only been at this for fifty years

I just got a link (and an email) from Stanly Jungleib who founded Seer Systems and was responsible for the development of the first professional software synthesizer. Stanley had been a member of the group that founded MIDI which is a industry protocol that is still used (I use it almost every day) represent music.  I had forgotten my own role in the development of software synthesizers until Stanley’s email.  It brought back a lot of memories.

I got started using computers because of my interest in music. Getting into music rather late at the age of 15,   I thought of myself more as a composer/arranger than pianist back then.  But I was really interested in Jazz which is improvised.  In late 1966 when I went to work for Joe Kamiya at  the Langley Porter Institute doing the first work in brain wave bio feedback, I began to think that I could somehow combine physiological information such as EEG, GSR , heart rate etc to get feedback from an audience and couple that with a real time computer musical improvisation program.  Of course, at the time, the computer we used   had a memory smaller than a one photo on the iPhone and probably had as much computing power as a remote control for a TV but that did not stop me from dreaming.

I continued my interest in using computer for music creation.  Sometime around 1990 I joined the board of OpCode Systems a leader in the music software industry.  I was a Vice President at Intel at the time and OpCode’s products only ran on the Mac which used the PowerPC microprocessor. This was a bit of a problem but did not keep me from having a Mac in my music studio.  I also joined a group call MuSig which was user group focused on Midi that was founded by Glenn Spencer, a music teacher (one of my teachers).  Glenn introduced me to Stanley.  Stanley and I had a number of conversations.  At that time, we at Intel lead by the Intel Architectural Labs was working on a series of technology to turn the PC (remember this was around 1991) in to a multi media platform.  My group at Intel (which became Intel Capital) shared this vision and was investing in a number of early stage companies that could help with this.  A key part of the strategy was called NSP (for native signal processing).  The idea was to use the main CPU instead of dedicated chips (especially DSP’s).  In a sense it was a way to sell more powerful microprocessors (made of course by Intel) but it also had the important benefit of making the functionality software based instead of hardcoded.  This flexibility proved critical in the development of multimedia capabilities.  I can’t remember perfectly, but I must have introduced Stanley to the Labs and also assigned someone to work on making a small investment in his company.  The result was one of the first (if not the first) software synth.  Andy Grove actually demonstrated Seer synth at Codex in 1994.  By 1995, Microsoft was putting major pressure on Intel to stop developing software.  I won’t go into it  although you can read a bit about it here. Intel caved to Microsoft aggression.  Much of the NSP projects were killed including the one with Seer.  Seer went off to do a deal with Creative Labs which was the major supplier of sound boards for the PC.  I left the board of OpCode around the same time.  Glenn died in 1998.  That was pretty much the end of my involvment with music technology.

Now I am back on a Mac.  I use Garage Band and Logic Express.  I am able to do things I could only dream about back in the day.  I even have music creation programs on my iPhone.

