Computer History – Pastimespace

POV: Bank of America unveils ERMA

ERMA, the Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting, was a groundbreaking computer system introduced by Bank of America in the late 1950s.

It revolutionized the banking industry by automating the processing of millions of checks and transactions and setting the foundation for modern electronic banking systems.

Imagery credits: Aurora Tucker, Bank of America Corporate Archives

#retrotech #oldtech #vintagetechShow More

POV: Bank of America unveils ERMA

ERMA, the Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting, was a [...]

Fei-Fei Li's AI Journey

Last week, we had the honor of hosting Stanford Professor Fei-Fei Li [...]

CHM Live | Fei-Fei Li's AI Journey

[Recorded September 17, 2024] Artificial intelligence has been [...]

Oral History of Christos Karamanolis

Interviewed by Dag Spicer on 2024-02-22 in Mountain View, CA © [...]

Celebration of Life: C. Gordon Bell

[Recorded August 24, 2024] CHESTER GORDON BELL August 19, 1934 – May [...]

DAC-1: IBM and General Motors

In the late 1950s, IBM and General Motors teamed up to develop DAC-1, [...]

Massively parallel supercomputing: introduction to the Connection Machine (CM-2)

[Recorded in 1990] Lecture by Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corp. [...]

WAIS Project: Wide Area Information Servers

[Recorded in 1991] This video describes the main characteristics of [...]

Big Data, Big Transition, Big Trouble

[Recorded in 1996] Brief Lecture produced by Silicon Graphics about [...]

Fairchild Integrated Circuits

This clip from a 1967 promotional film by Fairchild Semiconductor [...]

CHM Live | Predicting the President: Origins of Computer Forecasting

[Recorded July 23, 2024] Every election night, millions of Americans [...]

Mary Allen Wilkes Oral History, part 2 of 2

Interviewed by David C. Brock on 2022-07-06 in Cambridge, MA © [...]

Oral History of Mary Allen Wilkes, part 1 of 2

Interviewed by David C. Brock on 2021-07-28 in Cambridge, MA © [...]

Ralph Baer & Odyssey

Using a TV to play games? You can, in part, credit Ralph Baer for [...]

Will Wright's Lessons in Game Design 🕹️

In his November 2003 lecture, Will Wright, cofounder of SimCity and [...]

CHM Live | Making News: How Tech Shapes Journalism and Society

[Recorded June 27, 2024] Today, journalism, technology, and political [...]

IBM's "Man & Computer" (1967)

Check out this clip from “Man & Computer” (1967) by IBM UK, providing [...]

Dialed In: The Prehistory of Social Media

Long before online forums and communities like Reddit and Discord, and [...]

CHM Live | The Chinese Computer

[Recorded June 18th, 2024] How can Chinese—a language with tens of [...]

InsantInsanity AI Puzzle

What did artificial intelligence look like 50 years ago? In 1971, a [...]

CHM Live | India's Digital Revolution: Innovating Civic Technology

[Recorded May 30, 2024] From launching a digital identity system used [...]

Oral History of Robin Matlock

Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn on 2024-02-07 in Mountain View, CA © [...]

Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn on 2024-02-07 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Robin Matlock was born in 1965 and raised in Arizona. In high school she participated in a wide variety of sports. She attended Rice University on a music scholarship. Although she majored in music, that was not her long-term career path. In fact, she didn’t have a clear direction, so took a number of economics courses figuring business might be her career direction.

A lucky opportunity took her to the San Francisco Bay Area living with relatives where she found a job in sales working for ADP. Over the next few years, she moved through several tech companies and expanding her responsibilities to include not only sales, but business development and product marketing. Among other lessons, these experiences taught her to think like a customer, a perspective that served her well throughout her career.

After a job at a company called Imperva didn’t work out, she thought strategically about her next step and found an opportunity to be VP of Corporate Marketing at VMware. This was a big step and brought her into a job in which she didn’t have any direct experience. However, with her willingness to learn from others and hard work, she made a success of that position. This success led to higher level and more diverse responsibilities until she was named Chief Marketing Officer in 2013. In this oral history, she outlines many of the marketing challenges faced by a high growth tech company, which was actually largely owned by EMC and/or Dell throughout her tenure.

