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Bernard M. (Barney) Oliver, who directed research at the Hewlett-Packard Corporation for four decades, died of heart failure at his Los Altos Hills home on Thursday. He was 79.
Trained as an electrical engineer, Dr. Oliver was pivotal in the flowering of modern technology in the Silicon Valley. It was under his leadership that the first hand-held calculators were produced at Hewlett-Packard in the early 1970's. Later in his career, he founded Biosys, a company specializing in biological controls for agriculture, and turned his attentions to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.
Upon completing his studies at Stanford and the California Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate in 1940, Dr. Oliver joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York. He initially worked on schemes for improving the quality of then-new television systems, but shifted his attentions to radar after America became involved in the Second World War.
His enthusiasm for this work caused him initially to reject an invitation by fellow Stanford alumni William Hewlett and David Packard to join their growing electronics company in Palo Alto. But a year later, in 1952, Dr. Oliver became Hewlett-Packard's Director of Research. In 1957, he was named a Vice President, and joined the Board of Directors.
Dr. Oliver held over fifty patents and was the architect of much of the ground-breaking technical development at Hewlett-Packard. He is probably best known for his work on the HP-35, the first hand-held calculator. The possibility of such a device occurred as Hewlett-Packard engineers were considering what product should follow the successful HP 9100A, a programmable desktop electronic calculator which used discrete components. In 1970 integrated circuits, which combined many such components in one package, were just becoming available. "We realized that if we took the 9100 and converted it to integrated circuits, we could miniaturize it and carry it in our shirt pockets," said Oliver. Hewlett liked the idea, and gave Oliver's group a year to develop the product. Today, its successors are used by millions of people, and Dr. Oliver received the 1986 National Medal of Science for this work. He also served as a Vice President and later as President of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).
At the same time he was developing miniaturized calculators, Dr. Oliver co-directed a summer study at NASA's Ames Research Center on a scheme to use radio telescopes to search for evidence of advanced extraterrestrial societies. This study, called Project Cyclops, became the basis for much of the modern SETI effort. Prominent among these was an ambitious NASA program for which Dr. Oliver served as a senior manager. In 1993, when congressional action ended NASA involvement in SETI, Dr. Oliver was instrumental in finding philanthropic funding to continue part of the experiment under the auspices of the non-profit SETI Institute in Mountain View, where he was also a Board member. At the time of his death, he was working as a Senior Scientist for Project Phoenix, as the privatized search is called.
Dr. Oliver grew up on the family ranch in Soquel Valley, and graduated from Stanford University in 1935 prior to his graduate work in electrical engineering and physics at Caltech. In 1945 he married Priscilla (Suki) Newton, who died in December, 1994. In addition to his contributions to technology, Dr. Oliver served on the Palo Alto School Board and was a supporter of the Los Altos Repertory Company, where his wife often performed.
He is survived by his three children, Karen Newton Oliver of Vancouver, B.C., Gretchen More Oliver of San Francisco, and William Eric Oliver also of San Francisco.
The family has requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the SETI Institute, 2035 Landings Drive, Mountain View, CA 94043.
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