Goodbye Geocities!  Yahoo has just announced that it is shutting down Geocities.  I wanted to say goodbye.  We (Intel Capital) made an early investment in Geocities  (maybe 1997).  I remember the meeting where I first learned about it.   One of the  people in my organization  invited me to a meeting to discuss Geocities with the venture group that was the main investor in Geocities (about 50%), @venture.  @venture was the the VC arm of CMGI.  The meeting was attended by the CEO of CMGI, Dave Wetherell, and Peter Mills who headed up @venture. The Geocities concept at the time really took my imagination.  The idea was that people would stake out virtual real estate and build a presence there (kind of like Second Life without the avatars.  The kind of real estate you owned and its location had different values. Users were called homesteaders.  Neighborhoods were created to focus on different topics. It was really the beginning of user created content and social networking.  The meeting turned out to be an extremely important one to both Intel and to me personally.  Not only did I get very excited about the potential of Geocities and the general concept it represented but I got very excited about @ventures and their various investments.  I was particularly impressed with Dave Wetherell and learned that he was able to start @ventures with the money that CMGI had made from being an early investor in what was maybe the first browser company (can’t remember the name) which was sold soon after the investment to AOL.  I was extremely impressed with Wetherell’s vision.  After that meeting, I got Intel’s agreement to make a significant investment into CMGI (December of 1997).  It was the first time we invested in a company that invested in early stage ventures (we always wanted to do that directly).  Our agreement provided for Intel to also have the opportunity to co invest with CMGI in early stage companies.  I became a board observer (at that time Intel did not want to have board positions in companies we invested in do to perceived legal issues…..they no longer feel that way).  Being a board observer with CMGI provided me with a lot of insight in the development of consumer Internet which was my main passion.  I played an active role with the company and when I left Intel in April 1999 (ten years ago!), I was asked to join the board of CMGI . That worked out for me pretty well.  The company soon had a 40 billion dollar valuation  and I was able to sell all my vested shares at the peak. Then the bubble burst and that combined with varrious management issues prevented CMIG from executing the vision that Dave had for the Internet. But it did not work out badly for Intel.  Intel sold a major part of its  Geocities stock to Yahoo prior and during the acquisition of Geocites by Yahoo for about three billion dollars after the company had first gone public.  I guess (can’t remember) that Intel made over a  billion dollars in its investments in CMGI and Geocities.  Not sure how things worked out for Yahoo after the acquisition. Obviously, it did not work out in the long term but maybe it helped Yahoo develop its stong consumer position which it unfortunately did not maximize these last years.

The story of Geocities is important in looking at companies like Facebook, Twitter, Second Life etc.  I also suspect there are going to be a lot of sad people mourning the lost of this very important company.

There was an interesting editiorial in the NYT today.  As a man who was treated for Prostate cancer  over 12  years ago, I often said that I had PSA disease.  The problem in my opinion is not having PSA tests done. It is what happens after the results come back positive.   The PSA test can provide a lot of value in determining if someone has prostate cancer and to a certain extent how aggressive  that cancer may be particularly if the PSA is monitored over a period of time.  The rate of change of PSA is an important indicator.  The problem is that when a PSA is above a certain level (they were using 4.0 when I had my first PSA done at the age of 50 years), the next step is often a Biopsy to determine if there is cancer and to grade the Cancer. This is where the problem really comes into play.  If cancer is detected (and the older you are the better chance that you will have some amount of prostate cancer), the next step is for the doctor to recommend ways for you to treat it. Top of the list is surgery followed by radiation of some time.  My doctors do not really treat the possibility of what is called “watchful waiting” especially if you are young.  Doctors  do not want to take the chance that you, their patient, may be one of the people that have an aggressive form of the disease.  The idea is that if the cancer is found early and the prostate removed or totally cooked with radiation, then you can no longer get prostate cancer.  But even that is not always true.  There is not just one kind of prostate cancer.  Many prostate cancers grow very slowly and many never spread beyond the prostate (it has to do that to become dangerous).  Frankly, I wish I never had treated my prostate cancer (I had radiation) but watched and waited (by monitoring the PSA and maybe having a biopsy ever few years) but at the age of 51 no doctor would have recommended that approach.

The good news is that i am pretty sure within ten years we will be able to determine of a man has an aggressive form of the disease or one that can be left alone which would be most cases.  I also think we will find ways to deal more effectively with advanced prostate cancer which will mean that the cost of taking the risk will be reduced.

In 1979, my wife and I  decided to leave Israel where we had been living for five years with our three children.  My specialty was computer in medicine (in particular at that time, the use of computers in Cardiology).  I felt very confined professionally and felt that I should either focus on medicine (either research or administration) or work for a computer company.  Once I formulated the issue like that the decision was simple.  I could never give up computers.  So while a choice to stay in medicine meant going back to Europe, the decision to go into computers meant a return to my home country, the United States.  First of course, I had to get a job.

