Sandy Ruby; launched Tech HiFi from MIT dorm room

SANDY RUBY

As a mathematics graduate student at MIT in the 1960s, Sandy Ruby and another student launched a dorm-room stereo store that grew into one of the nation's largest consumer electronics chains, Tech HiFi.

Mr. Ruby and John Strohbeen opened their first store, which was named after their alma mater, at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar streets. They expanded to more than 80 stores before discount price wars forced them out of business in the mid '80s.

Mr. Ruby of Charlestown, who went on to write software programs designed to forecast the future, died Nov. 22 at Massachusetts General Hospital from complications of diabetes. He was 67.

"He was incredibly intense and the most focused person I ever knew," said his wife, Gretchen Carter. He was like a laser beam, whether it was leafing through a book or working on his computer. He was not distracted."

Born Sandow Sacks Ruby in Orange, N.J., he was the son of Myron, a lawyer and an Army officer, and Leonore Sacks, whose family owned a Newark iron foundry. His mother died when he was a boy.

Mr. Ruby grew up on Army bases early in life and later in Essex Fells and South Orange, N.J. He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, and went to Harvard, where he studied math and built motorcycles in his dorm room at Lowell House, according to his brother Michael of Brooklyn.

A leg injury from racing motorcycles kept him out of the Vietnam War and he graduated from Harvard in 1963, Michael said.

"He wasn't a music guy. That was never the central thing for Sandy," Michael said. "He liked building stuff and breaking it down. Initially he was building motorcycles and breaking them down . . . then he likes the idea of building electronics equipment."

At MIT, Mr. Ruby completed all of the requirements for a doctorate except writing a dissertation.

He was tutoring Strohbeen when the pair got into the sound system business.

In 1979, Mr. Ruby started the retail chain Computer City, but the stores were ahead of their time and closed before shoppers embraced personal computers.

Mr. Ruby's first marriage, to Ruth Richards, ended in divorce.

After Tech HiFi closed, Mr. Ruby returned to applied math and software.

He wrote a top- selling spreadsheet program for the Commodore 6400, an early personal computer, and had a regular column in a publication for programmers.

He later ran Cambridge SoundWorks in the mid-1990s before it was sold to investors.

In recent years, he designed software for Hay McBer, a benefits consultant firm, and was fascinated by genetic programming, software based on the theory of natural selection and used to forecast future events in the stock market or political outcomes.

Carter said she and Mr. Ruby met at Hay McBer in the early '90s. They married in 1998.

"He was very brilliant," she said. "He was funny and had a quirky sense of humor."

She recalled how he battled to save an ailing rosebush she was intent on digging up. "He launched a campaign. He started a petition to save this rosebush and had our friends sign it. I relented and kept it," she said. Roses grew from the bush this summer.

At home, Mr. Ruby enjoyed listening to classical music on his sound system and reading the latest books on business.

Every week, he pored over electronic stores' ads in the Sunday Globe. "He really loved the hi-fi retail business and he never stopped loving that," his wife said.

In addition to his brother and his wife, Mr. Ruby leaves his daughter, Lauren Jo Richards-Ruby of Oakland, Calif.; his sisters, Kathryn Ruby of Manhattan; Elizabeth Lyden of Omaha; and Alice Germond of Charles Town, W.Va., who is secretary of the Democratic National Committee.

Burial will be private.