Recently I had the chance to hear Mark Zuckerberg speak. The reaction of the audience when he appeared was almost comical – as soon as he walked across the stage, almost every person in the audience whipped out a cell phone or camera to take a snapshot. I was sitting near the back of the room, so from my vantage point I just saw a sea of glowing screens. And, of course, then I saw laptops out and those very photos being posted to Facebook. And it made me ponder – does engineering have its own celebrities, just as entertainment and politics also do? The recent outpouring over the passing of Steve Jobs underlines the incredible impact and the high profile that technical visionaries can have. But on the whole, engineering has very few recognizable faces. Bill Gates, people recognize. Steve Jobs, ditto. Mark Zuckerberg maybe slightly less, but among the [...]
I’m not suggesting the usage of engineers in crash testing over the million dollar and well qualified crash test dummies. However, I would like us to consider the people behind the dummies that work on developing safer and safer cars, trucks, motorcycles and roads for us to drive in and on. As a car and motorcycle user, I’m all too aware of how easy it is to get involved in an accident. Lucky for me, the ones I have been involved in have resulted in no injury to myself or others. I do, however, remember watching one accident that involved a car rolling over and being amazed at the driver getting out and walking away. I’ve also seen motorway accidents where cars and lorries have spun out of control and been not only stunned at the lack of injury but to see vehicles not turn over. The key thing I [...]
Almost everyone has heard of “Amazing Grace” Hopper. She left her position as a university professor in math to join WAVES, which led her to write the first compiler. She also is the one who popularized the term “debugging”, after literally finding a bug in a computer. She developed the programming language COBOL. She envisioned a future where everyone could easily use computers, and we have her to thank for many of the advances that led to modern computing. Today, however, I’d like to introduce another mathematician turned computer scientist who hasn’t received as much attention as Hopper: Frances Allen. Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow and to receive the Turing award. She is also a fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery. She originally intended to teach after earning a master’s degree in mathematics, but decided to work at IBM until she had [...]
I wrote last week about Jim Williams passing away and how influential he was on the analog electronics community and myself. In a sad twist of fate, one of Jim’s friends and another hero of mine, Bob Pease, died in a car crash on the way home from Jim’s memorial service. Bob was driving his ’69 Beetle in the hills of Saratoga, CA when his car went off the road and struck a tree. When I found out that two analog legends are now gone, it really hurt. Obviously nothing like their close friends and families have felt, but instead a loss in the world because they meant so much to engineers. So this week’s theme is about mistakes? Well, it’s not my biggest, not by far, but my mistake is not asking Bob or Jim for an interview sooner. They were both at the top of the list of [...]
Jim Williams died a few days ago. Jim was an applications engineer for Linear Technology, a chip manufacturer that makes analog components. He was one of my favorite authors and engineers and someone I really looked up to. I loved reading his books and application notes, and I believe his leaving this world is a great loss for everyone. However, in examining what I know of his life, I feel I can learn a few things. First off, to call Jim anything less than an analog electronics expert would do his memory injustice. His clarity in writing and his ability to piece together clever circuits to show the capabilities of a new LT chip was unbelievable. And the reason he was able to so adeptly create circuits is his years of dedication to his craft. Not only was his job working with circuits, his pastime was repairing old analog Tektronix oscilloscopes. This [...]
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