Page 145 - LLR-Exploration II

Howard Gordon

Bill Morem and Melanie Cleveland - bmorem@thetribunenews.com and mcleveland@thetribunenews.com,
August 3, 2013

…Howard Gordon lived a life propelled by vigorous curiosity and gusto and yet was low-key and
unassuming in the face of some of his culture-altering Internet contributions.

Gordon was among the first innovators who made streaming a video or song over the Internet possible
when he championed software-based compression for images and audio — MP3.

Want to attach and send a photo on the Internet? It was Gordon and his company, Xing Technology,
that wrote very fast JPEG compression software for personal computers in the 1990s. Before Xing,
nearly everyone thought special devices were needed to accomplish such data compression.

A graduate of UCLA with degrees in math and music, Gordon played classical piano, flute and guitar,
excelled in dressage and was an avid surfer, skateboarder and champion sailboat racer.
Figure 124: Howard
Gordon, Class of 1970
Amy Kardel of Clever Ducks, a computer networking services company in San Luis Obispo, remembered
Gordon as “absolutely brilliant and just the neatest guy.”

Born Oct. 10, 1952, in Montebello, east of Los Angeles, and raised in Pomona, Gordon’s interest in
computers goes back at least 40 years, long-time friend and collaborator Eric Redemann said.

While the two were college roommates at UC San Diego in the early 1970s, Redemann recalled, Gordon took
a summer job on campus that entailed making a technical, animated film using the university’s number-
crunching computer center.

Prior to microprocessors, computer centers at that time were usually huge buildings holding vast banks of
computers with long waiting lists for users.

Redemann said Gordon figured he could get exclusive time on the computers if he worked all weekend and
let the other students have access during the week.

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