Robin held that position until 2020, deciding that she could continue to grow her career and give back by joining the boards of a select group of companies. She is currently serving on six different boards, both public and private. The most meaningful of those is the George Mark Children’s House, which is a pediatric palliative care house focused on serving children with incurable diseases and their families.

She maintains her interest in sports and fitness, working out almost every day, playing tennis and running for several miles on a regular basis.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102808965

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102808966
Acquisition Number: 2024.0016Show More

Oral History of Keith Diefendorff

Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn on 2022-08-24 in Mountain View, CA © [...]

Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn on 2022-08-24 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Keith Diefendorff had a remarkable career as the lead architect for multiple microprocessors, including the Motorola 88110, the PowerPC, and a version of the MIPS processor. He played a leading role in the design of other microprocessors as well, including TI’s Lisp machine, the MicroExplorer. Keith grew up in Ohio where he attended Kent State and the University of Akron where he earned a Masters in EE. He went to work for Texas Instruments where he spent 13 years designing computer peripherals, and a variety of microprocessors from the TI 9900 family to the Explorer family of Lisp machines.

Keith then moved on to Motorola where he was asked to architect the next generation of the 88K family of microprocessors, the 88110. That project was eventually cancelled when Motorola, Apple, and IBM decided to collaborate on the design of the PowerPC family of chips. Diefendorff was the lead architect for Motorola.

After 7 years at Motorola, he moved to Silicon Valley and went to work for NexGen Microsystems, where he played a critical role in convincing the company to make their X86 processor compatible with Intel’s X86 family.
After AMD’s purchase of NexGen, he moved onto Apple where he again got to play the role of lead architect for the PowerPC, but this time from Apple’s perspective. His major contribution in this role was to get the AltiVec Vector processing instructions added to the architecture.

He later served stints as the editor-in-chief of the Microprocessor Report, CTO at ARC Cores, chief architect of MIPS’ proposed Sony Playstation processor, architect at Montalvo Systems, and finally back to Apple, from which he retired in 2011. Upon retirement, he moved back to Texas where he has a 100-acre ranch, cattle, horses, etc. and two houses – one for he and his wife, and one for his son and his family.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792764

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102792765
Acquisition Number: 2022.0125Show More

Oral History of Jim Morehouse

Interviewed by Dal Allan and Bruno Marchon on 2023-09-20 in Pagosa [...]

CHM Live | NOVA Secrets in Your Data

[Recorded May 16, 2024] Whether you’re on social media or surfing the [...]

Oral History of Bruce Daniels

Interviewed by Hansen Hsu on 2023-08-01 in Mountain View, CA © [...]

Interviewed by Hansen Hsu on 2023-08-01 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Bruce Daniels was born in Houston, Texas, on January 10th, 1949, and grew up in Oklahoma. He majored in physics initially at MIT but switched to computer science in his junior year, and continued on at MIT for his Ph.D. work on the APL language. While there, Daniels became involved in programming the original version of the text adventure game Zork, and would later be contracted to write the Apple II version for Infocom. Daniels decided to leave his Ph.D. to join John Couch’s group at Hewlett-Packard, working on programming languages and tools for the HP 3000 minicomputer. After Couch joined Apple, Daniels would eventually follow him there in 1979. Although Daniels was originally on the Apple III project, he happened to join Couch, Steve Jobs, and others who were working on the Lisa to visit Xerox PARC in 1979, where they were introduced to the graphical user interface. Daniels would be recruited by Jobs to help manage the Lisa software group a few months later to help turn the Lisa into a GUI-based computer. In addition to managing and helping run user testing, Daniels also wrote a mouse-based graphical text editor that was used for software development on the Lisa.

At one point there was a plan to release a product for software development that was a Lisa with only developer tools instead of office applications, and Daniels led the project. When this was canceled sometime in 1982, Daniels moved to the Macintosh development team for six to nine months, influencing them in adopting the Lisa’s graphical user interface. Daniels was supposed to work on a word processor for the Macintosh, but balked when Jobs insisted he write it in 3 months, when he knew it would take 2 years. Daniels rejoined the Lisa group and Randy Wigginton replaced him on what would become MacWrite.