That turned out to be pretty easy although there were some issues which I reported here.  I had consulted on an off for Digital Equipment Corp.  I ended up there and within six months, I was responsible for the hardware engineering of the low end computers.  Most of the products where small computers sold as components but I also had a few “systems” that were being done for various product lines.  One was Decmate at word processor (competing with Wang). And other who’s name escapes me now, was a small computer used by a small business product line.  I loved developing stand alone complete systems.  In Israel and I had developed a single patient monitoring computer called SOLO (Single Online Observer).  So I was pretty excited about this type of computer.  About after my joining in the July 1979, I got a call from Gordon Bell who ran engineering that I was requested to attend a meeting with Ken Olsen,the CEO.  his brother Stan, one of the key VPs (the meeting was at Stan’s house), Gordon and a few others.  It was a very interesting and it turns out, very t important meeting.  I will not go into it here but the results was that I was given a mandate to develop a family of personal computer.  At first, I named it KO (for Knock Out although some noticed a similarity with Ken Olsen’s name). Later we changed the name to CT (for Computing Terminal).  It was an amazing computer for the time and I am very proud of it.  Here are some of the features (remember  kiddies, it was the early 80s):

1) Bit map graphics
2) Real time O/S with multi tasking
3) Customer installable options
4) Telephone management system (could make and receive calls and digitize voice_
5)Ethernet LAN options (first PC with this)
5) 5 Meg 5 1/2 Winchester hard drive (yes megs not gigs)
6) First PC that could stand on its side
7) Double sided Floppy disc drive
Most importantly application compatible with the 32 bit VAX line

Well it turned out that this venture totally failed and for a number of reasons.  key amongst these was that along the way, Ken decided that IBM and Apple were not enough competition so when Barry Folsom proposed using building something close to the IBM PC but using much of the packaging of the Professional, Ken went for it and the Rainbow was born  Then Dick Loveland said he could use the same stuff but with a PDP eight and come out with a Decmate (word processor) replacement.  Ken thought thought this was fantastic.  Three different computers all using common parts and in his mind, doing different things.  Well the customers could just choose.  And as I am quoted in The Ultimate Entrepreneur. “they did.  They chose IBM”.  Could things have turned out different for Digital.  I think so.  Maybe if Barry and I had been able to work better together  (Decmate was just stupid) we could have come up with  a Pro that was positioned for the Digital customer bases and a Rainbow that was targeted at small business a individuals.  But it was not to be.

Anyway, during the last year or so of the project and my last year at Digital, Mark Porat made a movie that dealt primarily with the development of the Professional.  It was funded for the 25 anniversary of the Company but it never saw the light of day. I and a few others were able to get copies before the film was killed.    It is pretty silly and I am  bit embarrassed by it now but  it is also interesting I think.  I just put it up on the net here. Enjoy!

As you probably know, Bill Gates is leaving the employment of Microsoft the company he founded in 1975.  Bill and I have had overlapping lives.  I actually started working on computers a few years before Bill (being 10 years older then Bill helped).  And while I am not Bill Gates I can imagine  what it must mean for him to leave the computer industry in which he was so much a part in shaping.  While most of you are thinking of Gates the Billionaire, Gates the Entrepreneur, Gates the competitive businessperson etc, right now I am thinking of the Gates the boy programmer.  A man that  knew what a bit really was. Who could not only hold the code for a program in his head but the entire memory of the computer (the was not much difference then). 

I first meet Bill Gates in 1981 when he visits Digital Computer (the then number two computer company) to meet with Ken Olsen, the CEO.  The meeting was set up by Barry Folsom who was responsible for the Rainbow one of Digitals three failed attempts to enter what became the PC market.  I was busy with my own failure, the Professional Series.  By that time, Bill had pretty much figure out the business strategy of Microsoft (I wont explain here).  A year later, I attended a speakers dinner at PC Forum (when Ben Rosen still ran it) with Bill, Steve Jobs, and many of the 20 something’s that would create the PC business ( I was 37 at the time and feeling pretty old).  That was when I first learned about Compaq and Lotus and began to understand myself how the computer industry would develop.

