Gideon Gartner

Origins and early life

Gideon Gartner was born in Tel Aviv, then in Mandatory Palestine, on 13 March 1935, the son of Abraham Gartner, an engineer, and of Pnina Bedri, a musician and teacher, and came to the United States with his family as a small child. As Wikipedia records, citing his obituaries in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, both of 17 December 2020, his parents were Eastern European Jewish émigrés; he grew up in Brooklyn and played first horn in the Midwood High School orchestra.

He graduated in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956 and took a master's degree at its Sloan School of Management in 1960.

Work and career

Because he spoke Hebrew, Philco sent him to Israel in 1961 to help bring one of the first large transistorized computers into service at the Ministry of Defense, and he then joined IBM, where he became a manager of market information. In 1970 he moved to Wall Street as a technology analyst, first at the broker E F Hutton and from 1972 at Oppenheimer and Co, where institutional investors voted him the leading computer analyst every year until 1977.

In 1979 he and David Stein founded Gartner Group in Stamford, Connecticut, to sell computer buyers, vendors and investors short, opinionated research notes on information technology, and he led it as chief executive until 1991. The firm went public in 1986 and, under the name Gartner, still has its headquarters in Stamford today. In 1995 he launched a second advisory firm, Giga Information Group, and he later supported the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, which holds his oral history and the records of his companies.

He died at his home in New York on 12 December 2020, of complications of Alzheimer's disease, at the age of eighty-five.