NBC Bay Area shared this video on Youtube in 2023! Roy Clay was an American computer scientist and inventor. He was a founding member of the computer division at Hewlett-Packard, where he led the team that created the HP 2116A16-bit minicomputer.
Learn more about Roy Clay from the Paolo Alto History Museum
Known as the Godfather of Silicon Valley, Roy Clay Sr. was not only one of the first pioneers in the world of computer software during the late ’50s but a pioneer for African Americans breaking into the tech field. Whilst future techies such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were just toddlers, Roy was developing computer software.
Born in Kinloch, Missouri in 1929, Clay grew up in the Jim Crow days of the South in a home with no indoor plumbing. A good student, he was the first African American to graduate from St. Louis University in 1951 when there was no such subject as computer science. Graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, he struggled to find a job.One of his first job interviews upon graduating was with McDonnell Aircraft. When he arrived he was told: “Mr. Clay, we are very sorry but we have no jobs for professional Negros.” He soon became interested in computing and in 1956, not to be dissuaded, he landed a job as a computer programmer for that same company.
In 1958 he obtained a job at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in California where he wrote software for the U.S. Department of Energy that demonstrated how particles of radiation would spread after a nuclear explosion. Word of Clay’s work got back to David Packard of the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto and in 1965 he recruited Clay to set up HP’s computer development business.