Bing Newcomb grew up in a working-class family in small-town Oregon and after high school would probably have been destined to work in the region’s sawmills or lumber mills, except for one thing: he was legally blind.
So instead he went to college and became the first in his family to graduate. He then became a computer programmer and invented a system that revolutionized stock trading, allowing individual investors to buy and sell stocks on their personal computers, making him a multi-millionaire.
Mr. Newcomb, who co-founded the E*Trade company and wrote the computer code that made it work, died Jan. 29 at his home in Palo Alto, California. He was 79. last month by the family through Oregon State University, his alma mater and a major beneficiary of his philanthropy. His wife, Gerry Newcomb, said the cause was congestive heart failure following neurological complications.
In 1980, Mr. Newcomb and William A. Porter were introduced by a mutual friend at a Halloween party in Palo Alto. Mr. Porter, once a cowboy turned electronics prodigy, had just purchased an Apple II personal computer, the company’s first model aimed at consumers. How, he wondered, could he and other individuals use the new technology to buy and sell stocks from home?
Mr. Newcomb, who had worked as a freelance computer programmer and hired himself out to banks and other companies in need of a guide to emerging digital technologies, provided the answers.
In 1982, with $15,000 in capital, the partners started TradePlus, one of the first electronic trading platforms. The first exchange was made on July 11, 1983 by a dentist from Michigan.
By enabling investors to trade stocks from their computers, the company reduced transaction costs below the rates charged not only by full-service brokers, but even by many discount brokers. The service helped promote home computer sales and transformed amateur Wall Street buffs into professional day traders.
Despite his impaired vision, Mr. Newcomb skied and hiked, and although he couldn’t drive, he got up well before dawn, taped a flashlight to the handlebars of his bicycle, and pedaled to work before the New York Stock Exchange opened. York.
After the market tanked in the mid-1980s, the company re-emerged in 1991 as E-Trade Securities. It quickly became a leader in online stock transactions.
By 1994, revenues had risen geometrically, from $850,000 just two years earlier to nearly $11 million. A business magazine named the company the fastest growing private company in Silicon Valley. It went public in 1996 as the E*Trade Group.
Mr. Newcomb, who had been the company’s chief systems architect and vice president of research and development, retired in 1997 with 2.4 million shares of the company, when the price per share was about $23.
Bernard Alan Newcomb was born on November 10, 1943 in Scio, Oregon, a town of less than a thousand people south of Portland, to Lyle and Agnes Newcomb. His father worked as a janitor at Scio High School.
Bernard was born with cloudy vision caused by congenital cataracts. He was known as Bing because when he was a toddler, that’s how his older brother pronounced his name.
He attended Oregon School for the Blind in Salem through second grade, returning home on weekends. He then attended Scio public schools through high school. He was the valedictorian of his class.
He consistently made the list of deans in the College of Business at Oregon State University at Corvallis, graduating third in his class in 1965.
But because he was visually impaired, he recalled, he was turned down by recruiters for banks and accounting firms. A placement consultant at Oregon State persuaded General Electric to hire him in the data processing department of the company’s Hanford Works plant in Richland, Washington, where he worked for three years.
His marriage to Carol Kearney ended in divorce. In 2020, he married Gerry Lee Marshall. Besides her, he is survived by a brother, Jerry, and a stepson, Forbes Marshall.
After he retired, Mr. Newcomb turned to philanthropy. He donated the Bernard A. Newcomb Foundation and, together with his wife, focused on improving the lives of people with disabilities, among other things.
His gift of $6.1 million to the state of Oregon in 1997 was the largest stock donation the university had ever received.
In 2000, Mr. Newcomb and his family received $1.3 million to build a soccer field, track and field stadium, and other athletic facilities at Scio High School, where he was demoted to the team’s water boy because of his vision.
He supported research through the All May See Foundation at the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of California, San Francisco, where he also funded the Bernie and Gerry Newcomb Center for Innovative Eye Surgery. He received the Hellen Keller Achievement Award from the American Foundation for the Blind.
Mr. Porter, who has received much of the public credit for E*Trade, passed away in 2015.
The company was purchased in 2020 by the Wall Street brokerage firm Morgan Stanley.
