Charles Benjamin Blish was born at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.

He was brought to Milford, Pennsylvania as an infant by his parents. They divorced when he was eight years old and he remained in his mother's care. He lived in Milford until the sixth grade, when he went to school in New York City for a year, residing in upper Manhattan with his half-sister on the maternal side, Karen Anne Emden. He then returned to Milford and continued school there in several steps, including some home schooling with Walt and Leigh Richmond, friends of the family, until leaving high school in October of his 10th grade year and immediately obtaining a GED (General Equivalency Diploma.) He felt the local school system did not serve his intellectual, social and career needs well.

An inquisitive nature made itself known early on. He was reading science fiction aimed at teenagers (Tom Swift, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, E.E. Smith's "Skylark" series, etc.) quite comfortably by the third grade, and a direct side effect of this was a sense of isolation from his peers, many of whom were still struggling with books on the level of "Dick and Jane".

As a child, his room was characterized by control panels made of switches and lights obtained from the local hardware store, a light-alarm on the door, and numbers of de-constructed clocks, radios and other devices strewn about the floor.

At one point, when experimenting with chemistry, he visited a hobby store in Port Jervis, New York with his mother. He wanted the large Gilbert chemistry set; she noted that the smaller set said it was "safe for children" and indicated that this was what he could have. He contended that "No set is safe! If I can prove that the small set could be very dangerous, can I have the large set?" She agreed, and the next day, he stood in front of his mother as a diabolical concoction from that "safe" chemistry set blew every window out of the basement of the house in a single thunderous explosion. It set the dust from between the floorboards in his mother's room to dancing several feet in the air in the beams of sunlight coming through her window. His mother, an honorable woman, after calming down somewhat, went directly out and purchased the large chemistry set for him. However, he was made to mow lawns for a whole summer to pay for the windows, a lesson he never forgot. "A crater in the yard would have done as well" he has noted since.

Home-made rockets and explosives, poisons and acids, very deep holes in the yard, continuous model building, extensive reading to the point of obsession, putting up forts and tree houses, wandering in the woods, swimming the Delaware river, spelunking, cliff climbing, bike riding and exploring everything he could get to characterized his formative years.

At one point his friend Tony Splendore, after asking to be taken to a a combined cave and cavern system and finding himself deep underground with what he came to consider an excess of enthusiasm, announced "Bennie, you're a mole!" and proceeded to demand to "get out of here." Tony, it turned out, was not a mole.

It is not unfair to characterize Ben's late childhood and early teenage years as rebellious. As evidenced by a constant pushing against the limits of society and family life, he repeatedly got into scrapes and trouble with the authorities. If he pursued an interest, it was only the luck of the draw that said if it was legal or not.

His rebellious period ended at about age fifteen, after some particularly harrowing experiences with drugs and friends using drugs. After taking stock of his life, he set personal and educational goals and pursued them with complete single-mindedness which continued throughout his life.

Due to being involved in drug use, he spent one year in the reform school at Loysville, Pennsylvania. Just prior to his incarceration, he discontinued drug use and became an ardent opponent of the use of drugs, although a supporter of the right to choose for oneself whether to use or not, an attitude he maintains to this day. The timing was ironic, to understate the case.

Bob

Tony

He now views society (though not politics or the legal system) with considerably more tolerance than he did as a teenager.

After leaving high school, he studied electronics, receiving a diploma with honors from the National Radio Institute, following up by consuming every extended book on the subject he could find. He completed courses on arc welding and combustion engines. He audited technical drawing, mathematics and physics courses from Orange County Community College, at Middletown, New York. He pursued extensive additional studies in various disciplines on his own, and this accelerated once the Internet became available.

His key activities during his late teens and early 20's were working as an electronics repair technician during the day, while playing guitar in various bands and studios as opportunities arose. This culminated in professional work in New York City, where he performed as a sit-in musician in several studios. He performs without credit on a number of musical compilations of the 1970's. He left the business when a studio manager informed him that he was to be paid in cocaine, which while financially no doubt would have been advantageous, was anathema to him after his previous drug experiences and subsequent decisions.

In 1976, he sold his first article to a computer periodical entitled "Kilobaud." The article detailed running a small microcomputer (a National Semiconductor SC/MP) as a dedicated translator/controller for a Baudot coded teletype connected to a SWTPC 6800 computer system. It was printed shortly thereafter. Over the course of his career he wrote and published numerous additional articles and columns on various hardware and software topics.

While living in the northeast, Ben worked as a repair technician for Lafayette Radio, and Radio Shack. In these roles, he repaired radios, televisions, audio equipment, CBs and similar consumer electronics. Next he was employed at Paula-Arlen vending, where he serviced and repaired electro-mechanical pinball games and very early arcade games.

He moved to Florida at about age 22, and began to work at jobs in the engineering field in a methodical manner with the specific intent of learning as much as possible and doing as many different jobs as possible in order to build a foundation for an independent career.

