Thursday, May 28, 2020
So sorry to here of Al's passing condolences to Al's whole family. I just spoke to him on the phone few weeks ago and he was doing fine. I first met Al in the late 70's or early 80's when I interviewed and helped hire him as a consultant for Con Ed, Brooklyn Distribution Engineering. Al did a great job programming an early Apollo computer to do modeling of the electric distribution system, saving the company a lot of money in time sharing fees. Years later I joined the Brooklyn Distribution Engineering Department and Al and I worked on a project to bring the Xerox developed and leased computerized drafting system in house, buying our own hardware and workstations, and programming a new system from scratch. To do this, Al formed his own consulting firm and Kunz Associates was born. He hired a bunch of Russian born Brooklyn Polytechnic computer science students to do the programming and the project was a resounding success. All those students went on the better things. When I retired from Con Ed I went to work for Kunz Associates as a contractor working from home on an 18 month project to clean up data base errors in the computerized drafting system we developed and implemented. For the decades I knew Al he never once lost his cool or his temper or was anything but polite and kind and very reasonable to everyone he worked for, with, and all who worked for him. When we retired to NJ, Al and Sandy came over to our house for an Italian home cooked meal. A few months ago after not hearing from him in over a decade I gave him a call, and we started having telephone chats every few weeks which we both enjoyed, reminiscing about the Con Ed days and talking about our current lives. I was due to give him a call when I read Rob's Facebook announcement. Al will be missed.
