To any of his sports-fan colleagues, NIST mathematician and computer programmer Vernon Dantzler might have been somewhat of a celebrity. Dantzler had been a professional baseball player, and a star shortstop in the Texas circuit of the Negro Baseball League during the early 1940s, before the desegregation of Major League baseball. Dantzler also had a degree in mathematics from the Tuskegee Institute, and would later earn a graduate degree in the same field from American University.

After serving in the military during World War II, he joined the National Bureau of Standards (now called NIST) in 1947 as a mathematician in the Mineral Products Division, conducting research on concrete. By the early 1960s, he had become interested in computer programming.

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