Most schools don't understand intrapreneuring

 A challenging title, don't you think?   Two decades ago, virtually no university taught Entrepreneurship, although some (e.g. Stanford and MIT and Berkeley, to name a few) inspired students to think in terms of starting their own companies.   And then it became codified, and even ritualized.  Now it is de rigueur.

But what about intrapreneuring?

The word was coined, most say, by Gifford Pinchot III, in his book, Intrapreneuring, 1985   https://www.amazon.com/Intrapreneuring-leave-corporation-become-entrepreneur-ebook/dp/B07NNTPM1Y

Basically, the theme was how to embrace and encourage innovation inside a corporation, while working for that corporation instead of working to leave it and start your own with 'presumably' your ideas, often hatched within the corporation.   Now, granted, ofttimes corporations classically thwart creativity within their ranks, and who can blame someone for leaving due to frustration that their ideas are ignored?

But I just attended several IEEE Milestone events, led by the energetic, nearly peritpatetic IEEE volunteer Brian Berg, that celebrated truly 'earth-shaking' pioneering engineering efforts that shaped our current world, and I was struck overnight by the fact that more than half of them were team efforts within a company structure rather than an innovative start-up.   True, Bob Metcalfe's efforts to establish Ethernet resulted, among other things, in his highly successful 3Com company, but the work was done at (and the Award went to) XeroxPARC.   TCP/IP for Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf was indeed a university effort; the networking standard IEEE-802 was a team effort by many people, and significantly, was originally proposed by a triumvirate of XeroxPARC, DEC, and Intel.   David Liddle, not Metcalfe, was the original sponsor at PARC; Gordon Bell (who passed away last week) of DEC, and the unheralded Phil Kaufman at Intel organized the group that turned to Metcalfe's original suggestions.   The list of presenters for the ceremony was long, pedigreed, and clearly represented many organizations and multiple roles--hardly an Entrepreneurial activity.  Most definitely a monumental Intrapreneurial activity.  Why don't we recognize that?

Importantly, the IEEE Milestone program honors only companies, not individuals, and the work must have originated more than 25 years prior to nomination.  https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Main_Page

PageRank as an invention was at Stanford, akin to the TCP/IP work--later, of course, it was the basis for Brin and Page (eponymous) to start Google, decidedly an Entrepreneurial activity.  No argument that the Milestones for the first Laser Printer, and the first "PC" (the XeroxPARC Alto) both were company contributions, where neither Starkweather nor Thacker ever started a company with those ideas.

So, while we do celebrate Entrepreneurs as such, we fail to celebrate Intrapreneurs as such.  Why?  

It wasn't just U of Utah

 I mentioned in the previous post ("Ah, Yes, those reflections . . ." 4/25/24) that 'our display' was used at the University of Utah for a lot of their early computer graphics work, never mind that they didn't mention it for their IEEE Milestone award.

And for the last session of the AMW 50 meeting, Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar, showed up to describe his great book, Pixel, and how the Pixar company came into being.   Brian Berg, the AMW chair, and the head of the IEEE Milestone selection and presentation committee, introduced Smith.   

Berg said, however, that: "Smith was a key member of the U of Utah team".   Smith promptly corrected him to say, "No, I never worked there.  Yes, I visited, and I worked with them, but I was at the New York Institute of Technology for years (actually 1975-1979).   This followed his PhD at Stanford, and time at XeroxPARC.   Recall as shown in the plaque at the last post, that the award for U of Utah was for 1965-1978 work.

The excitement for me was the attached picture that Alvy Ray displayed for the AMW talk:

The HP 1310A succeeded the HP 1300A, circa 1971 or so, in a project led by John Riggen.  I had moved on to start the Logic Analyzer Operation.

It is described in the HP Computer Museum (Australia) at the following link:

https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=756

The original HP 1300A was a 14" diagonal screen; the HP 1310A was 19" diagonal.  Selling price went up from $1,900 to $3,000.   The story for the original HP 1300A development and technology is best told in the "Inside Story of the HP 1300A X-Y Display":

https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/writings/hp1300a_00.htm

By way of postscript, the 17,769 large-screen displays cited in the Medal of Defiance in that article included all the large-screen versions, including the 1300, 1302, 1308, 1309, 1310A, and 1310B.  And the users--including Dr. Denton Cooley for the first true artificial heart transplant--became world-famous (the article mistakenly ascribes the medical 'first' to Dr. Norman DeBakey at Stanford.  Here's the 50th anniversary picture for Cooley's work, with the eight-channel HP 1308A proudly displayed:

I no longer have a copy of the video for the Jane Pauley Today Show.    Who knows, might get it someday.

