User:Joyschwab/Bob Schwabach

Bob Schwabach (born July 7, 1935) is a syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about technology. His column, "On Computers" appears each week in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Birmingham (Alabama) News, the Worcester, Massachusetts Telegram & Gazette, the Bangkok (Thailand) Post, and several other publications.

Personal Life and Background
[[Media:bobschwabach.jpg]] Bob was born and bred in Chicago, Illinois. He did undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and graduate studies at State University of New York in Cooperstown and the University of Delaware. The graduate studies, in the history of science and technology, were arranged by the Smithsonian, to prepare him to become a curator at the Museum of History and Technology.

Newspaper Days
Around the third year of graduate school, he shifted gears and became a reporter at Wilmington, Delaware News-Journal. He spent three years there, won a few prizes, hosted a radio talk show, and then moved on to a dozen more years with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Chicago Tribune. At the Philadelphia Daily News, he took first place in the Media Awards Competition.

Schwabach was a feature writer in Philadelphia and a food and restaurant writer in Chicago. In the late 1970s, he wrote an article about the first computers, which at the time included Ataris, Apples and Commodores. It was syndicated by the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain and news service and led to the 1980 "On Computers" syndicated newspaper column, the longest-running syndicated technology column in the world.

Besides writing the column, Schwabach was also director of technical communications for Argonne National Laboratory, where the atom bomb was developed. Schwabach answered media questions about bio-degradable plastics, synthetic chlorophyll, super conductors, maglev trains, nuclear reactors that never need to be cleaned or refueled, diamond coatings, silent submarine engines, and x-ray movies of chemical reactions.

Schwabach is married and has four children. He married for the second time in 1998 and now writes the column with his wife, Joy Schwabach.

Until 2008, the column was syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. It is now self-syndicated.