Steven's GeoData is an interesting experiment in broadcasting geospatial information, a topic near and dear to my heart. It would appear that Steve is actually an entrepreneur, and a good one at that. But his messages are resonant for folk in corporations, so I am going to 'sneak' it in here.
The specific image that appealed to me today, sent to me by our high school class co-ordinator, is below:
Very instructive image, don't you think?
Wonders never cease.
John Minck maintains the HP Archives, memoirs and such from a number of HP oldtimers, including yours truly. As it happens, he gets questions on occasion, such as this one, reported earlier this week in my HP Phenomenon blog:https://hpphenom.blogspot.com/2024/10/logic-analyzer-question-huh.html
The actual primary question in my mind is: was there ever an official reasoning behind getting rid of "Signature Analysis" and "Map Mode"?
I answered it in that blog, but later thought about the small book I penned maybe a decade ago about Intrapreneuring, and my own pseudo-memoir in Minck's files. Here's that memoir:
See https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/chuck_house/lsa_birth_03.htm
There is a book as well, entitled "Permission denied--Odyssey of an Intrapreneur". As noted in one on-line review, the original version wrongly maligned Biomation's CEO, mis-identifiying with another CEO of the same name who was later found guilty of serious crimes.
Another review was much more enthusiastic, writing:
Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2014
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?
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.
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 . . . .
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.
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).