 Later in my role as Vice President Business Development at Intel, I would often attend meeting with Bill (quarterly executive meetings between Intel and Microsoft, other company meetings and industry events).  Bill was not one of my favorite people.  The company he built is not one of my favorite companies either. But the software they developed which at that time always needed more processor power did put my kids through school.   Later when Bill set up his foundation, I was a bit conflicted.  Now I had to admire someone I did not really like.

So Bill is now moving on or rather leaving something behind. But the foundation must be such a different experience for him for  he will never be in the position he was when he first started programming computers.

I know myself that I never knew such joy in my professional life as when I would late a night, program my first computer bit by bit.  I wonder as Bill get older, if he will miss those days more than his days at the helm of Microsoft and as the worlds richest man.

My great grandmother’s family lived in a small town in the Ukraine called  Priluki for a very long time. I was able to trace my family back to about 1760 but they could have been there for hundreds of year before. My great great grandfather was a butcher. He was born in 1830. He died in 1890 when my great grandmother was 13 years old. Her mother had died in 1880 when my great grandmother was just three. Soon after, her sister Rosa left for San Francisco where her older half sister lived. A second sister also immigrated to San Francisco. My great grandmother, Basya followed in 1897. She married in 1898 and had the first of her three children in 1899. I knew Basya well. She lived to be almost a 100 years old and even held my son on her lap. She would tell me stories of Priluki including descriptions of the family’s home, the river she swam in and most importantly about her older brother Aron-Movsha Borodinsky. She always said that I reminded her of him. He was an actor in the local Yiddish Theatre. He also took over the family butcher business. Aron-Movsha for reasons I do not know decided to stay in Priluki. A few days ago, I saw the face of Aron-Movsha for the first time when his granddaughter visited me at my home in San Francisco. She is living in the bay area now. As I wrote earlier the great grandson of Aron-Movsha found me from Israel via the internet. So after a 111 years, the decedents of Basya (my sister and a cousin where here as well) meet the descendent of her brother Aron-Movsha. I learned about what happened to my family in Priluki. How they continued to live in the home where Basya was born. About the children of Aron-Movsha and their children. About how they continued to communicate with the family in San Francisco until the Communist Authorities told them in 1938 that they could no longer answer the mail from San Francisco. About how they fled from the Nazis to Kazakhstan where Aron-Movsha died. About how his daughter Miriam return to Priluki after the war and had a child, the woman that visited my home. I learned about how she with her children left Priluki in 1991 and went to live for a short time in Israel before going to Canada. Eventually she got a green card and moved to the New York. After living there for a long time she decided to move to the bay area even though she knew no one. I wonder if at some level she knew she would find her family. And then her son, who lives in Israel and is currently not allowed to live in the USA found me. And there we were. There we are a family reunited after 111 years.

Here is the photo of Aron-Movsha Borodinsky.  His granddaughter made it to San Francisco and now he has made it to the Internet.

]]> http://twothirdsdone.com/2008/05/09/the-internet-is-a-miracle-maker/ Fri, 09 May 2008 16:49:58 +0000 avram miller http://twothirdsdone.com/2008/05/09/the-internet-is-a-miracle-maker/

