Robert Swirsky (born December, 1962, Brooklyn, NY) is a computer scientist, author and pianist. In the early 1980s, he was one of the first regular contributors to the nascent computer magazine industry, including Popular Computing, Kilobaud Microcomputing, and Interface Age to Creative Computing.[1]
Swirsky holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Hofstra University, and is one of Hofstra's Alumni of Distinction. While there, he met VOIP pioneer Jeff Pulver who attended Hofstra as an undergraduate student.[citation needed] After graduating, Swirsky worked on projects ranging from aircraft avionics to one of the first all-software digital radio receivers for a VLF submarine application.
In 1989, Swirsky moved to California and joined Olivetti Advanced Technology's Unix group. He was a frequent speaker at Uniforum, Usenix, and other Unix shows, and hosted parties where he entertained people with song parodies about the Unix computer operating system, some of which were featured in a special Evatone Soundsheet issue of Interface Age magazine.[2] He studied music and piano at Hofstra University with professor Morton Estrin.
After Olivetti, Swirsky went to Adobe Systems, where he was a member of the core PostScript team, and the team that developed the first versions of Photoshop for Microsoft Windows, including Win32s on Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11. His work made him a participant in many industry standards committees, such as TWAIN, and he was a frequent speaker and contributor at ACM SIGGRAPH events. Before leaving Adobe in 1998, he worked with Will Harvey on HTML rendering technology.