Robert Johnson served as Chairman of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Utah from 1987 to 1993. A distinguished engineer and inventor, he earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1956, the first degree granted by Caltech in Digital Computing. His doctoral dissertation involved creating a digital computer that solved advanced algebraic equations. Prior to that, he received a Master's degree in servomechanisms from Yale University in 1950 and began his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin in 1946, where he was elected to the Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu honorary societies, served as editor of the Engineering College magazine, and played French horn in the marching band.

Johnson's career spanned pioneering contributions to digital computing hardware and data processing. At Hughes Aircraft, he designed and built the first aircraft guidance digital computer and the guidance computer for the Falcon missile, earning 15 patents, including the 1953 Johnson Counter, a shift register logic circuit still widely used in computer design. At General Electric's research laboratory in Syracuse, New York, he led the team developing the GE/Bank of America ERMA system, the first computerized bank check accounting system, which introduced magnetic ink character recognition (MICR)—the oldest continuous standard in the computer industry for reading routing numbers and account details on checks. From 1964, as Vice President of Engineering at Burroughs Corporation, he advanced language-directed computer architecture. In 1981, at Energy Conversion Devices in Troy, Michigan, he became president and founded Ovonic Imaging Systems, pioneering amorphous silicon flat panel displays and batch-fabricated computers. He also established Mosaic Systems Inc., focusing on electrically programmable wafer stacks. After retiring from the University of Utah, Johnson joined Filoli Information Systems in Palo Alto, California, SI Diamond in Austin, Texas, and in 1996 founded nDV LLC, specializing in data mining and multi-dimensional visualizations. His inventions have profoundly influenced digital logic, avionics, financial processing, and display technologies within computer science and engineering.