Charles Simonyi

Microsoft Office developer

• Born: September 10, 1948
• Place of Birth: Budapest, Hungary

Primary Company/Organization: Microsoft

Introduction

As a computer programmer and software developer, Charles Simonyi led the team that developed Microsoft Word, Excel, and other successful and influential application programs. He is credited with helping to develop such basic elements of personal computing as icons, pull-down menus, and the mouse. Before he joined Microsoft, he was employed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, where he led in the development of a text editor and graphical user interface that made personal computing possible. Leaving Microsoft in 2002, Simonyi cofounded Intentional Software Corporation. He also earned attention as a philanthropist and one of the first space tourists.

Early Life

Charles Simonyi was born Károly Simonyi on September 10, 1948, in Budapest, Hungary. His father was a professor of electrical engineering, and through his influence Simonyi was allowed to spend time assisting an engineer who was working on one of the few computers in Hungary at that time, a Russian-made Ural II with two thousand vacuum tubes. Sixteen-year-old Simonyi was hired as a night watchman at the Central Statistical Office so that the computer could be left on overnight to conserve the vacuum tubes. It was during this period that he began writing programs, one of which brought him a job offer from a computer research facility in Copenhagen, Denmark. Because he was still seventeen when he graduated from high school, too young to be drafted by the military, he was allowed to accept the job for one year. He and his father planned for this to be Simonyi's way out of Communist-controlled Hungary.

After eighteen months in Denmark, Simonyi left for the United States, where he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study engineering and mathematics. He worked in the university computer center to earn enough to pay his tuition. A program he wrote as a student led to a job with the Berkeley Computer Corporation. He was recruited in 1972, as he was completing requirements for a bachelor of science degree, to work at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Assigned to a PARC team that was developing the Alto, Xerox's first personal computer, one of the projects he worked on was the development of a text editor for the Alto. He was also a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University at the time, and he decided to make the text editor project part of the research for his dissertation. In 1975, Bravo, the first text editor to implement a variety of features such as upper- and lowercase characters, underlining, boldfacing, justification, and margin setting, became operational. Bravo also allowed users to make changes, such as adding text, moving blocks of text, deleting text, and incorporating graphics into a document. Simonyi received his PhD from Stanford in 1977.

Life's Work

In 1980, Simonyi met Bill Gates, and the following year he accepted an offer from Gates and moved to Seattle to start Microsoft's new-applications group. Until his arrival, Microsoft had focused on programming languages and operating systems. Simonyi brought with him the knowledge of the software he had worked on during his time with Xerox. He invented the method of writing code that Microsoft's programmers continued to use for more than twenty-five years. Building on the Bravo product, Simonyi and his team created the first version of the word-processing program Word in 1983. Features such as line breaks, boldfacing, and italics on screen and typeset-quality printing were innovations in the program. Not only was Word compatible with the MS-DOS operating system; it was also among the earliest applications to appear on IBM's OS/2 and Apple's Macintosh computers. The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1989, two years ahead of Corel's WordPerfect for Windows—an edge that helped to establish Word as the leading word-processing program. By 1994, it held a 90 percent share of the market.

Simonyi is also considered the father of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program. Electronic spreadsheets were not new. A Harvard Business School student had invented VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") in 1978. Simonyi had insisted, upon his arrival at Microsoft in 1981, that the company procure the latest in graphical user interface (GUI) technology. Having created Bravo using GUI, Simonyi strongly believed in the future of the technology, a belief shared by Gates. Microsoft introduced a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982, which became Microsoft's best-selling application, but then Multiplan's dominance was challenged by Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus seemed to be winning the competition by 1983.

On October 25, 1983, Gates summoned Simonyi and other strategists to a retreat at the Red Lion Inn near Bellevue, Washington, to consider action. The result of the session was the concept for what became Microsoft Excel. A trademark lawsuit by a software company that had developed earlier a banking program called Excel required that the Microsoft name be used with the company's new program. In September 1985, the first version of Microsoft Excel for the Macintosh shipped. The first Windows version was released in November 1987. Lotus, like Corel, was slow to produce a Windows 1-2-3 application, and by 1988 Excel was leading the spreadsheet competition. The program was the first that allowed the user to define the appearance of the spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes, and cell formats) and the first to introduce intelligent cell recomputation, which allowed changes to cells dependent on the modified cell without recomputing the full spreadsheet.

Microsoft quickly became the leading software developer for personal computers, due in large part to Simonyi's contributions. During the 1980s, as Microsoft researchers worked to develop and improve the Windows operating system, the company was financially supported by profits from Simonyi's application programs. The company's growth into the leading software developer for personal computers was due in no small part to its software applications.

By 1991, Simonyi had become chief architect of Microsoft Research, a title he held until 1999. Dissatisfied with the costs of software failure, which (according to a 2002 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology) ran as high as $59.5 billion annually, he wanted to develop an approach to stem the waste of resources—not only in dollars but also in talent and time. The concept, which he called "intentional programming," would ultimately, he hoped, result in generic tools created by programmers that could be modified by end users according to their needs. By March 1995, his team had built a working system for using intentional programming. In September 1995, he delivered a paper, "The Death of Computer Languages," in which he described his ambition and the result of his team's research. In 2001, Microsoft began pushing developers who wrote software for Windows to adopt a new programming system, the .NET Framework. Not only did this system require a less radical break from conventional techniques, but it also produced finished work. Clearly, the time was not ripe to push Simonyi's intentional programming. Simonyi left Microsoft in 2002, taking with him a patent-cross-licensing agreement that allowed him to use the concepts of his intentional-programming research but forbade him to take any of the code developed while he was employed by Microsoft.

After leaving Microsoft, Simonyi founded an independent company, Intentional Software, an engineering firm that focused on realizing his vision of software less prone to errors and less expensive. In 2017, Intentional Software was purchased by Mixcrosoft.

Simonyi's company was not his only new adventure in the twenty-first century. In April 2007, he became the fifth-ever space tourist, transported to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz rocket and spending two weeks there. He visited the International Space Station a second time in March 2009, making him the first person to make two trips as a space tourist. He reportedly paid $25 million for the privilege of traveling in space.

According to Forbes, Simonyi had a 2024 net worth of $7.2 billion.

Personal Life

A noted philanthropist, Simonyi endowed several professorships. These included the Simonyi Professorship of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, held by his friend, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, from 1995 to 2008; a Simonyi Professorship for Innovation in Teaching at Stanford University in 1997; and the Simonyi Professorship of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2005. In January 2004 he established the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, which operated until 2013. It awarded grants to institutions such as the Seattle Symphony, the Seattle Public Library, the Metropolitan Opera, the Juilliard School, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Simonyi's collected paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Victor Vasarely, artists whose work he felt anticipated the digital age, and showcased them at Villa Simonyi, his glass-and-steel residence in Medina, Washington, designed by legendary Seattle architect Wendell Lovett. Simonyi had a relationship with the entrepreneur and television personality Martha Stewart from 1993 to 2008. He married Swedish consultant Lisa Persdotter, three decades his junior, in 2008. The couple had two children together.

Bibliography

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