Once back in the Lisa group, Daniels worked on optimizing the system’s performance, helping the team track and fix bugs, and began to do public demos and other PR work for the Lisa, through its announcement date in January 1983. Daniels also helped create the MacWorks Macintosh emulation environment for the Lisa. After the Lisa shipped in the summer of ’83, Daniels began to do PR work for the upcoming Macintosh.

Daniels left Apple in 1984 to create a startup, Singular Software, to make a Macintosh database application. This was sold to Borland in 1986. After leaving Borland in 1987, Daniels joined Sun Microsystems, helping develop standards for software development inside the company, and standard user interfaces for internal applications. In between stints at Sun, Daniels helped create a cross-platform application toolkit at Oracle.
During the late 1980s, Daniels was also called to testify in Apple’s lawsuit against Microsoft and HP over the similarity in the look and feel of the Macintosh and Windows’ graphical user interfaces.

After rejoining Sun in 1992, Daniels worked in research, developing a high level language, DASL, that would generate Java code for graphical applications. This work would later be applied to the cloud.
In 1999, Daniels was asked by the governor of California to join the Regional Water Quality Control Board for the central California coast. After Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, Daniels decided to pursue a Ph.D. in hydroclimatology at UC Santa Cruz, studying the effects of climate change on local water supplies. Daniels developed a system to model variations in local water supplies and helped the Soquel Creek Water District build a system to replenish ground water with treated wastewater.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792890

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102792891
Acquisition Number: 2023.0133Show More

Oral History of Judy Estrin, part 3 of 3

Interviewed by David C. Brock and and Marc Weber on 2023-03-15 in [...]

Oral History of Judy Estrin, part 2 of 3

Interviewed by David C. Brock and and Marc Weber on 2020-02-05 in [...]

Interviewed by David C. Brock and and Marc Weber on 2020-02-05 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

In this second segment of her three part oral history interview, networking pioneer and entrepreneur Judy Estrin discusses her time managing Bridge Communications, the networking company she cofounded with her then-husband Bill Carrico. She tells the story of taking Bridge public in the mid 1980s, and then various acquisitions by Bridge. That leads into the story of how Bridge was acquired by 3Com, the company cofounded by Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe.

At 3Com, Estrin assumed the role of director of marketing and sales while Bill Carrico focused on administration. She describes the initial honeymoon period, and then the conflicts that arose over strategy and Bridge's role within 3Com, and between Bill Carrico and 3Com CEO Bill Krause. Estrin and Carrico left the company after nine months. In 1988, they joined the founding team of Network Computing Devices (NCD). Estrin's leadership at NCD led her from executive vice president to president and CEO by 1993.

In 1995, six months after leaving NCD, Estrin co-founded Precept Software, Inc., a company specializing in networking software. Under her guidance as president and CEO, Precept Software experienced notable success, culminating in its acquisition by Cisco Systems in 1998. Following the acquisition, Estrin served as Cisco's chief technology officer until 2000. In 1995, six months after leaving NCD, Estrin co-founded Precept Software, Inc., which developed networking software. Under her guidance as president and CEO, Precept Software experienced notable success, culminating in its acquisition by Cisco Systems in 1998.

Following the acquisition, Estrin served as Cisco's chief technology officer until 2000. Estrin was listed as one of the "50 most powerful businesswomen in the United States" by Fortune in 1998. In 2000, Estrin and Carrico co-founded Packet Design, LLC, a networking technology company with $24 million in funding. Packet Design later spun out three venture-backed startups. During this time, she divorced Carrico. She served as CEO of Packet Design, LLC, until it was dissolved, distributing its assets to investors in late 2007.

After Packet Design, she created JLABS, LLC, which she considered a way to pursue her interests in innovation and leadership. She became the CEO of Evntlive, a tech company founded by her son David Carrico, in 2013.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792008

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102792009
Acquisition Number: X9156.2020Show More

Oral History of Judy Estrin, part 1 of 3

Interviewed by David C. Brock and and Marc Weber on 2019-09-20 in [...]

