It is with profound grief that we announce the loss of Peter "Pete" Cressman, who died peacefully in his Montara, CA home on February 22, 2024 after a years-long battle with cancer.

Peter Walls Cressman was born on June 12th, 1937 in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. Growing up in Lansdale, he enjoyed canoeing and camping with his parents Mimi and Ray and older sister Barbara. He went on to study at the Case Institute in Cleveland. An avid jazz fan, he enjoyed playing drums, and his love of jazz fatefully brought him to the Courtland Hi-Fi lounge in Lansdale one night where he met his first wife, Barbara. They eloped in 1959 and drove across the country, ending up in the vibrant North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. They went on to have 3 children: Jennifer, Jeffrey, and Mark. After completing his BA at San Francisco State, he went on to get his masters at UC Berkeley before he accepted a teaching position back at SF State.

The family then moved to San Jose, where Pete found himself at the epicenter of the nascent computer industry. He took a job at Hewlett Packard, then at fledgling Apple just as the company was developing the first personal computers: the LISA and then the Macintosh. As Release Manager, he held an important position, managing a testing team and determining whether a software application was ready to be released to the public. Through his exciting work in the early days of Silicon Valley, he met his current wife, Gabriele.

Pete enjoyed drawing, gardening, camping, music, boogie boarding, dancing, and model trains. A lover of the arts, he was hugely supportive of the artistic endeavors of his children and grandchildren. He always brought joy to every family gathering, sharing his family’s traditional Pennsylvania Dutch dishes such as shoofly pie with younger generations and famously turning celebrations into a contest of who could pop the champagne cork the farthest off the back deck.

He is survived by wife Gabriele, children Jenny, Mark and Jeff, daughter-in-law Sandy, grand-daughters Natalie and Julianna, ex-wife Anne Barbara Cressman and sister Barbara Hartenbauer.

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