A few days ago I got an email from what turns out to be my third cousin. I will call him TC.  The email said that his great grandfather was Aron-Moysha Borodinsky.  He found me on  the major Jewish genealogy site, JewishGen.  My heart almost stopped when I began to read the email.  My great grandmother Bessie (Basya )Borodinsky born in 1878 in the Ukrainian village of Priluki had a brother named Aron-Moysha Borodinsky. Basya had two sisters that had  left for San Francisco and she joined them there in 1897.  About five years ago, I became interested in my family history.  I knew  Bessie  well.  She lived to be almost a hundred years old.  I even have a photo of my son with her, my grandmother, my mother and me.  I spent a lot of time with Bessie while growing up. She told me stories of Priluki of told me about her older brother Aron.  Unfortunately by the time I became interested in my family history, not only was she dead but also my grandmother and my mother.  It took a lot of effort to find out even what Bessie maiden name was. I did know the name of the village. To make a very long story short,  I was able to put together the story of the Borodinsky family starting in 1760 and going on to about 2004. I even sent someone to Priluki to photo copy the Jewish archives which were just piled up in the back of an abandon church (soon after we got copies of the relevant pages, the documents were taken away by the authorities to add to the central achieves, something that might take twenty years).  That is how I learned that Aron-Moysha married and had four children.  And there were many other members of the extended Borodinsky family living in Priluki at the beginning of the 20^th century.  I never knew what happened to them but assume that whoever was left died either in a pogrom or, the Holocaust or WWII.   I wrote back to TC and told him I was his third cousin and told him a bit about what happened to the sisters of his great grandfather and what extensive family he had in the San Francisco bay area .  TC lives by the way in Israel.  He told me what happened to the family (yes most died at the hands of the germans, or fighting in the war) but one of the daughters of Aron survived (she would have been the 1^st cousin of my grandmother).  She knew about the family in San Francisco from her father, Aron but there was no way to contact them, she died about ten years ago in Israel.  TC was actually born in Priluki and I was amazed to learn there were still Jews there.  Not only that but the Jewish grave yard is intact and I am sure I can find the graves of Bessie’s parents.  TC has offered to go with me to Priluki.  And it also turns out that recently his mother (the second cousin of my mother) moved to the San Francisco area.  I just spoke to her via a friend that speak Russian and hope to see her soon.  She is all alone here and is so happy to learn that she has a big family in the bay area.  TC has photos of the family from before 1900.  He and I can put together the pieces of our family and reunite them after 110 years.  How amazing!

While I am still very much interested in the future, I have come to realize that I know a lot more about the past particularly with respect to technology.  After all I was working with computer before most of the people that use them were born.  For the last few years I have been working on a project to document the early history of broadband where I was fortunate to play a key role (while I may not be the father of broadband although some say I am, I am surly its god father).  It has been a  two year project and I hope to realize a web site dedicated to this topic at the end of the year.  It is only 15 years ago when Matt Miller, then CTO of General Instruments (reporting can you believe, Don Rumsfeld) and decided to abandon our activities with Microsoft to develop an interactive TV and  instead developed a bi direction cable modem and head end equipment and then proceed to conscience the cable industry that they could over computer communications.  It is not my intention to preview this project but just to illustrate the point.  There are a lot of people that know how broadband works now and probably a large group working on its future including a continuation of my efforts at Intel   (which ended in 1999) with the development of WiMax.  But there are only a handful of people who could explain how residential broadband got created.

Kevin Maney who use to be at USA Today and is now at Portfolio wrote a column on some of the changes that we have experienced in the last twenty years (since the stock market crash of 1987).  Those of you (there may be one or two) that read my blog regularly know that I love to think about the past and the changes that have taken place. I also love to think about the future and the changes the may take place.   That is why I have to do yoga, meditation, the Alexander Technique, psycho therapy and most of all, play piano, just hoping to stay in the moment even for a moment.   Anyway, I enjoyed Kevin’s remarks.  The stock market crash of 87 is one of those days where you remember where you where and what you where doing (like the two Kennedy assassinations and the day I lost my virginity).  We were living in Portland. Our children were actually children. I worked for Intel trying to make business sense out of a technology experiment masking as a business ( a venture with Siemens to build a multi processor, fault tolerant computer with a new micro processor, new operating systems and any thin else new we could think of).  This all ended up as a JV company called BiiN which “fail to launch” as they say.  A year later, we would move to Palo Alto, where I would start up Intel’s venture arm (what eventually became Intel Capital).  Intel was still primarily selling memory chips (I am laughing now thinking about the fact that Intel use to be referred to as a “memory” company in the context of this post) but realized that its future would be as a microprocessor company.   The crash of 87 was very scary.  For the first time every in my life I actually owned stock and had been building a “nest egg” so that I could send my kids to college.  I watch this dream lose its grip on reality and in a panic. I actually sold my stock holding, thereby locking my loss and learning a very valuable lesson:  you want to sell when the market is high not when it is going down.  This lesson paid off when in March 2000, I sold most of my stock holdings which were primarily in the technology sectorJ.   

