Ah, yes, those reflections

 In the March 21, 2024 post (first in awhile, yes, I admit I've been dilatory), I commented about reflections going back to the 1965 talk of Ivan Sutherland at IBM's SHARE Design conference in New Orleans, and how it caused me to visit MIT.  Then, getting ready for the AMW talk yesterday, I dug back through more stuff, and realized that my old display box, the HP 1300A, played a somewhat bigger role (with more serendipity than I appreciated even until this sleuthing) in the emergence of University of Utah in the computer graphics world.

Brian Berg, don of AMW for some years now, has been conducting IEEE Milestone recognitions for the past decade or so, and he gave a great RAT talk about that last night.  They've awarded twenty to date, with an astonishing six more due in the next 60 days.  The very first one, I believe, was for the HP 35 handheld calculator.  I was invited to that celebration, which Brian and Fred Terman (the son) hosted in HP's Building 2 cafeteria as I remember it.   Something like 100 folk who were part of that old effort assembled, including Tom Whitney's widow and ubiquitous Dave Cochran (who passed a year ago).

Brian last night said that the Milestone awards are wonderful and unique in that they celebrate the project and not the person--saying that there are plenty of awards for the individuals.  He cited how proud the companies are of these awards, and showed several photos of where the plaques are proudly displayed.

And he acknowledged the great contributions of the U of Utah's computer graphics department to this work, from 1965-1978.  See this award, for example, in two photos:

What delighted me was realizing that U of Utah was using my HP 1300A as a key graphics display before Sutherland arrived.   How I found that out, was from Alan Kay, as I noted last month. who used it for his prototype FlexWriter.  What Alan also shared was that he learned of this from his first job, at Beehive Medical Electronics, which became a Computer Terminals vendor (actually, to HP for their first text terminals).  And what was even more intriguing was that Ted Shortliffe had told me in his ACM Award Archive interview that he had worked with Homer Warner, when Ted was doing his first work on AI for medical purpose.  Homer co-founded Beehive, along with Don McQuarrie, son of a famous Utah doctor, Irvine McQuarrie.

 What made this interesting to me is that Don's first cousin was Irvine McQuarrie (son of Irvine's brother, who was head of the Utah Medical Society.  Irv was my Forest Service partner for summers in 1959-1960 in Toiyabe National Forest (Bridgeport, CA), and he kept notice of my career from then forward.  So he told Don about our box, and that is, I believe, how Beehive came to have an HP 1300A, and thus for Alan to see and use it, and thus for U of Utah to have a true analog "bit-mappable" display box, long before Sutherland arrived and he and Dave Evans created Evans and Sutherland Inc.

Ah, those connections.  I was married to a Salt Lake City woman, and that informed the COPD work done at the Colorado Air Pollution Control Commission in 1970--destroying the still-extant AMA stance on COPD being a 'smoker's disease'.   The issue of course that showed up was that Utah was the 15th worst state in America for COPD, but cigarettes were banned from the state.  What?

Well, so much for reflections . . . .