Carel Scholten

Carel S. Scholten (1925 to 2009) was a physicist and a pioneer of computing in the Netherlands. Born in Amsterdam, he studied physics at the University of Amsterdam from 1945 to 1952. In 1947 the Mathematisch Centrum asked him to help build an automatic calculator with his friend and fellow student Bram Loopstra. Their first system, the ARRA I, was not a success, but its successor the ARRA II, on which Gerrit Blaauw also worked, was. From 1954 he built the transistor-based ARMAC with Loopstra and Edsger W. Dijkstra, who wrote its software and collaborated with him for more than thirty years. In 1958 he joined Electrologica, later Philips Electrologica, and developed the Electrologica X1 with Loopstra, of which forty were installed by 1964. Eindhoven University of Technology gave him an honorary doctorate in 1991.