EE alumnus posthumously inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame
A life of firsts
Purdue University’s College of Engineering is both pleased and gratified to announce that Frank S. Greene Jr., who received his master’s degree in electrical engineering from Purdue in 1962, has been posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Greene, who received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Santa Clara University, led a life of firsts. As one of the first Black engineers in Silicon Valley — he worked for the pioneering firm Fairchild Semiconductor — he led a project to design gate arrays and semiconductor memory for the ILLIAC IV supercomputer, the first platform to sport all-semiconductor mainframe memory and deploy parallel processing.
Frank’s inventiveness was put to the test in that task. The chips required more than 1,000 microscopic transistors, each of which had to work perfectly. Collaborating with Wendell Sander, the two engineers invented a solid-state random-access memory solution that provided information storage redundancy to offset any defects. The patented work dramatically reduced waste and production costs in what was, at the time, the world’s fastest memory chip.
That life of firsts went well beyond his engineering prowess, extending to the realms of entrepreneurship, business, venture capital, education and mentorship.
After his stint at Fairchild, Greene founded his first company, Technology Development Corp., to make test and instrumentation systems for clients like NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Navy. It became the largest Black-owned business in Northern California, making avionics equipment for the F-16 Falcon and the space shuttle program, and a system for scuba divers to communicate.
He also launched ZeroOne Systems, which sold large-scale scientific computer systems to the government for engineering and research, and later became president of Networked Picture Systems, where he led a successful turnaround and assisted in the company’s merger.
Greene co-founded the venture capital firm New Vista Capital to support women- and minority-owned businesses. He developed a model for leadership called VRE (vision, relationship, execution), founding the Go-Positive Foundation to spread his vision to young business professionals and provide scholarships to high school and college students.
As an educator, Frank Greene taught electrical engineering and computer science at five universities — Howard, Northwestern, Santa Clara (he later became that school’s first Black trustee), Stanford (where he became assistant chairman of the electrical engineering department), and Washington University in St. Louis.
His firsts extended to his own life. The first Black cadet to complete Washington University’s four-year ROTC program, he joined the U.S. Air Force, where he worked at the National Security Agency on high-performance computers, achieving the rank of captain.
Greene was the recipient of numerous awards. He was included in a 2009 Palo Alto, California, exhibition titled “Soul of Technology: 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology.” Purdue presented him with an Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer Award and a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award. He received the Black Alumni Achievement Award from Washington University, the Distinguished Alumni Award from Santa Clara and the Silicon Valley Engineering Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and was recognized as a member of that organization’s Hall of Fame.
The Frank S. Greene Jr. Middle School in Palo Alto was named in his honor. The Frank S. Greene Scholars Program was established in 2001 to support students in K-12 education in math and science. The program features activities like monthly scholars sessions, a science fair, an engineering competition, career day, summer science institutes, and parent enrichment.
Frank Greene was born in Washington, D.C., in 1938 to Frank S. Greene Sr. and Irma Olivia Swygert and grew up in St. Louis. Raised amid segregation, he became part of the civil rights movement, engaging in sit-ins around the Washington University campus to integrate places that Black students wanted to patronize. He told Palo Alto Online a funny — and trenchant — story about going to a pizza parlor and finding that the owner was already willing to serve them.
“The problem was that between us we didn’t have enough money for one order, so from that day, I’ve always said, ‘You have to be prepared for opportunity when it arrives… You’ve got to be prepared for success.’ We weren’t expecting to succeed, so we didn’t take any money.”
Much of his career was dedicated to advancing African Americans in technology. He established a scholarship program for African American scholars in honor of his wife Phyllis, herself an advocate, and with whom he had two children, Angela W. Greene Gage and Frank S. Greene III.
Frank passed away on Dec. 26, 2009. He was 71.