HARPSWELL — Howard Briscoe was born in Ridley, Pennsylvania, on July 19th, 1930. He attended MIT, graduating in 1952 with a major in geophysics. As an undergraduate he became an early programmer of the Whirlwind computer and while working on his master’s degree, was a member of MIT’s Geophysical Analysis Group, exploring the use of computers to analyze seismic data in the search for oil. He not only wrote programs himself, but also taught a whole group of Geophysics graduate students how to program.

This group of students was instrumental in the digital revolution in seismic exploration in the decade of the 1960s. His master’s thesis, entitled “Statistical Evaluation of Mineral Deposit Sampling,” was completed in 1954, after which he joined the Gulf Research and Development Co. in Pittsburgh, PA. However, within about a year, frustrated by the slow progress at Gulf, he returned to MIT, joining Lincoln Laboratory where he worked first on the SAGE air defense system and later on missile re-entrant studies, living for two years at the far end of the Vandenberg missile range on Kwajalein island in the Pacific.

Leaving MIT he joined the consulting firm of Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge. There he continued pursuing his interest in signal processing techniques as applied to a wide variety of military and medical projects. He was instrumental in the design and implementation of the Butterfly based torpedo simulator at the Naval Underwater Systems Center (NUSC) in Newport, RI. He worked with NUSC for about 10 years and actually moved to Newport for 2 years.

In 1979 he headed a team at Barking Sands Test Range on Kauai that demonstrated the ability to detect anti-submarine aircraft from a submerged submarine. In addition to his signal processing expertise, Howie was a superb systems engineer and as such he consulted for many projects including, for example, BBN’s Prophet medical information system. In what may be the most far-reaching contribution BBN made in its thirty years of medical computer work, Howard, after visiting several potential PROPHET user sites, saw that most investigators kept their lab notebook data in tabular format. PROPHET’s resulting column and-row table format predated the first spreadsheet programs and went on to be the basis for BBN’s commercially successful RS/1 software product.

Howard was married to Martha Briscoe from 1955 to 1985, and Traudel Arrol, from 1993 to 2010. He enjoyed many outdoor activities including sailing, hiking and skiing, in both the U.S. and Europe. He belonged to a few outdoor clubs, including SubSig, Southern New Hampshire Ski Club, and the Ericson Sailing Club.

On June 15th Howie’s Ericson sailboat was seen drifting toward the rocky shore of Casco Bay in Maine on his shakedown voyage for the 2013 season. The harbor master where he moored his boat went out to investigate and found Howie dead at the tiller. He is survived by a son William Briscoe of Berkeley, California, and a daughter Kathleen Briscoe of Carlise, Mass., and his partner, Cecilia Menard of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Memorial services are planned for late October. A website has been set up in his honor: https://sites.google.com/site/ howardbriscoesmemorialsite/ which will have updated information about his memorial in the fall, or you can email wwbcooks@gmail.com with the subject “Howard” to receive a notice.

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