[1] Born in Aberdeen, Washington, he served in the United States Navy during World War II.

To make his last name easier to pronounce during military roll calls, he officially changed it to "Grinich".

[5] Grinich left Fairchild in 1968 to study computer science while teaching electrical engineering at UC Berkeley.

[7] In 1978, he was appointed chief executive officer of Identronix, a company that pioneered Radio-frequency identification systems, which are now used extensively in anti-theft tags.

In 1985, Grinich founded and became CEO of Escort Memory Systems to commercialize RFID tags for industrial applications.