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American computer programmer

Steven McGeady is a former Intel executive best known as a witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial. His notes and testimony contained colorful quotes by Microsoft executives threatening to "cut off Netscape's air supply" and Bill Gates' guess that "this antitrust thing will blow over". Attorney David Boies said that McGeady's testimony showed him to be "an extremely conscientious, capable and honest witness", while Microsoft portrayed him as someone with an "axe to grind". McGeady left Intel in 2000, but later again gained notoriety for defending his former employee Mike Hawash after his arrest on federal terrorism charges. From its founding in 2002 until its sale in November 2013, he was Chairman of Portland based healthcare technology firm ShiftWise. He is a member of the Reed College Board of Trustees, the Portland Art Museum Board of Trustees, and the PNCA Board of Governors, and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Steven McGeady was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a manager for Bethlehem Steel. After high school in Michigan City, Indiana he briefly attended Purdue University. Then in 1976, he enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. As manager of the i960 software development tools team from 1986 to 1996, McGeady was an early developer and promoter of open source software, beginning with Richard Stallman's GNU C compiler and tools. McGeady wrote the i960 target for GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) and led the team that developed a suite of tools including a globally optimizing, trace driven optimizer for gcc and the first GNU Debugger (gdb) port to a remote, stand alone system. He hired Cygnus Support to integrate those changes into the mainline GNU tools and to improve the tools' ability to deal with many object file formats. McGeady was Vice President of Intel's Multimedia, Communications, and Internet activities from 1990 through 1996, where he led the development of the first desktop video compression software for the PC, Intel's early implementations of multimedia network broadcast protocols, the first products to combine television and web pages, online virtual communities, the Java language, and data security infrastructure. As a software engineer and developer, McGeady was often a minority voice at hardware dominated Intel. In 1996 he was asked by then CEO Andy Grove to take a job as Grove's assistant and is the only known person to turn the job down. Grove later said that he and Intel would have grasped the importance of the Internet to the company more quickly had McGeady taken the job. McGeady had a less positive relationship with succeeding CEO Craig Barrett, reportedly telling Barrett to "pound sand" when Barrett instructed him not to testify in the Microsoft case.

During 1996/97, McGeady was a visiting researcher at the MIT Media Lab, pursuing research on emergent and self organizing behavior in computer networks. During this time he was a keynote speaker at the first Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society. His speech from the event, "The Digital Reformation: Freedom, Risk, Responsibility" was reprinted in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, and is credited by some as formulating early theories regarding what became social media. During 1997 and 1998, McGeady was a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Technology Board Committee on Information Systems Trustworthiness, and is a co author of its book on the subject.

McGeady entered the news again in 2003 because of his defense of his former Intel employee Mike Hawash who was arrested at Intel in early 2003. McGeady organized a defense fund and protested Hawash's 6 week incommunicado detention without charge. Hawash ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiring to aid the Taliban in fighting against U. S. forces in Afghanistan, and received a reduced sentence in the so called Portland Seven case in exchange for testifying against some of his co conspirators.