Internet Pioneer Now Digitizing Our College Years

Shortly after leaving Yale and completing graduate work at MIT, Harry Forsdick (PC) joined Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), the engineering firm responsible for creating the hardware, software and communication protocols for the ARPANET, the predecessor and testbed for the Internet.

After a career in technical leadership and general management with BBN, CMGI, Genuity and Level 3, Harry retired. But he didn’t stop working. He created LexingtonPhotoScan.com, a small, mostly local business that digitizes photos, documents, movies, audio recordings, and videos so they can be stored and viewed electronically. Harry says his retirement business (there’s an oxymoron!) converts any analog media to digital, a continuation of a professional career that was about transitioning from analog to digital.  (See this 1984 article in the New York Times where Harry waxes eloquent for “multimedia documents.”)

Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Incidentally, this business also plays into Harry’s long interest in photography, multi-media, and gadgets. His recent photography camera fun has included 360-degree, 3D and drone photography, and he has been seen wearing a virtual reality headset.

Creation of The Archives Section

More relevant to our Class, Harry is a co-webmaster of this site, and he’s responsible for creating some of the wonderful materials seen in the brand-new Archives section of this website, specifically:

• the Banner,
• the Old Campus,
• the 25th Reunion Essays,
• the Class History (as it appeared in 1969), and
• the Letter from Kingman Brewster on Admissions Criteria used for our class.

Basically, the first three items are how the pictures and information initially in your Profile got to be there.

Recently, Harry digitized the recruiting film from 1966, To Be A Man, and put it up on the website. Several members from Davenport dug out some old copies of The Rogues’ Gallery, a mini-yearbook of remembrances for Davenport; Harry has finished scanning one of the them and is scanning the others for later publication.

More Coming Soon

JP Jordan (BK), one of the founders of the New Journal, dusted off his original copies, got them out of his barn (before his wife tossed them), and mailed them to Harry.  The scanning work should be finished in a month or so.

Those of you who’ve looked at back issues of the Class Notes may have noticed they only go back to 1995 — when the Yale Alumni Magazine first created an online edition.  We want online copies back to 1969!  In late January, Harry and his wife made a second trip to Sterling Library to locate back copies of the Class Notes so they can be scanned and uploaded. In Harry’s first trip (with JP Jordan), they just cased the joint, discovering all of the do’s and don’ts of a library that takes their archival responsibilities seriously.

Harry explained “Scanning the Class Notes and then running Optical Character Recognition on the scans will make them available to the search engine on the site. That way, anyone searching for your name (using the search function at top right of any page on the site) will find you — everything published in the Class Notes and other posts.”

What’s in YOUR Attic?

Let Harry Scan Stuff  You’ve Saved!

Last, Harry issued an open invitation to all Classmates: “If you have materials from those bright college years that you think would be of interest to others — college publications, recordings of key events, flyers, pictures, etc. – please send me an email (harry@forsdick.com) describing what you have. I will get back to you to coordinate from there.”

This website will be a shared resource we can use and enjoy as these items from our youth are added. It will also be a repository that we will donate to Yale and perhaps add to their archives. So, if you have any items, from “back in the day,” PLEASE contact Harry and make arrangements with him to digitize them and post them here for all to enjoy.