Obituary of Charles T. Retter

Charles Thomas Retter was born in Philadelphia, Pa, January 1, 1946, on the first day of the post-war baby boom. He died suddenly December 30, 2013. He was the son of the late Charles W. Retter who died in 1990 and the late Eileen McDonough Retter who died Nov. 21, 2013. When he was three and a half, he moved with his family to Lafayette Hill, PA, where he grew up, attending Baron Hill Elementary School and then Plymouth Whitemarsh Junior and Senior High School, graduating in 1963 with honors. Summers were spent swimming competitively for a number of years with Plymar Swim Club. In winter, he swam for the YMCA in Germantown, PA, and very competitively for Plymouth Whitemarsh High School. Following high school he entered the co-op program for electrical engineering at Drexel University and graduated in June, 1968. During his time at Drexel, his co-op work experience was spent at NASA, outside of Washington, DC, helping to calculate early space flight. After graduation from Drexel, he worked for Raytheon Corporation in Bedford, MA on the development of surface to air missile defenses. In 1970, he returned to work at NASA for a year and a half before entering graduate school, first at Northeastern University where he earned his Master's degree in engineering. At Johns Hopkins University he earned a Doctorate of Philosophy in Engineering in 1975. After graduation from Johns Hopkins, he worked at Gaertner Research Inc. in Stamford, CN for three years until joining Data General in February, 1978. There he worked on the Nova 4C and the Eclipse 8000 earning three personal patents. Following his tenure at Data General, he became a full time professor in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. In July, 1993, he joined the civilian staff of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds (APG) in MD and worked there doing research for the US Army until his retirement, March 1, 2005. He retired to Exton, PA and led a very active life, hiking, camping, photographing the countryside and printing panoramas of the scenery. Each year, he planned driving trips to different regions of the country to enjoy hiking, camping and photographic quests. In addition, he continued his lifelong passion for computers doing personal research. He built his first computer, with a core memory, at age ten. Charles was also an avid reader, often reading three or four books at a time. Computers always fascinated Charles. In his early years computer hardware was his main interest. From his days at Johns Hopkins until into his retirement, Charles was interested in the effectiveness of codes and their boundaries. His PhD thesis was on Goppa codes. While teaching at Northeastern he lectured on MacLauren-Marsaglia codes and Reed Solomon codes. He incorporated all his prior research working at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. He was intrigued by steganographic coding techniques which permit the transmission of information hidden in photographs. He published multiple papers and presented some of them at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Information Theory, which he joined while still in high school. He had achieved lifetime membership with 50 years of uninterrupted membership. He will be greatly missed by his brothers, Alan (Kristen) of Hollis, NH, Robert (Patricia) of Los Angeles, CA and Bruce (Martha) of Chapel Hill, NC, two nephews, David (Meghan) of Methuen, MA and Charlie of Durham, NC. and a niece, Jennifer Renninger (Bill) of Tampa, FL, and by his friends, Mia, Richard and Elizabeth Brower of Bryn Mawr, PA. Memorial donations may be made to John Hopkins Univ. Dept. of Electrical Engineering, 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD. 212018-2683