on Success By Aruni Gunasegaram and Pam Losefsky
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Photography by Tommy LaVergne
The next time you retrieve cash from a machine without walking into the bank, or the next time you slap down your little plastic debit card to buy lunch, you can thank Jimmy Treybig ’63. Before Treybig became the founder, CEO, and chair of Tandem Computer Corporation, there were no reliable credit cards or debit card transaction processing systems, and the ATMs that did exist weren’t very secure. Treybig is the architect of the fault-tolerant computer, a device so ubiquitous in the world today that life without it is practically unimaginable.
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ack in 1974, people still stood in line to deposit paychecks, paid for groceries with cash, and put big purchases like furniture on layaway plans. It was Treybig’s vision for parallel computing, which enabled financial service firms to establish the foundation for electronic money, that changed these cumbersome processes and made modern life in the Western world possible. And the groundwork was laid during his undergraduate days at Rice University. A ham radio enthusiast, Treybig entered Rice in 1959 with a love for electronics and majored in electrical engineering. While computers had not yet arrived in Houston, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the physics, math, and technology taught in the engineering program served him well. “Rice gave me a foundation in how to think, and that is far more important today than anything I could have learned about a computer then,” he says. “Even my art history class was valuable.” If the electrical engineering program imparted analytical thinking, it was Treybig’s experience working on the college newspaper that sparked his interest in business. Working for his good friend, Dan Tompkins ’63, he made about $500 selling ads for the Thresher during one year, but when he found out that Tompkins had pulled down nearly $16,000 in the same time period, he realized there were a few things about business he’d better learn. A quick study, Treybig took over the business manager position for the Campanile the following year and hired someone else to sell the ads. He made a lot more than $500 that year. With this first business lesson behind him, he resolved to start his own company, but he knew he still had a lot more to learn.
Fall ’06
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