When his children were young, Peter often told them “This country is one of the few countries on earth where you can complain about the government, and you generally don’t disappear. So complain all you like, just don’t forget how lucky you are.”

      Peter knew what he was talking about. Born in 1937 in Budapest, Hungary, he lost his father, Bela Bonyhard, to the Holocaust.  Peter himself narrowly survived, hiding in a monastary, in a cellar, and 'passing' as the son of a Jewish woman with a Swedish passport received from Raoul Wallenberg. Then, as an opinionated schoolboy, Peter struggled to conform during what he remembered as “endless and pointless speeches, having to clap for a long time and cheer a nagy Stalin, (the great Stalin), and having to lie a lot in class in order to survive.”

      After fleeing Hungary to Vienna during the 1956 revolution he attempted to immigrate to the US but was rejected for lack of religious affiliation. He was offered a scholarship to Leeds University, so he settled in England and became a British citizen. He maintained great loyalty and gratitude to England and remained a British citizen for the rest of his life. He received a B.S. in physics from Leeds University in . He then came to the US to interview at IBM, where he was given an IQ test on which he scored so low he was ineligible for a position. He returned to England and received a Ph.D. in numerical automation from London University. After seven years at ICT in London, he spent 14 years at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ.

      In 1984 Peter joined IBM, San Jose, (fortunately, no IQ test required of applicants with a doctorate) where he was manager of new technology head design. He resigned the IBM post in 1991 to become Seagate's manager of MR head development. Under the "doctrine of inevitable disclosure", which presumes a technology transfer whenever a former employee goes to work for a competitor, Peter was sued by IBM. In 1994 the suit was settled by a cross-licensing agreement between Seagate and IBM, a settlement that was described by one analyst as “a major step in folks agreeing to trade information and work together, which is extremely important for the industry" (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hyde/WEALTH3.htm).

      When Seagate closed its San Jose research facility, Peter took a position at Read-Rite, from which he retired after a stroke in

      Peter Istvan Bonyhard died on July 6, 2007 at the age of 70, in Tiruvalla, Kerala, India, of a head injury received in a fall. He held 38 U.S. patents and authored 26 articles.  He is survived by Ann Bodine, his wife of 38 years, and by his children, Jonathan, Karina, and David, three unending sources of wonderment and pride to him.