EDSIG

After slightly over 50 years in the computing field, Herbert retired in July 2009 from the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) to become now a Professor Emeritus. However he has continued to teach several on-line courses for them, now from Venice, Florida.

In late 1959 Rebhun became a programmer for Blue Cross of Western Pennsylvania. He wrote programs for the IBM 650 mainframe using SOAP and, of course, using punched cards. He then left to join IBM in Pittsburgh. While with IBM, Herbert was able to be one of the earliest users of COBOL and ended up doing programming in it and began teaching classes to USS employees in COBOL.

After a career in industry Rebhun left IBM (in 1963) to start various careers in Higher Education. His first job in the academic environment was at Frostburg State College in Maryland where he put in a punched card DP system that changed their processing from all manual paper systems to automated systems.

In 1965 Herbert moved to Indiana University to be involved in the first higher education development of an on-line telephone registration system. In 1967, he moved to Tampa and became the Coordinator of Planning of the University of South Florida computing center and a faculty member in the College of Business. In the Fall of 1977, he became the first computing faculty member at the University of Houston Downtown (UHD). At UHD he had various administrative positions in addition to being the developer and Coordinator of our CIS major. He based the CIS degree on the DPMA model for in 1980-81 as he was on one of the committees.

Rebhun received his Ph.D. from Florida State in December 1974 in Instructional Systems and Design. Previous degrees in BBA and Masters are from the University of Pittsburgh.

His involvement with AITP began in 1980 where he was a member of the Houston chapter of DPMA. He was selected to be the coordinator/chairperson of one of the first ISCON conferences (jointly with Dr. George Fowler of Texas A&M) and also was the conference chair at the Louisville ISECON in 1994. Dr. Rebhun also began the UHD student chapter of DPMA/AITP in 1980.

Early in the ISCON history, Rebhun and several others banded together to begin what became EDSIG and held various EDSIG positions in earlier years.