Interviewed by David C. Brock and and Marc Weber on 2019-09-20 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

In this first segment of her three part oral history interview, networking pioneer and entrepreneur Judy Estrin discusses her youth, education, and early career. She begins by reviewing the stories of her parents, early computing contributors Drs. Thelma and Gerard Estrin. Judy Estrin was born in Israel when her parents were creating WEIZAC, the first electronic digital computer there.

Her family then moved to Los Angeles, where her parents became faculty at UCLA. Estrin recollects growing up on the UCLA campus, the character of her parents and household, and her exposure to computing. She reviews her undergraduate studies at UCLA, and her decision to pursue a master’s at Stanford in computing in the group of her father’s former student, Vint Cerf. At Stanford, Estrin describes her involvement with networking technology, particularly the Transfer Control Protocol, TCP, within Cerf’s group.

She discusses her decision to join Zilog, and its efforts in Ethernet and local area networking, as well as the connections between Zilog and Xerox PARC. Estrin reviews her activities at Zilog, the development of its networking efforts, and the trajectory of the firm overall. She discusses her early association with Bill Carrico at Zilog, who would become her professional and personal partner. Estrin details the spin-off of the networking company Ungermann-Bass from Zilog, and her subsequent brief tenure with the firm.

She discusses her path to the formation of the networking start-up Bridge Communications with Carrico, and the general context for networking technology at the time. The interview concludes with Estrin’s discussion of the early organization, technology, strategy, and customers for Bridge.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102795139

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102795140
Acquisition Number: X9156.2020Show More

Oral History of Robert Garner, part 2 of 2

Interviewed by Roy Ogus on 2019-05-17 in Mountain View, CA © Computer [...]

Interviewed by Roy Ogus on 2019-05-17 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

In this two-part oral history interview, Robert Garner recounts his 1977-2018 Silicon Valley career in computer, networking and storage architecture, working both engineering and management roles in both product development and research at Xerox’s Systems Development Division (SDD) and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Sun Microsystems, Brocade Communications, and IBM Almaden Research (ARC). Beginning in 1977 with an MSEE from Stanford University, Bob Metcalfe recruited him into Xerox’s System Development Division (SDD) in Palo Alto that had been established to commercialize PARC's groundbreaking Alto personal computer. There he co-designed the Xerox STAR Professional Workstation and its 10-Mbps Ethernet interface, announced ahead of its time in 1981. That same year, he joined Lynn Conway’s pioneering VLSI design group at Xerox PARC.

In 1984, he left PARC to join the start-up Sun Microsystems as the lead architect of SPARC, its Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), working closely with UCB’s Dave Patterson and Sun’s cofounder Bill Joy. There he also co-designed the Sun-4/200 workstation using the first SPARC chips. In 1989, he transitioned into management to lead the I/O-subsystem ASIC team for Sun’s flagship UNIX multi-processor system, the SPARCcenter-2000. After managing an endeavor to design a gallium-arsenide based SPARC microprocessor, in 1991 he became manager of the UltraSPARC-I microprocessor front-end architecture and logic design team, growing it to 80 engineers. In 1994, he became the SPARC unit’s director of advanced development for microprocessor architecture, performance, compilers and CAD. In 1995 he managed the development of a new instruction-set and graphics-oriented microprocessor called MAJC, the first multi-threaded microprocessor. In 1997, he managed a Java distributed computing software project at Sun called JINI. He left Sun in 1998 to join start-up Brocade Communications as its director of hardware engineering, responsible for designing its FibreChannel switch products.

In 2001, he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose where he co-designed an innovative 3D, liquid-cooled scalable server called IceCube, inventing its surface-based capacitive couplers. The project culminated in an operational 3x3x3-node prototype. In 2007, he was asked to manage a small team that designed and supported a million-lines-of-code, high-performance, software-based storage controller deployed world-wide in supercomputers called GPFS Native RAID (GNR). He later spearheaded a preconfigured system product based on it called the IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS). From 2004 to the present, he's led a team of volunteers that have restored two 1960’s IBM 1401 mainframes to full operation, exhibited weekly at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102781303

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 1102781304
Acquisition Number: X8869.2019Show More

Oral History of Robert Garner, part 1 of 2

Interviewed by Roy Ogus on 2018-12-06 in Mountain View, CA © Computer [...]

