I was born in Syracuse, N.Y., where my father was a professor at Syracuse University. When I was five years old, my father took a sabattical at Osaka University in Japan, so I tagged along to go to kindergarten and learn Japanese. Unfortunately, when we came back to Syracuse none of my friends wanted to speak Japanese with me, so I've forgotten all of it :-(
After that we moved to Chicago, where my father became a professor at the University of Chicago.. Somewhere in there we took another sabbatical, this time to Sydney, Australia where my father had appointments at CSIRO and Sydney University, so we could all learn to speak "Strine". Unfortunately, when we came back to Chicago none of my friends could understand Strine, so I've forgotten most of it. :-( But I did get to visit Alice Springs, Ayer's Rock, and the Great Barrier Reef.
I went to three different high schools: Crow's Nest Boy's High School in North Sydney, NSW, Australia; Rich Central High School in Olympia Fields, Ill., and the University of Chicago Lab Schools (also known as U High). In spite of (or perhaps because of) all this gallivanting about I managed to graduate, then went off to MIT where I found my true calling as a nerd.
During the summer of 1974, my brother Paul and I took a bicycle trip from Portland, Oregon to Boston, Massachusetts, with a one-week stopover at home in Chicago. It was a great experience, and it's the major topic of conversation between us whenever we get together (our kids must think that's all we ever did together). Also along for the ride were Paul's friends Jeff Johnston and Tom Wolf, and, for a short while, Niels Roisman and Bob Stark. As I recall, Tom was not yet 16 at the time, and had trouble cashing traveler's checks because he didn't have a driver's license for identification. All I can say is, our parents must have been abolutely crazy to not only let us do it but to pay for it as well.
[ Update, June 2001 ] In a strange turn of events, it turns out that Jeff Johnston's older brother Jim was CFO of WaveMark until its aquisition by Motorola in June 2000. I discovered this while reading the alumni magazine of the University of Chicago Lab Schools, for which Jim had written an entry. We worked together for three years without knowing about this connection. Jim graduated a year after I did but we were only at U-High together for one year.
During my senior year at MIT I worked part time for the Balloon Lab in the Center for Space Research; this work eventually led to my Master's thesis on "A CCD-Based Star Detection and Identification System". I designed the electronics for a CCD-based star camera which was supposed to be used to help determine the positioning of a X-Ray detector on a high-altitude balloon package. Other people did the fabrication and the optics, but I basically designed and tested the package. Unfortunately the balloon gondola failed about an hour into the flight and fell 100,000 feet or so to the ground -- and landed on top of the camera. So it was never used. Welcome to the real world.
While working on the star detector I had my first taste of doing both hardware and software on a project. We needed a way to dump realtime data from the star detector, so I started playing around with an evaluation board the Balloon Lab had lying around -- an Intersil IM6100 Family Sampler. The IM6100 was basically a PDP-8 on an chip, and the sampler board included an monitor program and a teletype interface. Using the on-board monitor, I wrote an assembly code program to acquire and print the data. Since I had no assembler I had to calculate all memory addresses by hand; luckily the PDP-8 instructions are all the same length so the process was not too hard. The entire program was 58 instructions long, including constants (although I cheated a little by calling several subroutines in the monitor itself).
Later when I started working for Teradyne, Inc., I discovered that their in-house computer, the M365, was an 18-bit-wide version of the PDP-8, so I felt right at home working with it. I think it was a surprise to the people I worked for that I could program it.
Since graduating from MIT I have worked at the following companies:
Since 1978 my wife and I have lived in Needham, Massachusetts.
There is always the Brain Dump, and of course some Lit'ry Pretensions.