Haas’ family moved to Los Angeles when he was still a child, where his father worked as a designer of electrical cabinets for Hughes Aircraft and his mother was a schoolteacher. The second oldest of four children, Haas’ family instilled at an early age the importance of hard work and responsibility. He delivered newspapers while in elementary school and at age 14 began working in a machine shop where he swept floors and kept the facility clean. After only six months, Haas was setting up lathes and conventional milling machines. He continued to work at machine shops through high school and college, mastering the machining techniques that would lead him to found Haas Automation in 1983.
Haas graduated from high school in Mission Hills, California, in 1970. After high school, he attended California State University, Northridge, where he studied engineering and business. He graduated in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in accounting and finance.
In 1978, after working for three years as an industrial programmer, Haas founded Proturn Engineering, a small contract machine shop in Sun Valley, California. Haas worked side-by-side with his two employees at Proturn Engineering, machining parts for the electronics and aerospace industries. It was during that time Haas developed a fully-programmable 5C collet indexer to boost productivity in his own shop. The Haas 5C was the industry’s first device to automatically re-position parts accurately for machining by simply pressing a button, as opposed to having to reposition the material by hand – a cumbers
