A celebration of life

by his wonderful loving life partner Eric C. Milliren of 32 years and twelve years of marriage, his sister Joan B. Lefkowitz of Miami, FL, her husband Paul, their two children, Jeff and Sam, and, in turn, their five children. Steve’s parents and his maternal grandmother Sophie Kasdan, who had lived with the family throughout his youth and served as the family’s wonderful cook, all predeceased him. In addition to Eric and family, he is survived by many loving friends and wonderful colleagues.

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Steve was recognized as precocious while he was still very young. When he was in the second grade at an elementary school in Newton, MA, he took his first standardized reading test and scored beyond the fifth grade level (the highest the test could measure). When he was in the sixth grade his teacher allowed him a permanent hall pass—he could spend his time in school doing anything constructive anywhere he wanted, as long as he stayed in the building. He spent most of his time either in a newly equipped science lab or the library, though since the library was intended for children, he often brought a book from home.

 

He graduated in a class of about 300 from Henry Grady High School in Atlanta, GA, in June 1963. He had spent his four years in high school in a Ford Foundation-funded group of 30 of the best and brightest who took all their classes together with the best teachers in the school teaching the most challenging material they could; some classes were run as seminars with each student reading and preparing for presentation to the class a classic or recent paper in the field to be critiqued. At graduation he was recognized for his four local, national, and international science fair first places, his high standing in the National High School Mathematics Contest, his being one of the 40 national winners in the 1963 Westinghouse (now Regeneron) Science Talent Search, and his being a finalist in the National Merit Scholarship competition.

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In 1967, he earned an A.B. from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with Distinction (= magna cum laude) and Highest Honors (= summa cum laude) in mathematics. He had served as a member of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts Honors Student Steering Committee and as student representative on the Executive Committee of the faculty Honors Council, a member of the Joint Judiciary Council and chairman of the Robert Frost House Judiciary Council, and as chairman of the Unified Science Curriculum Committee of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts Honors Program. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi.

 

Steve earned his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1974. Both parts of his doctoral dissertation were published in respected journals. He served as a member of the University Senate Judiciary Committee, coordinator of the Rumor Control Center of the Office of the University Ombudsman, and as a counselor for the Cornell Draft Information Service. He was elected to Sigma Xi (The Research Society of North America). He was married from 1968 through 1973 to Nancy Ann Kaplan, PhD, whom he met at Michigan and lived together while we both did our PhDs until she fell in love with a fellow English student and divorced Steve.

 

During that period Steve was introduced to the TORI movement founded by Jack Gibb, who had served as the President of the Association of Humanistic Psychology. The letters in the acronym stand for Trust, Openness. Realization, and Interdependence and, as practice has borne out, they serve as the basis for developing a successful community, be it for a weekend, two weeks, or ongoing. Steve took part in about a dozen incredibly wonderful TORI communities; his most important and lasting result of his first one was recovering the freedom to cry, both for sadness and for joy.

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Steve served as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kansas (KU), Lawrence, KS, from January 1974 through June 1977 and as a tenured Associate Professor to June 1981. He was a member of a variety of departmental and university bodies. He had a very fruitful and enjoyable research partnership with Prof. Neil D. Jones during his time at KU and beyond.

 

From September 1979 through June 1981 he was on leave to serve as a Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University California, Berkeley. He also spent two terms as a visiting lecturer and researcher at Århus University in Århus, Denmark.

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In July 1981 Steve resigned from both of his academic positions to become a Senior Member of Technical Staff in Hewlett-Packard ‘s  Advanced Systems Laboratory in Palo Alto where he was a member of a seven-person team that designed the architecture for a new family of computers that would unite what had been H-P’s three disparate lines of systems from instrument controllers through mainframes.

 

In late 1983 Steve was made an offer he couldn’t refuse: to become employee no. 226 as the first manager in the Software Division of Sun Microsystems. He was recruited by the then Vice President of Software Eric Schmidt, PhD, who was recently Executive Chairman of Google and then its parent company Alphabet. He served as Manager of Programming Languages and Tools from January 1984 through September 1987 and was honored as the first Distinguished Engineer in the company. He also served on another seven-member team that designed a very different computer architecture named SPARC that survived from 1987 until mid-2018.

