Arnold Spielberg, who helped son Steven make his first movie, dies at 103

Army vet co-designed computer that allowed for invention of BASIC coding language, created system for Shoah Foundation to catalog tens of thousands of interviews of survivors

Arnold Spielberg, whose experiences during World War II inspired his son Steven Spielberg to direct “Saving Private Ryan,” has died at the age of 103.

Spielberg died Tuesday in Los Angeles of natural causes, his children said in a statement published in the Hollywood Reporter. His children reportedly were with him at the time of his death.

“Due to circumstances and safety precautions around the pandemic, a celebration of life is tentatively set for fall 2021 and aligned with the Jewish tradition of unveiling the headstone,” the statement said.

The statement, according to the Hollywood Reporter, also said that their father “taught them to ‘love to research,’ to ‘expand their mind,’ to ‘keep their feet on the ground but reach for the stars’ and perhaps most fatefully to ‘look up.’”

Spielberg enlisted in the US Army following the attack on Pearl Harbor and became a communications chief. He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery.

Nancy Spielberg, the youngest of four siblings that include director Steven, seen beside her father Arnold Spielberg just before he turned 99 in 2015. (Courtesy Nancy Spielberg)

Spielberg and Charles Propster designed the GE-225 mainframe computer in the late 1950s while working for General Electric. The machine allowed computer scientists at Dartmouth College to develop the programming language BASIC, which would be essential to the rise of personal computers in the 1970s and ‘80s.

“Dad explained how his computer was expected to perform, but the language of computer science in those days was like Greek to me,” Steven Spielberg told the General Electric publication GE Reports. “It all seemed very exciting, but it was very much out of my reach.”

Later on he understood.

“When I see a PlayStation, when I look at a cellphone — from the smallest calculator to an iPad — I look at my dad and I say, ‘My dad and a team of geniuses started that,’” Spielberg said in the family statement.

Arnold Spielberg said of his son in a 2016 interview with GE Reports, “I tried to get him interested in engineering, but his heart was in movies. At first I was disappointed, but then I saw how good he was in moviemaking.”

He assisted his then 17-year-old son Steven in the making of the more than two-hour movie “Firelight,” which his son directed, shot, edited and composed the music. It was screened in one movie theater in Phoenix in 1964.

In the mid-1990s, the elder Spielberg created a system that enabled the USC Shoah Foundation Institute to catalog some 52,000 interviews of Holocaust survivors and witnesses and 105,000 hours of visual history. The foundation was founded by Steven.

Along with Steven, he is survived by three daughters — Anne, a screenwriter; Sue, a marketing executive; and Nancy, a producer — as well as four stepchildren, 11 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.