Forty four years ago I went to jail for the first time.  I was arrested at the Palace  Hotel in San Francisco as part of a Civil Rights demonstration.  It is funny to think that the last time I was at the Palace Hotel it was for a Web 2.0 conference.   I doubt that many at that conference were even born before that day.  We were practicing non violent demonstrations then.  We lay in the street before the Palace Hotel. You can read about that at and even see a video at. They picked us up and threw us into a police van.  Then they booked us.  When the police asked me if I had an scars, I said yes (I have a major scar running up my back that looks like I lost in a sword fight).  I told them I had a lung operation.  They asked if anything had been removed and I said both lungs which they wrote down.  It was a demanding time.  I had to choose between anti war activates and civil rights.  I tried to spend my time equally.  The anti war stuff was more demanding and the music was not as good.  And believe me it was not as it is now, where most people know  that our government is lying to us. But watching the Jenna Six stuff reminded me of this time forty four years ago and it made me sad.

It is forty years since the Summer of Love.  And there are “reenactments” up all over the country.  I am trying to imagine what  this group (many if not most in their sixties) looks like now.  I remember the hit item at the time was LSD (and I do not mean the Mormons).  This year I bet it is the guy with the Viagra stand that does well. So much for free love. When you hit sixty it could cost you a few dollars (even if it is only co payments).

 I remember this Summer of Love.  I was still living in San Francisco although by then I had by then spent time in Asia and Europe. I was 22 years old.I had given up on the hippy life style although I still had a beard and long hair and working at the Langley Porter Institute which was actually on a hill that sort of looked down on the Haight Ashbury which was ground zero for the 100k people that came to SF to wear  flowers in their hair.  I had been a sort of founding member of the ‘hippy movement” although I never liked that term.  But I did not make the whose who of hippydom.

In 1963, I discovered a place on Fulton Street called the Blue Unicorn.  It was owned by Bob Stubbs.  It was a kind of coffee house but it was mostly about people like me who would go there for some coffee or food and sit around and read (we did not  have notebooks, blackberries, cell phones, or any other form of electronic communications).  They had a piano there that I sometimes played.  And a back room where I once saw Bob Dylan.  Alan Ginsberg would  come in and I sat and talked with him on a number of occasitions and even went to a party at his apartment.  I became friends with Norm Stubbs, Bob’s younger brother.  After a year or so, some similar places began to open up on Haight Street and slowly the action moved there. Bob actual opened a store right on the corner of Masonic and Haight Street.  If was all kind of strange to me.  I had spent many years as a child on that block between Masonic and Ashbery.  My mother and step father had a donut store right in the middle of that black.  And both my mom’s and dad’s families had lived in that area in the 20s and 30s.    We all smoked pot and even took LSD (I had my first experience after visiting a dance performance at the Magic Theater on Divisidero street)  And at that time the Rock movement was getting started.  I got to know some of the members of the Jefferson Airplane and  went to parties at the home of Jerry Garcia.  But I did not care for this kind of music.  Having studied classical music, I was falling in love with Jazz.  Also I wanted to be a serious musician (composer not piano player that came later) and the musicians I knew were more in love with drugs than music.  I use to joke that I wanted to practices and then get stoned and they wanted to get stoned and then practice. The exception to all this was Janet Joplin who I got to hear rehearshing. I was also busy with the anti war movement (Vietnam) and Civil Rights.   Most importantly, I was in love.  And when a few years later, my heart was broken I went to live in Paris and later London before coming back in 1966.  I was pretty surprise to see that a our little movement had grown and accomplished much  but also disappointed that so many of the people that came to SF in 1967 where not really looking for love.