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From October 1987 through December 1994, having decided he wanted to devote more of his time to research, he split his time between what had become the SunPro division and Sun Microsystems Laboratories. His main project during that time was outlining and then beginning to write what would become the 850 pp. text Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation (published by Elsevier in 1997) that became for 15 years the standard text for graduate students and professionals in the field. He co-authored three other books with his eight-year research partner Neil Jones, who retired several years ago from being a Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He served as a book series editor for Springer-Verlag, wrote six book chapters, and more than 20 journal articles. A 1986 paper that he wrote with a student intern was anthologized as the best and most influential paper of the year in his specialty area.

 

Steve chaired the 12,000-member professional society in his specialty from July 1985 through June 1987, served on several conference program committees, chaired a couple of conferences, and served on several national professional commissions and committees. He delivered the keynote address at the 1992 Japanese Sun Users Group Symposium in Kawasaki City, Japan, and several half-day tutorials at conferences and short courses. He wrote over 50 technical reports and delivered nearly 60 professional talks at conferences, universities, and companies around the world.

 

He also held short-term positions with the National Institute of Science & Technology, Gaithersburg, MD; Lockheed-Georgia Co., Marietta, GA; NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA; the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, PR; and the IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA. He took part in 1976 in a NATO Advanced Summer Institute on Computer Architecture in Saint Raphael, France, and in 1977 in an Advanced Seminar on Program Semantics in Sophia-Antipolis, France. He has been listed in seven Who’s Who books.

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Steve came out as a gay man in early 1978 and began a long series of volunteer positions later that year as the only faculty member of the Board of Directors of Gay Services of Kansas, Inc., at the University of Kansas. The following year he and his lover John H. Bandy moved to the East Bay so Steve could begin the visiting position at U.C., Berkeley described above. That summer they saw advertisements for a “Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries” to be held Labor Day weekend in Arizona. They both took part and became founding members of the loosely organized international Radical Faerie movement. They took part in numerous Faerie gatherings across the U.S. until John died of AIDS in 1988. Steve (Rosemary for Remembrance) had continued to be involved until it became difficult for him to travel in 2016, and he served as Queen Registrar for three winter gatherings at the Breitenbush Retreat and  Conference Center in Oregon.

 

He and his sister were inculcated by their parents with the virtue of tzedakah (Hebrew for “charity” or “giving back”). In 1982 and 83 he was a Member of the Board of Directors of Golden Gate Performing Arts, San Francisco, serving as its secretary and president. From 2001 through its demise in 2014 he was a member of the Kaiser Permanente San Francisco HIV/AIDS Advisory Board (a partnership of Health-Plan members and healthcare providers), serving as its co-chair for a year and as co-chair of both of its committees numerous times. From 2002 until it ceased publication in 2015, he was a member of the Editorial Board of the Kaiser Permanente San Francisco HIV Update newsletter and wrote several articles for it.

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From 2003 to his death he was a member of what is now the Community Advisory Group of Bridge HIV, including serving as its representative to the Global Community Advisory Board (GCAB) of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network since 2006. He has been an AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC) Advocate since 2005. From 2007 through 2012 he was a member of the CDC-sponsored City and County of San Francisco HIV Prevention Planning Council, serving as co-chair of two of its committees and writing a chapter of the 2010 HIV Prevention Plan. From 2012 to his death he was a member of the University of California, San Francisco’s Clinical Research Site Community Advisory Board (CAB) for the NIH-sponsored AIDS Clinical Trials Group, serving as its GCAB representative beginning in 2016. Beginning in 2012, he was a member of the AIDS Treatment Activists Coalition.

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From 2013 until his death, Steve was a member of the NIH-sponsored Delaney AIDS Research Enterprise (DARE) to Cure HIV CAB; his most important project for the DARE CAB was creating the 2015 through 18 HIV/AIDS Cure Research Introduction, Glossary & Resource Guides, the most recent of which exists as a 62 pp. PDF and a hyperlinked webpage, a self-contained PDF version of the Introduction & Resource Guide, and a Spanish version of the Introduction as a PDF and a web page. Finally, in October 2015 he joined the Getting to Zero S.F. Consortium, which is devoted to achieving zero AIDS deaths, zero new infections, and zero HIV-related stigma in San Francisco by 2020.