Robert Royce Johnson

Robert Royce Johnson (1928 to 2016) was an American inventor, engineer, computer pioneer and professor. He is remembered for the Johnson counter, a type of ring counter that was named for him, and for developing the method of encoding numbers on checks that was still in use as of 2018. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin and a master's degree in servomechanisms at Yale, and in 1956 was awarded a doctorate at Caltech, their first in digital computing. He worked at Hughes Aircraft on digital guidance systems for aircraft and missiles, then at the General Electric research laboratories in Schenectady, New York, on the computerized banking system ERMA, where he invented the magnetic number shapes still used on checks. He became vice president of engineering at Burroughs in 1964 and headed the computer science department at the University of Utah from 1987 until he retired in 1993.