Alumnus Helped Usher in Age of Personal Computing and Guide Lunar Astronauts Home

May 15, 2017 • by Marc Airhart

Bob O'Rear said his time in graduate school on the Forty Acres made a huge mark on his career for introducing him to astrophysics and computer programming.

A man stands with arms crossed in front of a wall that says "The University of Texas at Austin College of Natural Sciences"

Bob O'Rear (M.S. '66) wrote computer code that helped guide Apollo astronauts safely home and led the team that developed software for the first IBM PC. Photo credit: Vivian Abagiu.


Group portrait of 11 men and women from the 1970s

O'Rear (second row, far left) was employee number seven at Microsoft, a small software company that mostly wrote software for computer languages at the time of this company photo (1978).

Black and white photo of NASA mission control room with people sitting at rows of computers

NASA's Mission Control staff in Houston on the first day of the Apollo 10 mission in May 1968.

A group of adults and students posing for a photo in a lab, with some students wearing white lab coats

O'Rear provided the funding for the DIY Diagnostics research stream in the Freshman Research Initiative.

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