William D. Strecker

William D. Strecker, known as Bill Strecker, is an American computer engineer who earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, completing his doctorate in 1971 under C. Gordon Bell. He spent nearly thirty years at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he was the principal architect of the VAX minicomputer architecture, first delivered in the VAX-11/780 in 1977 as a 32-bit successor to the PDP-11 and one of the most influential computer architectures of its era. He later served as the company's chief technology officer from 1985 and as senior vice president for corporate strategy and technology from 1989, and afterward held leadership roles at Compaq Computer Corporation and Flagship Ventures. He holds sixteen patents and received the IEEE W. Wallace McDowell Award in 1985.