Patricia Wirth grew up on a farm outside Nebraska City where an outstanding high school teacher sparked her love for mathematics. After receiving a four year Regents scholarship she earned a B.A. degree in mathematics in three years with honors from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1971. In her first job after college she worked as a statistical research assistant at the Washington University School of Medicine studying innovative forms of health care delivery. She received the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1978 and 1981 respectively.

In 1981 Pat joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff until 1985 when she became a Technical Manager supervising performance modeling of AT&T’s new 5ESS Switch, the first fully software controlled network switching element. In 1990 she was promoted to Head of the Department of Teletraffic Theory and System Performance. She led this evolving department that grew to over 50 experts chartered to assess and improve the performance of AT&T's networks, products and services until her retirement in 2005. During this period she championed a company wide initiative to apply Software Architecture Reviews to all new significant software systems utilizing independent experts from within the company over a multi- day effort. This program led to significant improvements of major software systems meeting their business mission. The paper (co-authored) describing these experiences was named among IEEE Software's 25th Anniversary Thirty-Five Top Picks out of the 1200 peer reviewed full- length articles it had published through 2008.

With the rapid growth of the global Internet in the mid-90s and the opportunity it presented for AT&T as a growth business, Pat moved the major focus of her team. Contributions included the first end-to-end performance modeling of internet based services and associated actual measurable network metrics gathered in real time that alerted when customers were impacted. This work helped AT&T enter into contractual arrangements with clear boundaries and associated measures of quality including penalties with major corporate clients that shared portions of the delivered service. Within AT&T it also helped grow a large new business as a major internet backbone provider and as a provider of contractual services branded and provided by third parties. Additionally, Pat and her team were thought leaders in the international teletraffic community organizing conferences, delivering seminal papers and fostering exchanges and cooperation.

While at AT&T Pat also chaired the AT&T Labs Fellowship Program that provided financial and mentoring support to women and minorities pursuing doctorates in the sciences and engineering; this program was awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring and supported nearly 100 students during her tenure. She has received the YWCA Tribute to Women and Industry Award, the Women of AT&T Management Executive Award and was honored as a “Master” by the University of Nebraska. In 1997 she was the first woman to be named an AT&T Fellow, the highest technical award given at AT&T, "for the application of teletraffic theory, network performance modeling and systems analysis leading to the world-class performance of the global AT&T network."

Dr. George F. Haddix, Ph.D. served as the Chief Executive Officer of PKWARE, INC. Dr. Haddix served as the Chief Executive Officer of Applied Communications Inc. He founded CSG Systems Inc., a subsidiary of CSG Systems International, Inc. and served as its President. Dr. Haddix served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PKW Holdings, Inc. He worked at PKW Holdings until 1997 and served as a Consultant to PKW Holdings, Inc., until December 1999.

He also co-founded CSG Systems International Inc. in 1994 and served as its President and Chief Technical Officer from 1994 to September 1997. He served as President of CSG Holdings, Inc. from November 1994 to December 1997.

He served as President and Chief Executive Officer of US WEST Network Systems, Inc. from 1987 to 1988. From 1989 to 1991, he served as General Partner in Hansen, Haddix and Associates. He served as the Chairman of the Board of PKWARE, Inc. He also served as Chairman of Applied Communications Inc. Dr. Haddix served as a Director of PKWARE, Inc. and served as Director of PKW Holdings, Inc.

He served as Director of infoGROUP, Inc. (formerly, InfoUSA Inc) from March 1995 to December 9, 2008. He served as a Director of CSG Systems International Inc. from 1994 to May 2005. Dr. Haddix received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Iowa State University in 1968, an MA from Creighton University and a BA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, all in Mathematics and has served on the faculties of three universities.

Ron Lockard was a Regents scholar at our University and majored in Mathematics and Physics. He was also elected to the Sigma Pi Sigma National Physics Honorary Society. Dr. Ted Jorgenson (a member of the Manhattan Project) was his faculty sponsor. He continued his studies in Business and Computer Science.

His outstanding undergraduate record led to him recognizing the role that Computing would play in the future of science and business in our nation. He was determined to be a part of that future. Upon graduation from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln he took a position in the emerging central computing organization at the university as the Programming Manager.

George Nagy was born in Budapest in 1937. After WWII, a chance meeting between his father and a friend resulted in the family’s migration to Canada instead of Australia. He graduated in Engineering Physics from McGill University in 1959. On completing the MS at McGill and the PhD at Cornell, he joined IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, where he was assigned to work on Chinese character recognition because all the Chinese scientists were busy with Cyrillic OCR. He tells what brought him to Nebraska:

“During the summer of 1966, I was chopping rats at Cornell University. Frank Rosenblatt, who had been my thesis advisor five years earlier and whose interests had shifted from perceptron models of cognition to neurochemical experiments, was attempting to understand and confirm the recently reported transfer of learning through brain extracts in worms and rats. I was assisting in the extraction of synaptic end-bulb substance from the cortex of rats trained to run a maze while waiting for the accumulation of the statistical data that Frank had invited me to analyze.

