Hans R. Bruijnes

Hans R. Bruijnes of Livermore died on Feb. 12. He was 86.

Bruijnes was born on August 16, 1927 in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, the youngest of three sons born to Johannes Bruijnes, a physicist, and his wife, Johanna Van der Hauw.

The Bruijnes family came to America in 1933. They returned to Holland in 1938, just before the Nazi occupation. Bruijnes never forgot how surprised and happy his parents were to see him one day when they feared he had been killed in an air raid. After the war, the Bruijnes family returned to the U.S. where he attended Middlebury College in Vermont. Soon he met the love of his life, the charming and artistic Marlise Papendorf. They married in 1950.

In 1953, after earning a mathematics degree from San José State, Bruijnes was hired by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to support physicists in their work. His first job was to use a Marchant desk calculator to check the results given by their new UNIVAC computer. When the UNIVAC was proven reliable, he became a computer programmer. He was named supervisor of Batch System Development in 1960. In 1961, he moved his family to Livermore from Palo Alto where he had been residing since 1949. In 1964, he became Division Leader of the System Development Group. By 1968, he had been promoted to Assistant Department Head for Planning. Bruijnes ultimately achieved the position of Deputy Director of the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center.

In 1957, neither NASA nor the Air Force had any capability to track a satellite, so they called on Bruijnes and his team to predict where Sputnik would land. By about 1965, LLNL had a computer system written in a higher level language, a system that was time-shared, and had batch capability. It was well ahead of anything else in the industry. They set up an archival storage base and did a lot of cross compiling, switching between different computer systems. They were able to run a number of things in parallel on their Cray supercomputer before the factory itself had developed robust parallelism. He also did pioneering work on computer-generated speech and music. He and his colleagues really enjoyed their work. On his retirement in 1989, Bruijnes was surprised to learn that the lab had kept him out of the draft years earlier because his work was important to national security.

In addition to his computer skills, Bruijnes was a skilled craftsman. Like many men of his generation, he made much of the family's furniture. He also loved to travel, go camping and fly his plane.

For many years after his retirement, Bruijnes would join former colleagues weekly for breakfast and lunch. For several years, he collected pastries donated by the Panama Red Coffee Company, delivering them to Shepherd's Gate and later to the veterans at the Livermore V.A. Hospital. Bruijnes was a well-known character in downtown Livermore. A little less than a year ago, he had moved from his home of 50 years into Rosewood Gardens, a retirement complex closer to downtown.

Bruijnes is preceded in death by his parents Johannes and Johanna Bruijnes; brothers Frans and Henk; and his wife Marlise Bruijnes.

He is survived by daughter Susan Bruijnes and her partner Stephan Bianchi of Santa Cruz; son Ray Bruijnes and his partner Cindy Cobb of San Francisco; and brother-in-law Claude Mandell of Pleasanton. He also leaves behind numerous relatives in the Netherlands and many friends in Livermore.

There are no plans for a memorial service. Donations may be made in Hans' name to the Valley Humane Society.