He worked for Can-American Electronics, Electro-Sender Industries, MCI (later a subsidiary of Sony,) IBM, Datamedix, Analam, Century, Bally-Midway, Arcade Engineering, Techstar, Magnum, CMJ Enterprises, and Logical Devices before finally setting out on his own designing computer hardware and writing software, an occupation he still follows.

In the course of his active design career, he created the following hardware products:

• 68705 and related single-chip CPU programmer
• AD16 16-channel analog-to-digital card (with Dean Brown)
• AD/DA 1-channel analog-to-digital and digital-to analog SS-30 card
• AVT (this won Technical Achievement of the Year)
• Centuri 6809-based game hardware
• Cornerturner graphics accelerator (with Dean Brown)
• CMJ-TU terminal unit for digital radio encoding/decoding
• CMJ-IF interface card for Radio Shack "Color Computer"
• HAM-E compressed color video device (with Greg Tibbs)
• Intelligent bottlecap for liquor dispensing
• Mixmaster guitar mixer
• Pirate radio station
• Softpanel status display device (with Dean Brown)
• Sound Card SS-30
• Sony/MCI auto-ranging harmonic distortion device
• Techstar computer game hardware
• VIA card SS-30 — multifunction interface card

Although the list of devices is considerable, he spent the bulk of his career creating computer software products. The following major items characterize the wide range of interests and directions he pursues:

• 6805 Cross-assembler for Amiga
• aa_macro, an extensive lisp-like macro language
• Abbreviation elaboration system
• ApAssist hypertext documentation system (with Pete Patterson)
• AVT 1-4 — Images over radio by analog transmission
• AVT 5 — Images over radio by analog transmission
• Baudot driver for SC/MP
• Cards-n-Quiz — commercial arcade game
• CMJ-TU device (Magnum) Images over radio by analog transmission
• CoComm — telecommunications
• Code generators for product registration
• Color management software
• Crits — Artificial life
• Crypt — Encryption
• Diagnostic Cardiac Monitor — commercial software
• Flex for Amiga — 6809 Operating System emulation
• Flex for Win95 — 6809 Operating System emulation
• FT9600 driver for Amiga — Radio driver
• Genealogy engine (this one) and its predecessor
• Heathkit digital scope driver for Amiga — Tool driver
• Historical timeline generators
• HTML linkage analysis tool
• Image compression — image processing
• Image gallery software
• IP/IM (with Barry Chalmers) — Image Processing
• It — Commercial arcade game
• iToolBox — image processing software
• Jakeboard — Handicapped empowerment for keyboard
• Landscape rendering software (3d/shadows/lighting/textures)
• Missile Command — non-commercial arcade replicant
• Morphing — image processing (with Barry Chalmers)
• Morse code practice software
• Notebook (with Pete Patterson) — PIM
• Packet Bulletin board — networking
• PCLO/Boardmaster — computer aided circuit board design
• Photographic editing application, non-destructive
• Photographic lens application calculators
• Poker/Blackjack/Slot/Dice — commercial arcade/bar game
• Quizzard — commercial arcade/bar game
• Regpaint (with Barry Chalmers) — image processing
• Relational general purpose expert system
• Rockball — commercial arcade game
• Scheme — computer aided electronic design
• SdrDx — Software Defined Radio application
• Social media system
• Softpanel drivers — display and utility
• Soroc emulation for Windows — Terminal emulation
• Sounds for Solar Fox / Satan's Hollow — commercial arcade
• Spectral colorspace software — image processing
• Talkboard — Handicapped empowerment for speech
• Telerad — Tele-Radiology system
• Tree-based text decomposition and recoding — compression
• View-Edit — image processing
• View-II — signal processing
• Web content management system
• WTFM, a documentation generation system

Other engineering career accomplishments include:

• Technical Achievement/Year award (from over 1,000,000 qualified individuals)
• Image Processing software awards for Imagemaster and WinImages
• Product of the year award nominations
• Many technical magazine articles
• A regular technical magazine column
• Gave electronics lectures at his old high school
• Taught computer theory and op-amp design at Centuri
• Trained engineering interns at Logical Devices
• Highest class possible amateur radio license
• Federal Communications Commission engineering license
• IEEE Associate member

His personal interests include housecats and their feral relations, mineral collecting, model railroading, ship model building, aerobics, 1970's-era microcomputer collecting, amateur radio, artificial intelligence, photography, data compression, assembly language, c, c++, Python, HTML and CSS, boating, cars, traditional Chinese characters, coin collecting, playing and teaching guitar, pinup art, reading, the Spanish, Mandarin and Korean languages, spelunking, stuffed animals, chess, writing technical works on engineering and the martial arts, working on the Blish family genealogy, and inventing new devices, software methods, and technologies.

He is now retired.