In Frank’s absence, I frequently showed visitors through the lab. One visitor interested in learning more about neural networks was Don Nelson, director of the computing center of the University of Nebraska. After some discussion of brain models and my work at IBM on pattern recognition, he invited me to give two or three weeks of lectures to his staff — before the rise of computer science departments, many computing centers had a strong research orientation. Impressed by Don’s enthusiasm and wide knowledge, I set to work in the fall to prepare the material for the lectures. Already aware that most of the basic algorithms in pattern recognition and image processing were being continuously reinvented with perspectives from statistics, linear algebra, switching theory, combinatorics, control theory, and psychology, I programmed and illustrated each algorithm with the same example. I also read eclectically, and collected experimental applications. The lectures were well received, so immediately after my return I compiled my notes and submitted the material to theProceedings of the IEEE. This article not only became a Citation Classic, but next year, while on leave from IBM with the departments of informatique and of neurophysiologie at the Université de Montréal, my notes passed the trial by fire in a graduate course.

The first visit led to another invitation to Lincoln five years later. On the basis of that first agreeable experience, and impressed by the department’s talented young faculty and the university’s exceptional computing facilities, I eagerly accepted the chairmanship of the University of Nebraska Department of Computer Science in 1972. One thing that I recall learning quickly was that at conferences in those years, recruiting committees had to queue up at the tables of the few available computer science faculty candidates!”

At Nebraska, Nagy coauthored conference papers and journal articles with more than a half dozen faculty and many students. In 1985, the declining health of aging parents prompted the family’s return to the East Coast. Since then, he has been Professor of Computer Engineering at RPI where he teaches pattern recognition, probability, and digital design. He participates in research projects with former University of Nebraska–Lincoln colleagues, keeps in touch with several Nebraska students (a few of whom have already retired), and enjoys introducing new graduate students from around the world to the joys and frustrations of research (23 PhDs to date). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, and received a Lifetime Contributions award from the document analysis community. In his spare time he enjoys skiing, sailing, and writing prolix surveys.

"State of the Art in Pattern Recognition," G. Nagy, Proceedings of the IEEE , vol. 56, #5, pp. 336-362, May 1968. Current Contents "Citation Classic", pp. 12, January 22, 1979.

Donald F. Dillon was born in Alliance, Nebraska, the eighth of ten children of Tom and Katherine Dillon. He attended a one-room country school until his family moved to Alliance, where he attended a parochial grade and high school. Upon graduation from high school, he attended Regis University in Denver, Colorado, and then transferred to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he received his degree. After his graduation from college, he enlisted in the Nebraska National Guard and upon ending his active duty assignment in 1966, he went to work for the National Bank of Commerce in Lincoln, Nebraska. He started work as a computer operator, was then a programmer, systems analyst, and ultimately a Senior Vice President and Director of the Information Management.

In 1976, Dillon and associate, Dale Jensen, recognized that the continuing miniaturization and cost-reductions of computer hardware could make the power of the computer available to the full-range of financial institutions, from the largest to the smallest of banks. They foresaw the potential for software that could meet the needs of these institutions. The software would have to be sophisticated enough to meet the ever-increasing demands of the banking industry and would require an on-going maintenance and support system. Together, they left their banking positions and founded Information Technology, Incorporated (ITI) , which grew to become a leading national provider of banking software and services. Developing a completely new line of software systems for financial institutions allowed them to take advantage of the latest innovations in computer hardware, without being limited to the older constructs of the existing software systems. Although the original market for these products was institutions being serviced by larger banks and independent processing firms, it was not long before larger and larger institutions, including the processing firms themselves, recognized the power  and superior functionality of these systems.  Now, well over 2,700 of the U.S. banks, savings institutions and processing firms are users of ITI’s products and services.  In May of 1995, ITI was acquired by Fiserv, Inc., and Dillon became Vice Chairman and a member of the Executive Committee for that firm. In July of 2000, Dillon became Chairman of the Board of Directors for Fiserv and also continues in his position as Chairman of ITI.

Fiserv, Inc (NASDAQ: FISV), a Fortune 500 company, provides information management and electronic commerce systems and services to the financial and insurance industries. Headquartered in Brookfield, Wis., the company is the leading provider of core processing solutions for U.S. banks, credit unions, and thrifts. Fiserv was ranked as the largest provider of information technology services to the financial services industry worldwide in the 2004, 2005, and 2006 FinTech 100 surveys. The company serves more than 18,000 clients, including every one of the top 100 banks in the United States. In 2007, the company completed the acquisition of CheckFree, a leading provider of electronic commerce services. Fiserv reported nearly $4 billion in total revenue from continuing operations for 2007.

Dillon has over 40 years of experience in the financial and data processing industries.  He is a member of the Board of Trustees for the University of Nebraska Foundation; a member of the University of Nebraska’s Directors Club, a Trustee of the Nebraska State Historical Society and formerly served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Executive Committee Member for Doane College in Crete, Nebraska. Dillon is also a Board Member of the Dillon Foundation, which he created in 1997 and which has granted several million dollars to various humanitarian and educational organizations within the State of Nebraska.