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 . . . .    

AMW--the greatest gathering of Intrapreneurs in the world

 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.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271767139_A_Gentle_Philosopher--Reminiscing_Carver_Mead_and_me

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.

https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Memoirs/VLSI/Commentaries/A_Paradigm_Shift_Was_Happening_by_Chuck_House.pdf

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.

On Reflection (again)

 Well, as you might expect, thoughts lead to more thoughts.   Last month, I posted a small squib about early graphics, and meeting Ivan Sutherland, and a few thoughts re Alan Kay and etc.

And then, my daughter and her husband went to Bogota, Colombia where his son is managing a small chocolate factory.  And Jenny, at dinner, said, "Isn't Colombia the place that killed the Colorado carnation buisness?"   And I had one of those 'senior moments' that resolved fortunately after a few minutes.  And yes, it was Colombia that killed the Colorado cartel.   

And, ironically, it was from flying to MIT to meet Ivan Sutherland that led me to a chance luncheon with Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, Nick Negroponte, and a Colombian, Rodrico Arboleda Halaby.   Here's a picture of those folk then, and NOW (two, sadly, have passed away).

The story, told briefly, is that I met Halaby some 17 years later (1982), and recalled his name from earlier, but had no idea what he was doing.  Today, he is known as the long-time leader of the One Laptop per Child project, started by Nick Negroponte, his senior year room-mate (they were both architectural students at MIT).  A little-known factoid is that the fabled Media Lab at MIT was started and led by Negroponte, IN THE ARCHITECTURAL SCHOOL, not the CS or EE schools.  Whew!  With Papert and Minsky's aid.

I asked him what he'd been doing (the Media Lab didn't yet exist until 1985, and the OLPC 3 years later) and he said he'd, among other things, started a cut-flower business in Colombia, and he proudly said he'd 'Broken the CO carnation cartel in 4 years".  Irony of ironies--I not only knew the President of the CO Carnation Cartel (they called it an Association), I'd worked with him for 2 years on the Colorado Air Pollution Control Commission 1970-1972.

I'd even had a nursery and greenhouse during that period, but we didn't grow carnations.  1,000 greenhouses, with 7.5 million square feet of glass, did grow carnations, and they controlled 85% of the carnation business in America.   They'd built this over nearly 100 years, including starting FTD to have a distribution and delivery mechanism.

Halaby's senior professor in economics in 1965 asked the students to find a niche that was vulnerable to price dislocation, and Halaby found that these greenhouses used a huge amount of nateural gas for heating.  High altitude Colorado, not well known, has like 330 days of sunshine along the Front Range (Denver and Colorado Springs, for example), and carnations need ultraviolet sunshine to thrive.  So, with heat for the winter, almost the best US growing site for carnations.

Well, natural gas was regulated, to $0.10 per thousand cubic feet, from a 1945 Supreme Court case against Philips Petroleum, and there was noise that the cap might be removed.   Estimates were that it would quadruple, to $0.40 per thousand cubic feet, which would put a big economic hit on the Assoc.

And he reasoned that Colombia, on the equator, didn't need heating, and also had low labor costs, low land costs, and good sunshine.  But transportation?   Well, when the third version of the DC-9 came out in 1969, the economics of small jets swamped out the DC-6 and DC-7 and those planes were 'practically free' to purchase.  Moreover, jet fuel was now at a premium, and regular aviation fuel was at a glut, also very cheap.   

Buy 6 planes, go to FTD, and offer 7 cents a dozen cheaper, and 18 hours fresher, and a full color palate.

Bingo.    By 1980, a third of Colorado's greenhouses were gone; and 75% of those left had shifted to other flowers.  

And I knew 'both sides' of the story.  He didn't know the Colorado side, and they didn't know his.  talk about serendipity.

By the way, I wound up years later running MediaX@Stanford, a knock-off in part of the Media Lab story, but I never again met most of the others in the picture from 1965.   Colombia today has something like 60% of the worldwide cut-flower market, from carnations to roses to gladiolas and whatever.  The entire Rocky Mountain region has less than 15%.

Journaling, Memory, and Reflection

Memories . . . clear in the moment, but episodic,  and then . . . fleeting and fading over time.

And even "At the Time", subject to error and mis-understanding.  Think, for example, about multiple conflicting accounts of an accident by "eye-witnesses".

Memories are 'not what they used to be' is a finding we all come to appreciate.  And memories can get embellished.  My dad said, about his mother:  "She can remember things that never even happened."