Interviewed by Roy Ogus on 2018-12-06 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

In this two-part oral history interview, Robert Garner recounts his 1977-2018 Silicon Valley career in computer, networking and storage architecture, working both engineering and management roles in both product development and research at Xerox’s Systems Development Division (SDD) and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Sun Microsystems, Brocade Communications, and IBM Almaden Research (ARC). Beginning in 1977 with an MSEE from Stanford University, Bob Metcalfe recruited him into Xerox’s System Development Division (SDD) in Palo Alto that had been established to commercialize PARC's groundbreaking Alto personal computer. There he co-designed the Xerox STAR Professional Workstation and its 10-Mbps Ethernet interface, announced ahead of its time in 1981. That same year, he joined Lynn Conway’s pioneering VLSI design group at Xerox PARC.

In 1984, he left PARC to join the start-up Sun Microsystems as the lead architect of SPARC, its Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), working closely with UCB’s Dave Patterson and Sun’s cofounder Bill Joy. There he also co-designed the Sun-4/200 workstation using the first SPARC chips. In 1989, he transitioned into management to lead the I/O-subsystem ASIC team for Sun’s flagship UNIX multi-processor system, the SPARCcenter-2000. After managing an endeavor to design a gallium-arsenide based SPARC microprocessor, in 1991 he became manager of the UltraSPARC-I microprocessor front-end architecture and logic design team, growing it to 80 engineers. In 1994, he became the SPARC unit’s director of advanced development for microprocessor architecture, performance, compilers and CAD. In 1995 he managed the development of a new instruction-set and graphics-oriented microprocessor called MAJC, the first multi-threaded microprocessor. In 1997, he managed a Java distributed computing software project at Sun called JINI. He left Sun in 1998 to join start-up Brocade Communications as its director of hardware engineering, responsible for designing its FibreChannel switch products.

In 2001, he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose where he co-designed an innovative 3D, liquid-cooled scalable server called IceCube, inventing its surface-based capacitive couplers. The project culminated in an operational 3x3x3-node prototype. In 2007, he was asked to manage a small team that designed and supported a million-lines-of-code, high-performance, software-based storage controller deployed world-wide in supercomputers called GPFS Native RAID (GNR). He later spearheaded a preconfigured system product based on it called the IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS). From 2004 to the present, he's led a team of volunteers that have restored two 1960’s IBM 1401 mainframes to full operation, exhibited weekly at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102740476

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102740477
Acquisition Number: X8869.2019Show More

Oral History of Judea Pearl

Interviewed by David C. Brock on 2022-07-26 in Encino, CA © Computer [...]

Interviewed by David C. Brock on 2022-07-26 in Encino, CA
© Computer History Museum

In this interview, Judea Pearl discusses his life and long career. He begins by recounting his family background, and then his youth and education in Israel. Next, Pearl discusses his army service, experience of a kibbutz, and his technical education as an undergraduate at the Technion. He also discusses his wife, the software developer Ruth Pearl, whom he met at the Technion. Pearl then recounts the couple’s move to the United States, where Pearl studied electrical engineering while working. He discusses his work at RCA’s Sarnoff Laboratory and his PhD, both in superconducting electronics, at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Pearl then recounts the couple’s move to California in the mid 1960s, with Ruth Pearl working at TRW and he at Electronic Memories. With the rise of semiconductor electronics, Pearl decided to move into software and secured a faculty position at UCLA, where he has remained ever since. He recounts his moves into statistics and artificial intelligence at UCLA, and details his route to the development of Bayesian Networks. Pearl details his work on Bayesian Networks, and the trajectory of his work on causal reasoning. The interview concludes with Pearl’s reflections on his work, the state of artificial intelligence research, and his involvements with the Daniel Pearl Foundation and issues related to Israel.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792724

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102792725
Acquisition Number: 2022.0101Show More

CHM Live | Dialed In: The Prehistory of Social Media

[Recorded April 25, 2024] Long before online forums and communities [...]