This is a very funny video with Conan O’Brien visiting Intel.  I do not know how it happens but it is a typical example of Intel poking fun at itself.  The company does have humor although these days they might not be finding as much to laugh about.  See the video here. When I interviewed for my  job at Intel, Gordon Moore who was at the time CEO, Andy Grove who was COO, Les Vadasz Senior VP and badge number 3 my ultimate boss and good friend)and several other senior executives met with me in their cubicles. There was just room enough for two or maybe three people. No one had a real office and I think this is still the case. I understood this would be my situation if I joined.  On one hand I did not look forward to this although I did end up with a cubicle with a window. In my previous job as President of Franklin Computer, I had an office the size of a small living room but I also remembered that Franklin went bust. I thought back to my years at Digital Equipment.  Two things stuck in my mind. One was a visit to meet the head of computer retail at Sears (this was about 1982 and Sears was opening up computer retail stores).  We could not meet in his office since he was a not VP and the office he had just been given had belong to a VP.  VP’s had offices with doors that open to one side where their assistance sat.  Since he was not a VP his office was being changed so his door was on the hall and his assistant would sit across from that in an open office. They had to change the rug because VP’s could pick out there own rugs but if you were not a VP the rug had to match the hall rug. The next time I visited we meet in a conference room.  He had just been made a VP and they were redoing his office. At digital, we had what was called executives sponsors.  The executive sponsor was responsible for dealing with a particular account from the “feel good” point of view.  Ken Olsen asked me to take care of Ford.  Ford was a major customer and Philip Caldwell, the CEO of Ford was on the board of Digital Equipment and Ken Olsen was on the Board of Ford (no one cared about interlocking board members then).  In particular, Ken asked me to bring Phil’s assistant a Decmate which was Digital’s Word Processor.  I was brought to Ford by the digital sales man who took me there in a (you guessed it) Ford.  He told me that all sales people that called on Ford from any company had to have Fords or they would not be let in.  The parking lot was full of Fords.  There was no other model.  I asked one of the executives at Ford if Phil was driven to work in a Ford.  He said of course.  I asked if it was a standard Ford.  He said of course.  I asked if there was anything different about the car. He thought for a moment and said. “Only that it was serviced every day”.   We then went up to the executive floor in a special elevator that did not stop at any other floor other than the very top floor where there were apartments for directors to stay in when they visited the company.  The got there via helicopter so they did not even have to take the elevator. The executive floor was made out of Italian marble.  Each executive suite had three units; 1) executive, 2) assistant and 3) conference room.  I was shown Phil’s office which contained millions of dollars of art bought by Henry Ford other CEOs.  Then I asked his assistant how she liked the Decmate which I had sent ahead.  She said that she never used it.  I asked why and she said that she never types.  When I asked her how she wrote the letters that Phil dictated she pointed to the floor and said they do it down there.  I found out later that down there was a typing pool.   Later I got a chance to learn some more about some of Ford’s culture.  It seems that if an officer of the company wrote something it was printed on blue paper. Otherwise it was printed on white paper.  I went over to a copy machine and sure enough there were two kinds of paper (white and blue). It seems like you also had to copy things on the correct color paper. So having lived through all of this, I decided to try Intel’s way for a while.  It worked pretty well for me. So well that when I left Intel, I was able set myself up on the 50^th floor of building in San Francisco with a view of the bay bridge, decorate my office (the size of a living room) with Italian antique furniture and close the door. 

Yesterday I had a two hour lunch with a young entrepreneur.  While I am use to working with men and women young enough to be my children (like Simon and David the founders of www.heavy.com), this was the first time I can remember meeting with a CEO who was young enough to be my grandson.  He was born in 1984 the year that the MAC was born, (but not the year that George Orwell envisioned in his book 1984, we had to wait for George Bush and the Patriot Acts to start to see some of that stuff).  I had to remind myself that when I was about the same age as this person I ran a dept. at a University.  At that time, I was always the youngest person in the room.  Now I am mostly the oldest person in the room.  Well actually I am often both the oldest and youngest person in the room.  

