Charles Simonyi is a Hungarian-born American software architect. He started and led Microsoft’s applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office software suite. He co-founded and led Intentional Software, with the aim of developing and marketing his concept of intentional programming.
Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-born American software executive and space tourist.
His father, Károly Simonyi, was a Kossuth Prize-winning professor of electrical engineering at the Technical University of Budapest, and created the first Hungarian nuclear particle accelerator. While in secondary school he worked part-time as a night watchman at a computer laboratory in the early 1960s, overseeing a large Soviet Ural mainframe. He took an interest in computing and learned to program and learned to develop compilers and sold one of these to a government department. At the age of 17, Simonyi left Hungary to join Denmark’s A/S Regnecentralen in 1966 where he worked with Per Brinch Hansen and Peter Kraft on the RC 4000 minicomputer’s Real-time Control System, and with Peter Naur on the GIER ALGOL compiler. He subsequently moved from Denmark to the United States in 1968 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics & Statistics in 1972 under Butler Lampson.and later earned a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University. He has honorary doctorate degrees from the Juilliard School in New York and from the University of Pecs in Hungary.
After working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC)—where he created the first WYSIWYG text editor—from 1972 to 1980, Simonyi joined the Microsoft Corporation in 1981. While at Microsoft he led the development of the widely used software applications Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. In 2002 he left Microsoft to found his own firm, Intentional Software. However, he returned in 2017 after selling the company to Microsoft
In 2007, for the price of $20 million, Simonyi became the fifth paying traveler sent into space by the American space tourism company Space Adventures, Ltd. After a six-month training program at the Yury Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Russia, Simonyi was launched into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard Soyuz TMA-10 on April 7, 2007, with two Russian cosmonauts, Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov. On April 9 he arrived at the International Space Station (ISS), where he spent 11 days performing scientific experiments and communicating via amateur radio with high school students. He returned to Earth aboard Soyuz TMA-9, landing in the Kazakhstan steppes on April 21.
On March 26, 2009, he lifted off with Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and U.S. astronaut Michael Barratt aboard Soyuz TMA-14, a flight to the ISS that made Simonyi the first repeat space tourist. They returned to Earth on April 8, traveling on Soyuz TMA-13.