Rod Holt
Frederick Rodney Holt[1] (born 1934) is an American Electrical engineer and political activist. He is Apple employee #5, and developed the unique power supply for the 1977 Apple II. Actor Ron Eldard portrayed him in the 2013 film, Jobs.
Rod Holt
Background[edit]
Holt was born in 1934 to a psychiatry resident father and artist and teacher mother. He became interested in electronics by the age of 14 and taught ham radio courses for Wellesley High School by the age of 16.[2]
In 1952, after graduating from high school, Holt married his high school girlfriend Joanne. He also joined Ohio State University as a math major. He and Joanne had two children, Christine and Cheryl, during this period. Holt later stated that while at OSU, he also "became entranced with motorcycles and opened up my own motorcycle shop. That adventure failed within a year, however, and I then worked in the electronics industry to support my family. I continued to race bikes intermittently for the next twenty years."[2] By 1958, when he was a grad student at OSU, he also became a political activist. He would later become involved in OSU's Free Speech Movement, served as editor of the Free Speech Press, and reconfigured himself as a socialist.[2]
After graduate school, he became an electrical engineer with the Hickok Electrical Instrument company in Cleveland, Ohio,[2] and later joined Atari as an Analog Engineer.[3]