Community Memory in Berkeley, California 🗺️

Oral History of Steve Herrod

Oral History of Young Sohn

Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn on 2023-09-28 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Young Sohn has had a distinguished and diverse career in the semiconductor and IT industries, serving as an executive, investor, and/or advisor at major companies like Intel and Samsung as well as near-startups in need of strong leadership and direction.

Mr. Sohn was born in Korea, but was brought to the US by his mother at the age of 15 after his father was killed in an accident. He attended high school in the Washington DC area and later graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979, earning a BSEE. While in college, he joined the fencing team, became it’s captain, and won the NCAA championship in 1979.

Sohn’s first job was at the Avondale division of Hewlett Packard. He spent two years there, coming to appreciate the HP culture and how a successful company operated. His next step was to enter the Sloan School at MIT with a goal of combining his technical skills with management science.

While still at MIT, he started his own company, Tektra, to create a database product for the burgeoning PC market. He quickly learned the challenges of entrepreneurship and taking new products to an international market, and after two years decided to focus on his full-time job.

After graduating from MIT, he joined Intel and became product manager for their new Ethernet controller chip. However, in late 1984, he got a call from Andy Grove, then Intel’s President, asking Sohn to join Grove in a series of meetings at Samsung in Korea with the goal of setting up a strategic partnership whereby Samsung would manufacture Intel’s memory chips. Sohn was then asked to head the new joint venture, growing the office from 0 to 200 people in four years. He later returned to the US to startup Intel’s chipset business, but found he missed the responsibility and independence which came from running his own operation overseas.

A call from a headhunter convinced him to join Quantum as president of Asia, where he had the responsibility to again establish a new Asian operation, including manufacturing capabilities. He later became president of Quantum’s whole disk drive operation, learning first-hand the strategies and challenges of running a fast-cycle-time high tech business, where new products had to appear every 9 months.

He continued his varied and successful career, serving as CEO of Oak Technologies, president of Agilent’s semiconductor business, CEO of Inphi and Cymer, and eventually serving for almost a decade back with Samsung as president of their Strategy and M&A business group. Along the way he has served on multiple boards and volunteered for two years working with Nicholas Negroponte promoting his “One Laptop per Child” program.

Young Sohn retired from Samsung in 2021 and became a cofounder of a new venture firm, Walden Catalyst. He continues to maintain a work/life balance, exercising vigorously every morning for an hour and enjoying his passion for kitesurfing. He is married and has three accomplished children, two of whom work with him part-time in the family investing business.
* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102808914

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102808915
Acquisition Number: 2023.0159Show More

Oral History of Kit Colbert

Oral History of Caroline Rose

Interviewed by Hansen Hsu and Marc Weber on 2023-11-28 in Mountain [...]

A trailbazing woman in tech: Evelyn Berezin 🌟 #womenintech #womenshistorymonth

The Osborne Survival Kit

[Recorded in 1987] Video illustrating how to repair the Osborne [...]

Homebrew Computer Club

On March 3, 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club had their first meeting [...]

Chris Espinosa shares Apple's original marketing principles

From CHM Live's “Insanely Great: The Apple Mac at 40,” Chris Espinosa [...]

Former Apple Marketing Manager on the controversial "1984" Super Bowl ad

In a candid moment from a recent CHM event, Mike Murray, former Apple [...]

Eddie Dinel Interview

Oral History of Carl Eschenbach

Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn on 2023-12-04 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Carl Eschenbach was born in 1966 grew up in a close-knit family in northeast Pennsylvania. As is evident throughout the interview, his family and Christian faith are the most important aspects of his personal and professional lives. He played football, baseball, and was on the high school wrestling team. He excelled at the latter and earned a Division One wrestling scholarship when entering college. He thought he might go into the food business, having grown up helping his parents in their Dairy Queen.

After starting college at Wilkes College in Wilkes-Barre PA to potentially study business, his brother-in-laws’ success at DeVry University caught his attention when he was able to get a good technology job after only two years. So Carl switched to DeVry and never looked back.
His first job was with a PBX company, Inktomi, starting in 1987. His job there, as would be the case for future positions, was customer-facing. Initially, he started on the technical side but over time moved to a sales, then sales management roles. His company progression after Inktomi included NET, 3Com, then Inktomi and EMC.

