In May of my senior year at MIT,
I suddenly realized that I was getting sick of school,
and that perhaps going directly to grad school was not the best choice.
Totally naive, I started job interviews with the very few
recruiters still active on campus.
I acceped my only job offer, which was with the
IBM Advanced Systems Development Division laboratory
in Los Gatos, California.
The beautiful building with a view of the Santa Cruz Mountains
looked more like a country club.
It was a very creative environment.
I had opportunity to work with, or at least see
every day, people who invented things like
the disk drive, optical bar code scanners,
magnetic stripe readers, the ATM, and so on.
My first task in library automation
was interrupted by special invitation from the
President of the United States.
Drafted into the US Marine Corps,
I served two years at the supply activity
in Philadelphia,
mostly working on a new
teleprocessing application
in S/360 assembly language.
Upon release, I earned my MS at Berkeley,
then returned to IBM.
I wrote image compression and
device driver software in the days when
IBM pioneered the image industry.
Unfortunately, IBM marketers saw little market for
this exotic technology,
so the world passed us by.
I migrated into electronic design automation,
with an early focus on VLSI when that was a novelty.
I wrote logic simulation software in PL/I,
and maintained the internal IBM EDA software package
in which it was a component.
I participated in the architecture, design, and
software for the Logic Simulation Machine (LSM).
This concept progressed from our lab,
to IBM Research, to mainline processor technology.
Many generations later, it is marketed as the
Cadence Quickturn emulation engine.
It's probably the most powerful massively-parallel 1-bit processor
ever built.
The basic instruction is an arbitrary 1-bit 4-input truth table.
We began implementing IBM's mainline internal grid-based
detail router (for integrated circuits) on this engine.
IBM lost interest and dropped funding before we could finish it.
I wrote several tools for Timing Analysis,
earning a division-level achievement award.
The engraved clock is nice, and I still use it.
But the best part was a motivational conference
in Florida with a collection of IBM's best contributors.
In those days, I could book my own air travel.
For less than my peers paid to present our LSM session (rated
the best session of the conference),
I paid the Delta Airlines system excursion fare,
covering the Florida conference, the LSM conference
session in New York, and tourist visits to
Boston, New Orleans, Shreveport, and Bermuda.
I integrated IBM's circuit simulator into
the Cadence Analog Artist design environment.
This afforded me the opportunity to work at
Cadence sites directly with their engineers.
