Ambros Speiser

Ambrosius Paul "Ambros" Speiser (November 13, 1922 to May 10, 2003) was a Swiss computer scientist born in Basel and died in Aarau. He studied electrotechnology at ETH Zürich, earning his diploma in communications engineering in 1948, then in 1949 studied under Howard H. Aiken at Harvard and John von Neumann at Princeton. As chief engineer he led the technical development, from 1950 to 1955, of ERMETH, Switzerland's first electronic calculating machine, which became operational in 1955. He joined IBM in 1956 and served as director of the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory in Ruschlikon until 1966, when he left to direct research for Brown, Boveri and Cie at its Dattwil research center. He became a full professor at ETH in 1962 and served as the second president of the International Federation for Information Processing from 1965 to 1968, and received an honorary doctorate from ETH in 1986 for his pioneering work in computer science.