During the conversation, I was asked how I ended up at Intel which took me back to how I got started with computer in 1966 including how I actually learned to build gates and flip flops one at a time using single transistors, resistors and capacitors (those where the days). In the forty years that I have been working with computers a lot has change to put it mildly.  And as we know, the changes in hardware follow Moore’s law which implies an order of magnitude improvement every five years (that is 100 times in ten years).  Too bad software does not improve at that rate but then again we have not found the transistor equivalent of software yet.  Driving home from the meeting, I had to laugh as I imagined my lunch companion having a similar lunch forty yeas in the future. I even have a shot at being there and hopefully still being both the oldest and youngest in the room and maybe even understanding what is being said (thanks Posit Science). 

In 1966 when I was 21, I had a major career decision to make.  My main choices were between being a poet (I actually wrote some pretty good poems),  being a musician (but all buddies wanted to get stone and then practice while I wanted to practice and then get stoned),  go to jail a lot protesting the war (Vietnam then), becoming a Hassidic Rabbi or being a scientist.   So here I am more than forty years later, no longer writing poetry, practicing a lot but not getting stoned, protesting the war but not getting thrown into jail and blessed with the result of the decision I did take.  In 1966 I decided to become a scientist since it did not require me to cut off my beard or shorten my hair.  Actually being a scientist, Hassidic Rabbi, jazz musician or war protestor were very consistent with the way I looked (remember this was San Francisco in the 60s).  Only problem was that I never went to University (I went to sea as a merchant seaman instead).  Now I am going to skip over a lot of stuff. I was doing research at the Langley Porter Institute at the University of Cal. Medical School in SF and around 1967 we got a PDP-7 from Digital Equipment Company to replicate some experiments that other researchers had already done.  By that time I had been designing equipment for EEG studies for Joe Kamiya (we did the first brain wave bio feedback work).  I used digital modules (R series) from Digital Equipment (by the way, I ended up running the low end hardware group of Digital many years later) these were plug in boards that had things on them like flip flops and gates.  Well in comes this computer. I did not know anything about computers per se.  That night I opened up the computer and found out that it was made up of the same kind of boards I was using.  But when I used these boards I connected them with actual wires through what was a called a plug board.  Well there was no plug board and I could not figure out how the different boards “knew” what to do.  I even had to read the manual and that is when I discovered software and I was rocked to my soul. Here is a photo of a PDP-7.  There were only 120 of them ever built.  They cost $72,000 in 1965.   The most important thing that happened on the PDP-7 was that it is Dennis Richie developed UNIX.  This computer had an 18 bit word length (which means 2 bytes plus two bits kiddies).  The memory cycle time was 1.75 microseconds.  It took 4 microseconds to add two numbers together.  I can’t remember how big the memory was but I could actually remember most of the content of the memory in my head (I was a lot smarter then).  You can see a bunch of switches in the photo.  One set was to establish an address and the other set was for the content.  The computer was so dumb when you turned it on that you had to put in a small program via the switches (called the Rim Loader).  That program was smart enough to read a paper tape program via the ASR-33 teletype.  I bet we did not even have the equivalent of 8k bytes.  I learned to program it pretty well together with a friend named Pete Harris.  We would stay up all night getting that computer to do things that Microsoft still has not figure out how to do. But most fun was programming the lights so that their turning on an off would create RF which we could pick up on an am radio.  We created music. Eventually we got a tap drive and we figure out how to program that so that we could make the cabinet in which it was housed vibrate in a way that looked like dancing and that we could sync to the music we made through the lights. Of course we only did this late at night since during the day we did real science like studying guys that were high on drugs or if we were lucky Zen Monks.

Avram’s first mobil phone Just to prove I have always been a head of my time check out the photo below.  Remember this is 1946 folks.