On January 14, 2020, Rotarian Charles Schultz spoke to the Magnolia Rotary Club membership about his life. Pictured above is Charles Schultz.
Charles Schultz started his story by telling everyone that he was born in 1941 in Toledo, Ohio and that his father trained airplane pilots during World War II. During that war, Germany had the only airplane service to South America and the United States wanted to get Germany out of South America. As a result, the U.S. negotiated a deal with South America where South America would push Germany out of their countries if the U.S. would guarantee they would provide the same or better airlines services to those countries within South America. To do this, Pan America grace Airlines was formed and Charles's father was hired by the new airlines to train their pilots. However, this required that his family would move to Lima, Peru. As a result, Charles spent 12.5 years growing up in Peru. Charles attended the Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in Lima. His family later moved to Ecuador near an airport that was at 13,000 ft in elevation.
After the war, Charles moved back to Miami Florida where he attended Coral Gables High School until he graduated. After high school, Charles attended the University of Florida where he received a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1964. His first job after graduating college was to work for the Psychology Department at the University of Florida. They hired Charles because they needed someone to create a "stimulus generator" as part of an effort to see if certain diseases with electrical stimuli could be cured. The first test of his creation was used on a girl who could not stop sneezing. The girl was hooked up to the generator and given a mild shock each time she sneezed. After about an hour of electrical stimulation, the girl was cured. Charles then formed Schultz Instruments in 1965.
In 1983, Charles joined the Rotary Club in Gainesville, Florida until he moved to Texas and joined the Magnolia Rotary Club. That means that he has been a Rotarian for 36 years! His Gainesville Club had an international project of drilling water wells in Cambodia and they got a $300,000 international grant to do it. Charles still has a water well there with him name on it.
Just before the year 2000, when everyone was worried about computer systems breaking down as they turned their clock to the year 2000, Charles attended a seminar where a speaker spoke about the problems of random neural networks. This got Charles to thinking about working on a non-random neural network for use in Artificial Intelligence or AI. Using Fortran, Charles created a programmable AI that was accurate to 80-85%. It could reach an accuracy of 95% but experts said that situation would include brain damage and therefore it was not valid. Some 20 years later, someone else proved that the 95% accuracy was valid.
Sometime later, Charles was asked to speed up a computer interface that could only support 4 terminals. He decided to use the DMA (Direct Memory Access) interface and was able to increase the speed where 256 terminals could be supported. This capability was later used by other companies to increase their throughput.