Eschenbach’s stay at EMC was only 3 weeks, as he was immediately recruited away by Diane Greene, founder and CEO of VMware. He would spend 14 years at VMware, mainly as COO under 3 different CEOs. He established his reputation as an outstanding operations executive and took a major role in building VMware from a small operation with only 200 employees to a multi-billion dollar organization with over 20,000 employees.

In 2016, VMware was acquired by Dell (as part of the EMC acquisition) and Carl decided to move on to Sequoia Capital, the leading venture firm in Silicon Valley. In 2022, he took over as co-CEO of Workday.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102808942

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102808943
Acquisition Number: 2023.0200Show More

Operation Match ❤️

Swipe right through history back to 1965, when the first U.S. [...]

Oral History of Nicola Acutt

January 30, 1984: Steve Jobs unveils the Macintosh to the Boston Computer Society

Oral History of Chih-Yuan Lu

Interviewed by Craig Addison on 2023-05-13 in MHsinchu, Taiwan
© Computer History Museum

Born in Guangzhou, China, Chih-Yuan Lu’s family moved to Taiwan when he was 4 years old. By the time he entered university, he had developed a fascination and love of physics. At that time, almost all the top graduates from Taiwan universities went to the US for further studies, and Lu was no exception.

He received a scholarship to study physics at Columbia University in New York City, and by 1977 had earned a Master’s and a Ph.D. – both in physics.

Lu then returned to Taiwan to teach physics at National Chiao Tung University in Taipei. Although his salary was half what he received as a research assistant at Columbia, the cost of living in Taiwan was lower and he saw more opportunities, so he did not regret the move.
Lu took an interest in the semiconductor field, which was starting to flourish in Taiwan after the successful technology transfer program with RCA in 1974. In fact, the semiconductor industry was quickly becoming a highly sought-after field for the best and brightest in Taiwan.
Lu’s ideas, expressed in various local newspaper columns, caught the attention of Taiwan’s Finance Minister K. T. Li, who invited him to join the Science and Technology Advisory Group (STAG) as a research assistant. Lu jumped at the offer because it was an opportunity to influence policy making decisions in the early days of Taiwan’s technology development.

However, Lu soon realized he lacked experience in industry, so decided to leave Taiwan for a second time to find work in the US semiconductor industry. In 1984, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he was involved in DRAM development at a time when US memory chipmakers were facing intense competitive pressure from Japan.

Five years later, Lu received a phone call from TSMC founder Morris Chang, who was also president of Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), asking if he would be interested in heading up a new research project designed to bring Taiwan into the submicron age.

The resulting Submicron Project was a 5-year program backed by NT$7 billion of government funding. The “secret weapon” that helped Lu achieve the project’s goals was an army of young local graduates, many of whom he taught as a professor at National Chiao Tung University. They were especially motivated to sign up when Lu decided to bypass conventional 6-inch wafers and develop Taiwan’s first 8-inch semiconductor fabrication facility for DRAMs.

The resulting technology was spun off as Vanguard Semiconductor, which later became a DRAM foundry under the control of TSMC.
After the Vanguard spin-out, Lu declined an offer by Morris Chang to join TSMC as chief scientist, and instead struck out on his own by founding Ardentec, a wafer testing company.

Lu was later invited by Ding-Hua Hu, one of the original engineers from the RCA transfer project, to work as a technical consultant for Macronix International, a specialist in nonvolatile memory. However, as Lu had just started Ardentec, with $60 million raised from investors, he could only agree to consult for one day a week at Macronix, after receiving the blessing of the Ardentec board.

Lu joined Macronix full time in 1999, as chief technology officer, and was appointed president in July 2007.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792841

Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.

Catalog Number: 102792842
Acquisition Number: 2023.0073Show More

CHM Live | Insanely Great: The Apple Mac at 40

[Recorded January 24, 2024] In January 1984, Steve Jobs unveiled the [...]

1 of 39 Next