Joseph E. Vollers Jr.

Joseph E. Vollers Jr., a former Amagansett resident and pioneer in software systems design, died of esophageal cancer on Feb. 17 at his home in Louisburg, N.C., surrounded by his family. He was 77 and had been treated for the disease for a year. 

The eldest of five children, Mr. Vollers was born in the Bronx on Jan. 12, 1939, to Josephine and Joseph E. Vollers, a court clerk and battalion chief of the New York City Fire Department. He grew up on the shores of Sparkle Lake in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he fished, swam, and, one of his sisters said, amused himself by calculating logarithms in his head. 

After graduating from Yorktown High School in 1957, Mr. Vollers won Regents and merit scholarships and attended Alfred University, where he majored in math and was a member of the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps. 

In 1961, Admiral Hyman Rickover recruited Mr. Vollers to help design the guidance system for the Polaris submarine-launched nuclear missile at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works unit in Burbank, Calif. He next worked as a contractor for the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence agency, on the United States spy satellite program, writing the machine code for the telemetry and serving as a courier for top-secret pictures of Soviet Army sites that satellites had dropped into the Indian Ocean. 

In the late 1960s, Mr. Vollers and his first wife, Kathy Brodbeck, along with their three young children, moved to Westchester County, where he worked first for IBM and later started his own consulting business, the Systems and Communications Group, working with corporate, banking, and government clients. He later served as a vice president of Chemical Bank, overseeing some of the first automated banking systems. 

During the early 1970s, after his first marriage ended in divorce, Mr. Vollers moved to the East End  with Annette Meiners-Eggers, a computer programmer and artist who was his life partner. The couple raised three children in Amagansett and Springs, with Mr. Vollers leading his large, blended family to the beach for body surfing, followed by bonfires and clambakes, his booming voice audible over the crash of the ocean. 

A sister, Maryanne Vollers, who lives in Livingston, Mont., said he was a big-hearted, generous soul, a born rebel, and larger-than-life presence, who loved his family above all else. Nothing made him happier than cooking for festive get-togethers, she said, whether whipping up pitchers of white sangria or serving apricot-brandy turkey at Thanksgiving. 

In 2004, he and Ms. Meiners-Eggers relocated to North Carolina to live near some of their children. 

Along with his wife, Mr. Vollers is survived by five children: Kendrick Vollers of Colorado, Sabrina Vollers of Switzerland, and Koren Stagg, Kerry Roseberry, and Cormac Meiners-Vollers, all of Raleigh, N.C. In addition to his sister Maryanne Vollers, two other siblings, Charles Vollers of Riga, Mich., and Judith Martin of Paonia, Colo., survive, as do six grandchildren. A son, Joseph E. Vollers III, died before him.