Technology, S. Barton of CDC, Australia, S. Beltran from the Centro de Calculo in
Mexico City,
John Makepeace Bennett of the
University of Sydney, Launor Carter of
SDC - author of the subsequent Carter Report on Computer Technology for Schools,
David Evans of
UC Berkeley,
Bruce Gilchrist of IBM-SBC, Clay Perry of
UC San Diego,
Sigeiti Moriguti of the
University of Tokyo,
Gio Wiederhold, also of UC Berkeley,
Adriaan van Wijngaarden of the
Mathematisch Centrum in
Amsterdam,
Maurice Wilkes of
Cambridge University. Huskey was
Professor Emeritus at the
University of California after his retirement at the age of 70 in 1986. In 1994 he was inducted as a
Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery. Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum in
Mountain View, California, "described Dr. Huskey as a '
Zelig-like character, present at some of computing's greatest moments.'" == Personal life ==