1 | Name: | Dr. David W. Packard | |
Institution: | Packard Humanities Institute; Stanford Theatre Foundation | ||
Year Elected: | 2006 | ||
Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | ||
Residency: | Resident | ||
Living? : | Living | ||
Birth Date: | 1940 | ||
In 1985, David Packard developed the Ibycus Scholarly Computer, which was fully custom hardware and software and included a high-speed hardware "search engine." The machine was designed to read (and search) a CD-ROM containing large quantities of ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Nearly 300 of these were sold to universities and individual scholars to support teaching and research in these languages; many are still in use today. In 1987, he founded the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), one of the five largest foundations supporting the humanities in the nation, with the purpose of supporting the use of technology in the humanities. Most early PHI projects involved the creation of databases of historic texts, from Greek Epigraphy to Benjamin Franklin. In 1999, PHI expanded to include archaeology, music, film preservation, and education. In archaeology, PHI organized and funded a major conservation program at Herculaneum in Italy, an international archaeological initiative in Albania, and an emergency rescue excavation at Zeugma in Turkey, including the conservation of dozens of Roman mosaics. In music, PHI organized and funded a new scholarly edition of the complete works of CPE Bach and is collaborating with the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg to transform their definitive New Mozart Edition into a fully digital scholarly edition that can be kept up-to-date and will be freely available on the internet. In film preservation, PHI is building a new conservation center for the Library of Congress to house the Library's enormous collection of film, television, and recorded sound. PHI also provides major support for the UCLA Film and Television Archive. David Packard also founded the Stanford Theatre Foundation to renovate and operate the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto which for sixteen years has shown classic Hollywood films, all selected by Packard. |