Wow, I'd almost forgotten. AMW, the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, held its 50th anniversary conference this week. Founded by three Freds and a Ted in late 1974, the first meeting was at Asilomar's fantastic 'campground' in Monterey--a quasi-conference Center that captures a lot of the atmosphere and ambience of the upper, almost remote, Monterey peninsula. Fred Coury and Fred Clegg were intermittent HP designers, Ted Laliotis would later join HP long-term, and Fred Terman (son of THE Fred Terman who 'founded' Silicon Valley, and served long on HP's board) were the four founders. Terman died in 2021, Clegg in 2022, Laliotis sometime earlier, and Coury came to this meeting.
These were all designers at key companies, whose desire was to skirt or circumvent the 'suits' running the companies so that they could talk about 'real' problems, mostly technical, when microprocessors first burst onto the scene. A strict rule was that no tape recorders or formal papers or even lists of attendees were allowed, so that 'freedom' of commentary was encouraged.
I was invited by Bert Forbes and Fred Coury to attend and indeed to give a talk about our "new" Logic State Analyzers at the 2nd meeting, in a session chaired by Jack Grimes from Tektronix which included Gary Gordon from HP re his 'Signature Analyzer' and Sterling Hou (and Jim Lally) from Intel about the Intellec 8, to code the Intel 8008 and 8080. Interesting--Hou's talk was uninspired about a great product; Gordon's product more-or-less sucked (even though my lab had originally designed it) but Gary was and is a great tehcnical guy who can inspire just a bout anyone. Grimes did not defend the clunky and virtually worthless Tektronix DAS 9100--he did however give a fantastic talk about "Memory is Free" that I found insightful, even compelling.
I wrote about this session in my book about Carver Mead, when he bounded to the stage, seizing my slides to scribble his preliminary thoughts that led to "the tall thin man" IC and his book with Lynn Conway, about VLSI design.
Later, I wrote about AMW2, 4, 5, and 6 (especially 5 and 6) wherein Pat Conway (uncelebrated) and Lyn Conway (dissed for years while Carver basked in glory) did the unthinkable and built the basis for TSMC and the whole foundry idea, with experimental chips. My paper, plus several others, helped get Conway into the Computer History Museum 12 years after Mead.
Well, gosh golly, today (well, yesterday now), I was lucky enough to give a RAT talk (Rich Asilomar Tradition) about our own little start-up, AstroVirtual. It's a pretty good pitch, I think (proud author)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UldbgcTl8Pg
And, though RAT sessions are late at night, with no documentation, I got some great feedback, and they allowed me to post the video. True confession--I just showed the film, I didn't do a live talk. Sorry.
Anyway, just wanted to recognize a whole gruop of super intrapreneurs.
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