Paul Armer, a longtime lecturer and director in the Computer Science department at Stanford, died last month on Jan. 6. Armer, 91, had been hospitalized at Stanford Hospital due to pneumonia.
Much of Armer’s work analyzed the relationship between computers and society — specifically, how computers could be applied to daily life and how society would shape itself around them. From 1972 to the 1980s, Armer lectured on such matters at Stanford in the CS department. One of his early predictions was the rise of electronic banking — a concept that he questioned regarding its surveillance abilities.
“Such a system not only collects and files a great deal about your financial transactions … but the system knows where you are every time you make such a transaction,” Armer forewarned.
Privacy and the processing of information were issues that Armer was well-versed in. In addition to his writings and lectures on the subject, Armer provided testimony for a number Congressional committees and Presidential Commissions.
Armer began his career at RAND Corporation in 1947. For over two decades he was an instrumental member of the institute, spending about half of that time as the head of RAND’s computer science department. It was under his leadership that they build the JOHNNIAC, one of the first computers; the computer, used for engineering calculations, now resides at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
Armer moved to Menlo Park in 1968, leaving RAND to direct the Stanford Computation Center. The Computation Center, at the time, was a non-profit business under the CS department. It ran IBM computers and allowed campus programs to make use of them for a fee.
“Paul was an intelligent man, and he was interested,” said Edward Feigenbaum, who Armer succeeded at the Computation Center.
Armer left Stanford to join Harvard’s Technology and Society program in 1970. He returned in 1972, serving as a lecturer as well as fellow and program coordinator at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
In 1978, Arner became the founding executive of the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI), a research center chronicling information technology and computer programming. Founded in Palo Alto, CBI moved to its permanent home at the University of Michigan in 1981.
Along with his distinguished career in computer science, Armer fought in the European theater of World War II and received three medals for his service there in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He is survived by his wife Joan Roberts Armer, six children (three with his widow), four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his first wife and one of their sons.
Contact Jacob Nierenberg at jhn2017 ‘at’ stanford.edu.