I met Howard at Univ of IL Circle campus in the late 70s. I was hired on for work on two projects,
MISL and TVO. MISL was the Medical Information System Lab project that had the head of the
Information Engineering Department, Bruce McCormick, along with the Head of the Eye and Ear Infirmary,
Mort Goldberg, as co-Head Researchers. Howard and I selected a DEC computer system as the main part of the
MISL system with other minicomputers as the local resource in each lab that was selected for an instrument that
would be interfaced to the computer so the data taken by the instrument (an eye tonometer for example) could be
connected to the database on the DEC host computer. Howard integrated the computer so it could network with
another MISL computer on the Circle campus. This was done before the internet was invented, so it used
RS-232 modems for communication. The MISL Eye and Ear Infirmary host computer was across the street from the
Eye and Ear Infirmary at a new computer center. We made many trips from Circle campus to Med center campus
in Ruth's car. Howard enjoyed the acceleration that it had which had me fasten my seat belt extra tight.
In the warmer months Howard rode his 10 speed on the lake front bike path. I asked him about his path
and met up with him at Devon and Sheridan for the ride many times. Howard was working on a software
project with S.K. Chang. There were several of Chang's students working on the RAIN Relational Information
language processing software. Howard did not trust the lot of them and wrote the entire RAIN application himself.
S.K. Chang left Circle to be departement head at IIT. After Howard got his PhD, he invited Howard to join him.
After Howard was hired at IIT, he moved out of his parents apartment just west and south of Devon and Western
in Chicago to an apartment in Skokie. I helped him move with my van. I had started EPIX in 1983 and by 1985 I was
getting requests for software for the image capture boards that EPIX was making. Howard wrote several image
processing applications in his extra time while teaching at IIT.
Howard taught at IIT for 7 years, but when he did not get tenure, I asked him to join EPIX.
chuck petersen
December 10, 2025
