Bing Newcomb was mostly self-tauhgt as a software engineer. In the early 1980s, William A. Porter had an outlandish idea: People should be able to trade stocks via their home computers. For software expertise, he turned to Bernard Newcomb, a legally blind programmer who grew up in the small town of Scio, Ore. In 1982, Messrs. Porter and Newcomb founded Trade Plus Inc., a Palo Alto , Calif.-based firm that evolved into E*Trade, a pioneer in electronic trading that is now part of Morgan Stanley.

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