User:Rnoftsker/Sandbox

Andrew Egendorf was born in 1945 near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the same house as actor Kevin Bacon, thereby conceivably garnering him a Bacon number of 1.

Egendorf showed an early aptitude for invention, science and math, and in Junior High School, as a science project, designed and launched a weather balloon – purchased from Edmund Scientific - which brought him to the attention of the Science Faculty at Cheltenham High School and Norm Edmund of Edmund Scientific Co. [The Evening Globe, 12/15/59] Egendorf subsequently was asked by Edmund to make crystal models for the introduction by Edmund in its 1960 catalog of the scientific modeling tool D-Stix.

As a High School freshman, Egendorf presented a paper at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on the results of a magnetism experiment he performed with equipment he designed and built, following which he was invited to attend a National Science Foundation sponsored Mathematics Institute at Temple University and as a Junior in High School was offered the opportunity by the Penn Mutual Life Insurance company of attending an actuarial training course. [The Times Chronicle, 7/10/62]

Penn Mutual previously had given Egendorf the opportunity to program its Remington Rand 409-2, the world's first mass-produced computer to be shipped to a customer, 1951. As one of a handful of surviving people who actually programmed the machine, Egendorf helped fact-check information on the 409 line of computers for the recent book on the history of computing. [Electronic Brains, by Mike Hally, BBC, 2005] Egendorf now is actively involved with the Rowayton Historical Society, Rowayton Connecticut, in its efforts to accurately present the history of the earliest commercially-available computers, particularly since most of the history has been lost, and these machines have been eclipsed in the popular press and the popular mind by the Remington Rand UNIVAC.

After graduation from Cheltenham High School in 1963, Egendorf continued his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a Merit Scholarship, where he earned a Bachelor's Degree in Earth & Planetary Sciences in 1967. He then entered Harvard Business School.

In January, 1968, Egendorf and a friend wrote to famed consumer advocate Ralph Nader offering to work with him that summer if he would consider working with students. Egendorf convinced Nader that there was a huge reserve of available "student power", and as a result Nader established the student task forces which William Greider later dubbed "Nader's Raiders". [Washington Post, 11/13/68; Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, by Justin Martin, 2002; An Unreasonable Man, a film by Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan, 2006]. Egendorf's group studied the Federal Trade Commission and in March 1969 testified before Congress. [Washington Post, 3/19/69] Nader suggested to Egendorf that he obtain a law degree as a better means of effecting social change than obtaining a business degree.

Not wishing to abandon his MBA degree, Egendorf fought for the establishment of a dual-degree program at Harvard, and in 1968 Egendorf was selected as the first entrant for Harvard's newly-created joint Law-Business program, from which he graduated in 1971 with honors. As a programming project for Professor Ralph Zani while at Harvard Business School, in March 1970 Egendorf wrote the first electronic spreadsheet program for the use of his classmates on the school's teletype-input-output, time-shared IBM computer.

In 1967, while at MIT, Egendorf joined AI Lab Prof. Seymour Papert’s Summer (computer) Vision Project where he met Russell Noftsker, the co-founder and General Manager of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and in 1980 with Noftsker and a group of 20 other people, mostly from the AI Lab, founded Symbolics, Inc., the company which manufactured and sold one of the earliest workstations and the first computer built specifically to run AI software. Egendorf, Noftsker and Robert Adams incorporated Symbolics, Inc. in Delaware on April 9, 1980. AI enables computers to emulate many aspects of human cognitive processing including reasoning and decision making, and has become an integral part of computer technology today. On March 15, 1985, Symbolics was assigned "Symbolics.com" as the first dotcom and first registered domain on the Internet.

In 1977, Egendorf joined the law firm of Widett, Slater & Goldman, a major general-practice firm in downtown Boston. In 1983 he left his position as a senior partner to become General Counsel of Symbolics. Symbolics became a public company in 1984 and traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol SMBX.

In the early 90s, Egendorf became interested in patent law as applied to the emerging field of electronic commerce, and subsequently registered with the Patent Office in 2001 and was granted numerous patents worldwide dealing with e-commerce. He currently is President and CEO of Tradecraft Corporation, an intellectual property holding company based in the Boston area.

Egendorf's wife is Linda Egendorf, an internationally-recognized sculptor. Art Calendar magazine selected "Aftermath", a work by Linda Egendorf, for the cover of its October, 2001 issue, which was "Dedicated to those who lost their lives on 9/11", and in 2005 she was the only woman sculptor accepted from the United States into the International Sculpture Biennale in Toyamura, Japan.