Eagle Berns

Eagle Berns ( - September 19, 2004) worked for over thirty-five years in the computer software industry at Apple Computer, Oracle Corporation, and Software Publishing Corporation (SPC). During his tenure at those companies he established a reputation for forming strong R&D teams, and focusing their energies on producing high quality software products in a timely fashion.

After obtaining his BS and MS in computer Science at Washington University, he was a systems programmer at Stanford University for sixteen years

In the early 1980's Eagle co-wrote the Apple II computers games Pie Man and The Coveted Mirror and published them through Penguin Software. With both, his accomplished goal was to create games that were both entertaining and non-violent. Later Eagle also co-wrote the Macintosh version of the Graphics Magician for creating animation.

From late 1984 until 1989 Mr. Berns was at Apple. He started as manager of the group responsible for the software for the Apple IIgs machine. The Apple IIgs shipped on time, with what was recognized at the time as some of the best software and GUI interface to appear on the market. Eagle then transferred to the Macintosh Development organization, and after a short time as manager of languages for the development systems group (DSG), replaced his boss and remained at Apple as manager of DSG for the rest of his time at Apple. During this period, he was responsible for products which included MPW (the Macintosh Programmers Workshop), HyperCard, ResEdit, and AppleScript. Here also, he was able to produce quality products in a timely manner by focusing his energies on the organization structure made up of developers, QA personnel, and documentation people. Many of his management skills evolved from extensive management training courses provided by Apple.

Mr. Berns also served as Senior Vice President of Intellicorp Inc. of Palo Alto.

Eagle was director of the Oracle Toolkit organization which was responsible for the software layer that allowed all Oracle products to run cross-platform on all the operating systems Oracle ran on. During his three and a half years there, he evolved the organization into sub-groups with specific platform agendas, and built a QA and documentation group into the process with optimal efficiency and consistent documentation capabilities.

Mr. Berns served as senior vice-president of research and development at SPC (the makers of Harvard Graphics). His assignment was to bring new products to market, and reduce the length of the product cycle for Harvard Graphics. In less than two years, under his leadership the company produced four new products (Harvard ChartXL, Harvard Spotlight, OnFile, and Harvard Montage), plus two new releases of their flagship product, Harvard Graphics.

Afterwards, Eagle first contracted at Silicon Gaming, and was then offered a position as Vice President of Software, and held that position until just before he left.

Mr. Berns then turned his attention to teaching software engineering at a few of the community colleges on the San Francisco Peninsula until his death from heart complications at the age of 63.