Max Palevsky (July 24, 1924 – May 5, 2010) was an American art collector, venture capitalist, philanthropist, and computer technology pioneer. He was known as a member of the Malibu Mafia – a group of wealthy American Jewish men who donated money to liberal and progressive causes and politicians.
Early life
Palevsky was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Jewish immigrant parents — Izchok (Isadore) Palevsky (born May 10, 1890, in Pinsk, in the Brest Region of the Russian Empire [now in Belarus], died September 27, 1969, in Los Angeles), and Sarah Greenblatt (born May 16, 1894, died December 28, 1949, in Chicago). Izchok had arrived in Baltimore from Bremen, Germany, on the S.S. Brandenburg on March 18, 1910, while Sarah immigrated around 1916. Palevsky's parents spoke Yiddish fluently, but little English. His father, a house painter, did not have a car and had to use the Chicago streetcars to transport his equipment.
The youngest of three children, Palevsky grew up at 1925½ Hancock Street in Chicago. His older brother, Harry (September 16, 1919 — September 17, 1990), was a physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory; his sister, Helen (born 1920), married Melvin M. Futterman (December 28, 1918 – March 14, 1989).
After graduating from public high school in Chicago, Palevsky volunteered for the US Army Air Corps as a weatherman during World War II and served from 1943 to 1946. For his training he went for a year to the University of Chicago for basic science and mathematics and Yale University for electronics. He was then sent to New Guinea, which was the Air Force's central base for electronics in the South Pacific. After the war, the GI Bill made it financially feasible for Palevsky to earn a B.S. in mathematics and a B.Ph. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1948. Palevsky also did graduate work in philosophy at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.
Computers
After attending and resigning from a doctorate program in philosophy at UCLA, where he had served as a teaching assistant in the philosophy department, Palevsky discovered computer technology through a lecture at Caltech by John von Neumann about the advent of computer technology.
Palevsky began working in the computer industry in 1951 for $100 a week building computers at Northrop Aircraft, building copies of the MADIDDA, a special-purpose computer intended to solve differential equations. The MADIDDA was designed by physicist Floyd Steele, and who left Northrop in 1950, a year after the MADIDDA's completion. Palevsky worked to build copies of Steele's invention between March 1950 and January 1951. MADDIDA was priced from $25,000 to $30,000. MADDIDA would prove to be the last and most sophisticated dedicated differential analyzer ever built, since from then on all attention turned to electronic computers.
Two years after Palevsky joined Northrop, the division was sold to Bendix Corporation. Palevsky worked at Bendix from 1952 to 1956 designing digital differential analyzers as a project engineer, working on the logic design for the company's first computer. In March 1956, Bendix offered their first digital computer, the Bendix G-15, described by some as the first personal computer (a claim that is widely disputed). Palevsky worked on the DA-1 differential analyzer option, which connected to the G-15 and resulted in a machine similar to the MADDIDA, using the G-15 to re-wire the inputs to the analyzer instead of the custom drums and wiring of the earlier machine.