NEW YORK—A who’s who of CE industry greats didn’t let an autumn deluge rain on its parade last night. 

Aptly sheltered in the Rainbow Room atop New York’s Rockefeller Center, they and their hosts, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), celebrated the lives and contributions of this year’s inductees into the Consumer Technology Hall of Fame.

Among the honorees was TWICE’s own Marcia Grand, who led the publication to industry prominence during her nearly three-decade run as its publisher.

In accepting her award, Grand recounted how her trajectory from Bronx housing projects to industry eminence began by answering a classified ad for “a gal Friday creative momma” placed by fellow CT Hall of Famer Richard Ekstract, who was in attendance.

Grand thanked Ekstract, and longtime editor-in-chief Steve Smith, himself inducted in 2016, as well as the judges, “for giving this to me while I’m alive.” She also commemorated the late Bruce Alpert, her friend and associate publisher. "I know he's here with me tonight," she said.

Other highlights included remarks by 73-year-old inductee Hiroshi Yasuda, a member of the international engineering team that developed the JPEG and MPEG compression technologies which made portable digital images, music and video possible.

Yasuda demonstrated his team’s accomplishments by holding up a roll of film and a flash drive. “This holds 24 or 36 exposures,” he said raising the film roll. The flash drive, he said, “holds 30,000. Thirty-six … 30,000.”

Closing the ceremonies was inventor, futurist and inductee Ray Kurzweil, who brought some perspective to CE’s present and future. A child in Africa with a smartphone has access to more information today than a U.S. president did 20 years ago, he noted, while computers the size of blood cells and other coming tech advances will soon cure all diseases, radically extend life, and end human suffering.

“The sands of time will run in rather than run out,” he projected.

Master of ceremonies Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the CTA, also paid tribute to the late Jim Barry, a fixture of the trade group and the industry, and announced a $500,000 donation in his name to the CTA Foundation.

 This story originally appeared on TVT's sister publication TWICE.

NEW YORK—Jerry Pearlman, former Zenith Electronics CEO and chairman, is now a hall of famer. Pearlman and the other founding fathers of the HDTV “Grand Alliance” make up the 2016 CT Hall of Fame class.

Jerry Pearlman

Pearlman was the chief architect of Zenith’s digital HDTV strategy and a supporter for the core technologies that would serve as the foundation of the U.S. digital TV broadcast standard. Zenith was one of the companies that joined the “Grand Alliance” in 1993, a coalition of companies seeking to create the best digital TV standard.

Joining Pearlman in this year’s class is other members of the “Grand Alliance,” including Peter Bingham, president of Phillips Laboratories; James Carnes, retired Sarnoff Labs president; Curt Crawford, past AT&T Microelectronics president; MIT professor Dr. Jae Lim; former General Instrument Chairman and CEO Donald Rumsfeld.

CTA President and CEO Gary Shapiro noted that the “Grand Alliance” leaders had to “put aside personal and business interests, working together to formulate an ideal broadcast TV standard.

And, although Jerry was retired by then, the nation’s 2009 transition to all-digital broadcasting is viewed as a noteworthy postscript to his career and an exclamation point to his industry contributions.”

The Consumer Technology Hall of Fame was formed in 2000 by CTA to honor leaders in the consumer technology industry who have shaped and advanced innovation.