Steve Bangert was born in Santa Monica, CA and grew up in Redondo Beach. His parents moved the family to Santa Maria when he was a junior in high school where he graduated and then attended two years at the local junior college. He transferred to UC Berkeley where he received a degree in Physics. It was at Berkeley that Steve met his wife to be, Beth.
After graduating from Berkeley he joined the California national guard where he received his training in South Carolina and Georgia as a teletype repairman. Between basic training and advanced training he married Beth so she could enjoy a pleasant summer in Georgia with him.
To understand Steve’s career choices you have to understand he has had a life long love affair with all science and math. He likes to understand how things work. He spent his career as a scientific computer programmer that scratched that itch to learn how all sorts of things worked.
His first job in Sunnyvale was with Sperry-Univac that had a contract to guide military satellites into orbit. While the boss thought they had quite a catch from UCB they never quite figured out what to do with him. He did learn quite a bit while there that provided a good foundation for his next job.
Next up was a company called Systems Control Technology Inc (SCT) in Palo Alto. The company had a number of contracts with the government doing research on control algorithms for things like airplanes, helicopters, jet engines, etc. Lots of new things to learn about.
During the last year or so at SCT Steve, an engineer he worked with, and a friend of the engineer started a side gig. They worked during the day at SCT and during the night and weekends on porting (rewriting) a program called MATLAB for the then new IBM PC. The new company was called “The MathWorks” and it grew from the 2.5 people (friend half time) to over a thousand when Steve retired. While Steve had much to do with the success of the company he was always working on the technical side of the business. He worked remotely out of his house for 20 years while the president (engineer) grew the company in Natick Ma.. Steve dislikes anything to do with management or business so definitely don’t ask him to be on any boards:-)
Steve and his wife Beth have two sons and one grandson. One son lives in Sunnyvale and the other lives in Rohnert Park, which helped bring Steve and Beth to Sonoma County. After buying a house in Sonoma County in 2016, one year later the fires of 2017 burned their house to the ground. But although devastated by the fire, it did bring Steve and Beth to Oakmont where they have lived while re-building their “other” home.
Steve has become a “Pickleball” fanatic playing 3 times each week. In addition to pickleball Steve loves to hike, golf and do photography. He says the best thing about “pickleball” is the people. He loves the social aspects of the game here in Oakmont. He says he has never remembered so many peoples names and faces during his whole career.