And Reflections?  Gazing back over the past, thinking and pondering even about things from yesteryear, is not all that easy in late life.  It takes time, actually sorting and putting things in context, trying to recall just when this or that happened, and how several things interacted.   Too often, such efforts are skipped, the person feeling perhaps "Who would care, not even my grandchildren would care."   Others who might start, hear phrases such as "Are you trying to re-write history, is this just self-serving?"

All too aware of my own proclivities to recall selectively, I have long jotted down thoughts, impressions, and feelings while on trips or doing things that were hard exercises.  Call it Diarying or Journaling, it at least captures the mood of the moment.  And given that we just moved (in what my wife Jenny calls a "downsizing"), I found a sizable collection of papers, scribbles on envelopes, or on mostly blank pages torn from an airline magazine when I lacked paper.   Almost all have dates, but the piles are extensive, and very unorganized.  So, is that a treasure, or something to be gathered and tossed?

Historians often cite some version of the Confucius phrase, "The palest ink is more reliable than the most powerful memory."   The fact that this isn't probably one of Confucius' phrases--it likely traces to the Qing dynasty two millennia later--doesn't diminish the point.

Reflections have the advantage of 'hindsight' or more accurately, of placing the event(s) in context.  In the moment, you know the specifics, but none of the surrounding story.   As a simple example, when we introduced the HP 1300A, the X-Y-Z Display that served as HP's first graphical computer display monitor (an amazing four years before IBM did so; and eleven years before DEC), I knew of some great early examples.   I had shown a prototype to Information International Inc, which got excited about using it for movie graphics.  Who'd suspect they'd use that to begin work on Tron?   The AP Wire Photo news service picture of Dr. Denton Cooley using our HP 1308A for the first artificial heart transplant was great.  https://www.texasheart.org/50th-anniversary-of-the-worlds-first-total-artificial-heart/

Al DeVilbiss and I designed the modification of the Z-axis to permit 80 MHz signals to handle space video so that the world could see Neal Armstrong's foot land on the moon July 20, 1969.  I'd also shown a prototype to Doug Engelbart for what became the "Mother of all Demos" 

But it wasn't until 34 years later that I was interviewing Alan Kay and the topic happened to come up, to which he said, roughly, "the HP 1300A was the ONLY possible display for me to use for the FlexWriter in late 1967 and early1968 at U of Utah."   Imagine--he is doing his PhD there under Ivan Sutherland, who with Dave Evans is about to start Eans and Sutherland, which gets "the credit" for the first computer graphics company".  

 https://www.ksl.com/article/36039333/utah-inventions-the-birth-of-computer-graphics 

The irony is that I had visited Sutherland at MIT in 1965, after his inspiring talk at the IBM SHARE Design conference in May, 1965 in New Orleans.  There's a whole story here, which cements in my mind that the HP 1300A was indeed pioneering--yes, even the Medal of Defiance notwithstanding.

Anyway, the point isn't to revisit that story here, but just to illustrate that the Paul Harvey "Now you know the rest of the story" often can't be constructed, let alone appreciated, without adequate time to discover "the rest of the story:

So, dear reader, if I get going on all those piles and scraps of notes, who knows what might turn up?

How did the book do, and How are we Doing?

Wow, a mere nine years ago is when I finished the book about "Preserving our Digital Revolution Heritage" coupled with some lamentations about the ennui surrounding such history by those who created the revolution.   What happened in the meantime?  How come I never came back to the topic, or indeed, HOW DID THE BOOK DO?

Well, truth be told--we've made some progress, or at least I would define it as such.   In 2012, the Computer History Museum basically eschewed doing video or audio interviews because 'true historians' disdained such imperfect or even self-serving anecdotal material.   They had 43 captured interviews over a 30 year period, not quite one and a half per year.  WHEW!

Since then, due to some somewhat surprising circumstances (for which I might claim partial credit), they now have over 1,600 published interviews publically available, and a trove still in preparation.  And Steve Smith, then interim director for CHM, called my book's back cover the best statement he'd read.  

In addition, I personally have done several hundred interviews, for the Cisco Foundation, for CHM, and for the ACM Award Archive.   Such fun, to be sure, and it is amazing that people are willing to talk, even if they don't want to 'donate' for history.  And the stories are priceless.   I'll maybe spend some time in a few blog posts describing some key findings.

Meanwhile, I thought about a related topic = the role and interplay between writing things down (call it diary notes, or journaling), recalling from memory, and reflecting on 'the past'

And it is perhaps worth putting in the next post.  You decide.