In addition to his Fiserv Chairmanship, Dillon is active in various real estate and resort development activities along with investments in and support of high-tech start up companies.

William C. Norris was born near Red Cloud, Nebraska, on July 14th, 1911. He was raised on a farm on the Republican River in south central Nebraska. He and his two sisters, including twin sister Willa who later taught at Michigan State University, attended a one-room schoolhouse where their mother had been the first grade teacher. He attended the University of Nebraska –Lincoln to study Electrical Engineering and graduated in 1932.  Shortly before his graduation, his father died suddenly and Norris returned home to help save the family farm in the midst of the depression.

He worked as a salesman for Westinghouse Electric for seven years until he left to work for the US Navy, where he rose to the rank of commander. In the Navy, he worked on intelligence problems related to the Enigma machine of the Germans and contributed to the breaking of that code. In Washington, he met and Married Jane Malley, a WAVES officer, with whom he would have eight children.

After the war, he co-founded Engineering Research Associates, Inc., in St. Paul, Minnesota. ERA made contributions to the development of digital computer technology, and later merged with Sperry Rand Corporation. Norris headed the Univac Division of Sperry Rand before leaving to found the Control Data Corporation.

Control Data started by selling magnetic drum memory systems to other computer manufacturers, but introduced their own mainframe, the CDC 1604, in 1958. The 1604 was primarily designed by Seymour Cray and the company soon followed with a series of increasingly powerful machines beginning with the CDC 3600. In 1965, they introduced the CDC 6600 which by all rights can be called the first supercomputer. The series of machines were very popular in research universities and government laboratories. As a result CDC, which had gone public, was suddenly the darling of Wall Street and in an envious leadership position with a machine ten times as fast as anything else on the market.

Norris was among the first to recognize the importance of scientific computing and he had the vision to create the fastest computers in the world. He knew from his Navy contacts that such machines were needed. In that effort, he became famous for taking on IBM, which, at the time, was somewhat distant from the need for and possibilities of large scale computational science machines.

He was also early and instrumental in convincing the country of the need to hasten the development of the use of computers in education. That vision led CDC to build PLATO, the first computer-aided instruction system. Using PLATO, the University of Illinois built an automated foreign language lab that set the standard for years to come of what could be done in this area. Other PLATO pioneers built “dry labs” that realistically reproduced the effects of traditional wet labs at a significantly lower cost of instruction. The logic and philosophy behind these learning units are easily recognized in many of today’s automated teaching units.

Norris was also an industry maverick who built on Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner-cities and disadvantaged communities. He argued long and hard that other industry leaders should follow his example and bring up the work capabilities of our undereducated population. He became a champion of moving factories into the inner-cities, providing stable incomes and "high-tech" training to thousands of people who would otherwise have little chance at either.

The CDC 6600 was such a significant threat to IBM’s business, that they quickly started a project of their own to grab the performance crown back from CDC and for the first time pre-announced an advanced Systems 360 that was promised to be faster than the 6600. The machine didn't yet exist and CDC carefully documented sales CDC lost to the unfinished IBM project.  In 1968, Norris launched an anti-trust lawsuit against IBM, which was unable to deliver on its promise of a faster machine, and CDC was awarded $600 million in damages. Norris was a hero to all those who suffered under IBM’s marketing strategies.

Norris continually purchased new companies to fold into CDC, and eventually returned to the peripheral market in the 1970s. This later move proved particularly wise. It was also during the 1970s that Cray left to form his own company, and quickly drove CDC out of its leadership position in the supercomputer market. This left CDC in second place in a market for a small number of machines. Soon large Japanese companies were gobbling up what Cray didn't. CDC tried to regain its footing in the supercomputer market by spinning off ETA Systems, in order to allow the developers to escape an increasingly difficult management structure inside CDC. This effort failed however and CDC gave up on the market entirely.

In the 1980s, CDC was left primarily as a hard disk manufacturer and CDC’s manufacturing facilities included plants in Lincoln and in Omaha.  Their series of SCSI drives were particularly successful. CDC morphed into Ceridian which was first headed up by another University of Nebraska–Lincoln graduate Jim Ousley and today has gown to be a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

Norris died on August 21 2006 in Bloomington Minnesota. The list of companies spun off from CDC over the years exceeds 30 and many still exist today with capital value exceeding many billions of dollars. Much of this success can be credited to Norris, who, though not educated in business and not subscribing to many of the then-held sacred cows of a successful business venture, gave rise to success that can only be measured by the return from hard work and diligent thinking that he brought with him from a Nebraska farm and a University of Nebraska education.

Eckstein, Peter. “William Charles (“Bill”) Norris”, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE Computer Society, April-June, 2007.

Worthy, J.C.  William C. Norris:  Portrait of a Maverick, Ballinger, 1987.