Charles Thomas Retter was born in Philadelphia, PA on January 1, 1946. He was the son of the late Charles W. Retter who died in 1990 and the late Eileen McDonough Retter who died Nov. 21, 2013. 

He received the BSEE from (then) Drexel Institute of Technology; the MSEE from Northeastern University; and the PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1975.  His dissertation explored bounds on Goppa codes.  He joined Data General in 1978 where he designed the Nova 4C and Eclipse 8000 computers.  He taught for several years at Northeastern and joined the Army Research Laboratory in 1993, where he pursued his research interests in weight enumerators for Reed-Solomon codes and binary expansions of Reed-Solomon codes, decoding of binary expansions of Reed-Solomon codes, and the use of error control coding techniques in image steganography. He retired fully in 2005 and continued his work on RS codes, working on a special-purpose computer to support his work on weight enumerators.

He was a Life Member of the IEEE, a cheerful and well-liked colleage, and loving son and brother.