Glenn Henry ''(né'' Gaylord Glenn Henry; born July 26, 1942

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

), is an American

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

industry executive, cofounder of Centaur Technology, and inventor of computer technology at the advent and frontier era of the development of personal computers. He holds over 300 US patents.

Education

In 1966, Henry earned a BS degree in mathematics from

California State University, Hayward California State University, East Bay (Cal State East Bay, CSU East Bay, or CSUEB) is a public university in Hayward, California. The university is part of the 23-campus California State University system and offers 136 undergraduate and 60 post ...

. The following year he earned a MS degree in mathematics.

Career

Henry started his business career at IBM, where he worked for 21 years until 1988. He was the instigator, lead architect and development manager responsible for the IBM System/32,

IBM System/38 The System/38 is a discontinued minicomputer and midrange computer manufactured and sold by IBM. The system was announced in 1978. The System/38 has 48-bit addressing, which was unique for the time, and a novel integrated database system. It w ...

(forerunner of the

IBM AS/400 The IBM AS/400 (Application System/400) is a family of midrange computers from IBM announced in June 1988 and released in August 1988. It was the successor to the System/36 and System/38 platforms, and ran the OS/400 operating system. Lower-cost ...

), and

IBM RT PC The IBM RT PC (RISC Technology Personal Computer) is a family of workstation computers from IBM introduced in 1986. These were the first commercial computers from IBM that were based on a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture. Th ...

(forerunner of Power systems). He was appointed an IBM Fellow in 1985. He went to work for

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

in 1988 as the company's first VP of R&D. In 1993 he was Dell's Senior Vice President in charge of products. While working there, he discovered that it was not possible to buy computer processors for less than $160 wholesale, thereby constraining the ultimate retail price of the resulting computer. In 1994 Henry left Dell and began working on a new

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

compatible design. Funding for this new processor was provided by IDT. His work lead to the foundation of Centaur Technology Inc. Centaur's first processor came to market in 1997. The company was subsequently bought by

VIA Technologies VIA Technologies Inc. (), is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory. It was the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a fabless semiconductor company, VIA c ...

in 1999. Henry was the President of Centaur Technology until his partial retirement in 2019 (he still works part-time remotely). In addition to his management duties, he wrote microcode for the company's

compatible processors, and he designed hardware for several co-processors.

Honors

In 1985 Henry was named an

IBM Fellow An IBM Fellow is an appointed position at IBM made by IBM's CEO. Typically only four to nine (eleven in 2014) IBM Fellows are appointed each year, in May or June. Fellow is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achie ...

. In 2016 Henry was named a "Distinguished Alumni" of

California State University The California State University (Cal State or CSU) is a public university system in California. With 23 campuses and eight off-campus centers enrolling 485,550 students with 55,909 faculty and staff, CSU is the largest four-year public univers ...

. In 2017 the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...

added Henry's oral history to their "key pioneers and contributors" history collection.

References

External links

"Oral history interview with Glenn Henry,"

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

, August 7, 2001
"Oral history interview with Glenn Henry,"

, August 7, 2017
Documentary about Centaur Technology featuring Glenn Henry
2015 {{DEFAULTSORT:Henry, Glenn American computer scientists American computer businesspeople California State University, East Bay alumni IBM employees IBM Fellows 1942 births Living people

Education

Career

Honors

References

Further reading

External links