SAN ANTONIO – A special video tribute honoring David Monroe is now on display at the San Antonio Museum of Science and Technology (SAMSAT).
Monroe, who founded the museum, died last Friday in an accident at Port San Antonio.
Cliff Zintgraff, the chief learning officer at SAMSAT, called the museum “the house that David built.”
“There are very few people in the world who have this capacity to invent,” he said. “David had a deep appreciation for inventors.”
In an interview with KSAT on Tuesday, he recounted Monroe’s emergence in the tech world.
“I recently heard a quote that David wrote that, if you ask his mother, his mother would say, ‘He was working with technology before he could talk,’” Zintgraff said.
According to SAMSAT’s website, Monroe’s tech career began when he was 16 and still in high school.
While only a sophomore in college, Zintgraff said Monroe’s potential got the attention of a well-known tech company in town.
“The first desktop PC was created in San Antonio by DataPoint Corporation, and he became an intern,” Zintgraff said.
Monroe’s internship began just 18 months after the company created the Datapoint 2200. He was able to influence its instruction set and microprocessor.
“He worked numerous digital communication features of the DataPoint 2200 and was instrumental in the development of DataPoint as a company,” Zintgraff said.
Datapoint was a bustling tech hub in late 20th century San Antonio. At one point, the company employed approximately 13,000 employees.
A street on the Northwest Side still bears the Datapoint Drive name.
At age 27, Monroe earned a vice presidential position at the company, but Zintgraff said his interests also ran outside of company walls.
In the late 1990s, Zintgraff said Monroe had an idea that changed how everyone around the world now captures life’s moments.
“He had an idea for government application,” Zintgraff said. “So what he did is took a camera, and put it inside the cellphone so that someone could take a picture. And very quickly transmit that picture without waiting for the opportunity to be with that phone in person.”
Monroe held onto the patent for the first use of a camera in a cellphone.
In 2016, he founded and opened SAMSAT on the campus of Port San Antonio. It showcases some of the 25,000 artifacts he collected over a 40-year span.
The pieces highlight historic moments in electronics, computers, communications and cybersecurity.
While working with a children’s museum in Houston years before, Monroe planned on creating a space in San Antonio for families to embrace science and technology.
“(It) is as intense, as amazing and as deep as technology is (in San Antonio as it is) in the other places,” Zintgraff said.
In a 2022 interview with KSAT, Monroe laid out his simple, yet powerful plan for the museum.
“The goal is really simple,” Monroe told KSAT in 2022. “We’re in the inspiration business, trying to inspire children and young adults to get interested in technology.”
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