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class of 1963
inducted in 1993
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Andrew Egendorf
Attorney & Entrepreneur
After graduation from Cheltenham High School in 1963, Andrew Egendorf
continued his education at MIT, where he earned a Bachelor's Degree in 1967.
He entered Harvard Business School in 1967. In January, 1968, Egendorf and a friend wrote to famed consumer advocate
Ralph Nader offering to work with him that summer
if he would consider working with students. As a result, Nader
established the student task forces which William Greider
of the Washington Post later dubbed "Nader's
Raiders". (Egendorf's group studied the
Federal Trade Commission, and in March, 1969 presented its report to
Congress.) Nader suggested that Egendorf
enroll in Harvard Law School as a means of being better able to
effect social changes, and in 1968 Egendorf was
selected as the first entrant for Harvard's newly-created joint Law-Business
program, from which he graduated in 1971 with honors. As a programming
project for Professor Ralph Zani at HBS, in March,
1970 Egendorf wrote the first electronic
spreadsheet program for the use of his classmates on the school's time-shared
computer.
In 1967, while at MIT, Egendorf met Russell Noftsker, the General Manager of MIT's Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, and in 1980 with Noftsker
and a group from the AI Lab, founded Symbolics, Inc.,
the company which manufactured and sold the first computer built specifically
to run AI software. AI allows computers to emulate many aspects of human
behavior including reasoning and decision making, and has become an integral
part of computer technology today. On March 15, 1985, Symbolics
was assigned "Symbolics.com" as the first ".com" domain
on the Internet.
In 1977, Egendorf joined the law firm of Widett, Slater & Goldman, a
major general-practice firm in downtown Boston. In 1983 he left his position as a
senior partner to become General Counsel of Symbolics.
Symbolics became a public company in 1984 and
traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol SMBX.
In 1994, Egendorf became interested in patent law
as applied to the emerging field of electronic commerce, and subsequently
applied for numerous patents worldwide dealing with e-commerce, many of which
have now issued. He registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office in 2001, and now is President and CEO of Tradecraft
Corporation, an intellectual property holding company based in the Boston area.
Egendorf lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts with his wife Linda, who is a
nationally-recognized sculptor. Art Calendar magazine selected
"Aftermath", a work by Linda Egendorf,
for the cover of its October, 2001 issue, which was "Dedicated to those
who lost their lives on 9/11".
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