Richer Drives Digital Revolution

摘要

At age 14, Mark Richer helped his father assemble a complicated Heathkit color TV in their Long Island, N.Y., home. His dad may have panicked at the elaborate high-tech jigsaw puzzle, but the son was unfazed, laying the first brick in Richer's engineering career. Today, as president of the nonprofit Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), Richer is busy setting digital-TV standards, a critical piece of the broadcast industry's migration to digital transmission. "I'd always follow my father around the house, learning how to fix things," Richer remembers. "I would take a nail and wire to make electronic magnets so I could pick up paper clips." Yet by the time he headed to the Rochester Institute of Technology, his focus was photography. While there, he took computer classes and started working at the campus television studio, which was a member of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.