Bill Poduska

Bill Poduska is an electrical engineer and serial entrepreneur whose career connects the Space Race to the workstation era in a way few Massachusetts technologists can claim. A Memphis native who earned three MIT degrees in seven years, he led the manned computer systems laboratory at NASA’s Electronics Research Center in Cambridge before co-founding Prime Computer in 1972, which produced the first commercially available virtual memory minicomputer. After a philosophical split with Prime’s leadership over product strategy, he founded Apollo Computer in 1980, one of the earliest manufacturers of graphical workstations, acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1986, Poduska went on to found Stellar Computer and helped establish Advanced Visual Systems in Waltham, sustaining a pattern of company creation that few of his contemporaries matched.