Willis H. Ware, an electrical engineer who in the late 1940s helped build a machine that would become a blueprint for computer design in the 20th century, and who later played an important role in defining the importance of personal privacy in the information age, died on Nov. 22 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 93.

His death was confirmed by his family.

Mr. Ware’s participation in a classified World War II project to identify friendly aircraft led the mathematician John von Neumann to recruit him to help develop a computer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., in 1946.

That machine was not the first digital computer, but it was based on a set of design ideas described by Dr. von Neumann that were broadly influential — first on the design of computers built by scientists around the world, and then on an early IBM computer known as the 701. Many of these concepts are still visible in the structure of modern computers and smartphones.

Mr. Ware, part of a small group of engineers working on that machine, was the first to try to engineer many of the components that would become vital to modern computers. His experience in designing high-speed electronic circuits during the war was essential to his work on the computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, said George Dyson, a historian of the project.