Oral History of Gordon Eubanks
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Oral History of Gordon Eubanks Interviewed by: David C. Brock Douglas Fairbairn Recorded September 11, 2018 Mountain View, CA CHM Reference number: X8774.2019 © 2018 Computer History Museum Oral History of Gordon Eubanks Brock: Thank you very much, Gordon, for agreeing to do this with us. We could begin at the beginning, as it were, and I think our research shows that you were born in November of 1946 in Arlington, Massachusetts but you didn't stay there very long, moving something like 13 times before the end of high school. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your family of origin and your family background. Eubanks: Yes. I was born actually in Cambridge, but they lived in Arlington, so, but Cambridge sounds so much better. And my father got out of the service and he'd married my mother, whose father was a general in the Army. So my father spent the war in Hawaii, I know, just on Oahu the whole time. So he came back, he did a start-up which failed in electronics which I know nothing about it. You know, you don't ask these questions till it's too late. Brock: Right. Eubanks: So it's a terrible mistake. Fairbairn: So that would have been in the thirties that he was doing the start-up or in the forties--? Eubanks: No, after World War II in the forties. Fairbairn: After World War-- Okay. Eubanks: '47, '46-'47. So then we went back to his home in Iowa where he worked for Collins Radio Company and then he worked for Collins. They sent him to New York, he got into sales, to England, to L.A. But since he never went to college, he decided to go into smaller companies. We went back to New York then to Tulsa-- I mean, to Ohio and then to Tulsa. So Ohio, Tulsa, he was involved with piezo electric devices. Tried to sell the airlines on piezo electric instead of the air-driven headphones. He lost that deal, obviously. We all remember those things that stick in your ear. So we went to Tulsa and then I graduated from, my senior year we moved to Tulsa. I graduated from high school there and went to the same high school with Dick Schaffer. Remember him? Brock: No, I don't. Eubanks: Anyway, he had a bunch of conferences. He was a Wall Street Journal tech guy before the famous one. Fairbairn: So how did you find life in Tulsa? What was your experience there? Eubanks: Well, your senior year in high school is a bad time to move, but it was great. Tulsa's a great town. There's so many places in the country I could live happily; they're all over the place. But it was a little bit of a shock from Ohio to Tulsa, but it was good. The high school I went to had more National Merit CHM Ref: X8774.2019 © 2018 Computer History Museum Page 2 of 59 Oral History of Gordon Eubanks finalists than any school in the country except for Nutrea [ph?] or in Bronx School of Science, which are special. So it was just a public school in Tulsa and-- Brock: Was electronics in your household? Eubanks: So they had high-- It was a really good school, though. Brock: Right. Was your father, he was choosing to go join a series of small electronics firms, is that right? Eubanks: Yes. Brock: Yeah. Eubanks: Yeah. Brock: So it's all in electronics. Was he-- Eubanks: Piezo electric, these are the things you squeeze and electricity comes out. Brock: Right. Eubanks: So needles for cheap phonographs where it used that cartridge, as it moved the needle moved. And they're used in transducers, they're used in submarines, they're used all over the place. Brock: Right. Eubanks: Yeah. And then they ended up in Sierra Madre, California and then moved to another place-- They were in Arcadia, then Sierra Madre then somewhere else. Brock: Was electronics in your household? Like was he a hobbyist? Were you a hobbyist? Eubanks: He built things. My father could build things I could never do. I mean, I try to build something out of wood, it'd just look like shit. I mean, he was a real craftsman, I will say that. But he built Heath Kits. He built an FM tuner. He built amplifiers. And I had the tuner for years. I don't know how it disappeared, but. He was very good with his hands and he started on the assembly line at Collins Radio. Fairbairn: Oh. Eubanks: And then got into sales. And Collins was a big, high tech company at the time. I mean, they dominated aviation electronics, they dominated the high end of amateur radio. A very good company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. CHM Ref: X8774.2019 © 2018 Computer History Museum Page 3 of 59 Oral History of Gordon Eubanks Brock: And it seems like there's a kind of a military heritage in your family. Is that true or--? Eubanks: My mother's father was quite the individual. Two full families, all the kids had the same names. Finally got out of the Army and did a whole number of years for the Red Cross in Washington. I mean, he was a character. But no, not really. If you're thinking of how I ended up in the Navy-- Brock: Yeah, a little bit. Eubanks: Pretty easy. "Report for induction at 0700." Fairbairn: <laughs> Eubanks: So I managed to get an application in and get into officer's candidate school because this was '68, '69. I mean, that being drafted was not a great idea. I didn’t really want to go to Vietnam. Fairbairn: Right. Eubanks: It's the honest truth. Now the Navy, I was very lucky to get into officer's candidate school. I believe I was the only person in my company that didn't have strong political connections. Fairbairn: Wow. Eubanks: So they give Bush a hard time about-- I mean, everyone that was getting in any of these things had some connection, I think. I shouldn't say that in public. I mean, I was very lucky. Took the test, got accepted, went there. Volunteered for submarines. Brock: So you had gone into, or you graduated, what was your bachelor's degree in? Eubanks: Electrical engineering. Brock: Was it electrical engineering. And then you immediately went into the Navy or you--? Eubanks: Well, I went to the Draft Board and said, "Listen, I'm doing some graduate work. I want to finish it. I'd love to serve." So that gave me a year. They said, "We'll give you a year." That's when I got into the officer's-- It wasn't, like, the next day or something. But if I hadn't got in, I would have got drafted and who knows. But, meanwhile, I went to Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma. Sheep and all kinds of stuff out there. They were very early on to computers, so every business student had to take a programming course, everyone, to graduate. And so, I taught Fortran, which it turns out I began to realize if the EE things didn't work, they caught on fire. I shut down half the campus one time doing a motors lab and-- Brock: What, did you short something out or--? CHM Ref: X8774.2019 © 2018 Computer History Museum Page 4 of 59 Oral History of Gordon Eubanks Eubanks: I couldn't find a fuse so I just thought I didn't really need it. I'm sure, they made me pay for this big transformer that blew out. And so, I was interested in programming and I got pretty good at Fortran because I was teaching it, and they also started a computer science department in '68. They had a few professors. They said this is really going to be important. So, I was lucky in that sense. I needed to work to pay the last couple years of school, so I was making $300 dollars an hour teaching Fortran to business students. Brock: Three--? Eubanks: $300 dollars a month. Brock: A month. Fairbairn: Yeah. Eubanks: And I could,, you know, live on that. Fairbairn: Yeah. Brock: Do you think the university was into computers so early because of the connection to petroleum industry in the State? Eubanks: I think it was more that they had some really good professors. A lot of the EE people about that time went to Colorado to work for HP on their calculators. Fairbairn: Okay. Eubanks: They hired three or four or five of the good professors. You know, maybe it was a fluke. At the time, I didn't spend a lot of time trying to understand this because I didn't really realize it. But you know, the stored program computer was actually developed in Iowa, not in Harvard, actually. So, you know, I'm a defender. Out here, you know, you went to Oklahoma State? I mean, you got to be kidding. <laughs> You know, because it's all Berkeley and Stanford and all that. But these were all good schools in the Midwest. They're not Stanford. They don't get the students, but that's really a huge difference. And they don't get the faculty, so they're just clearly not as good. But they were interested in computers and I did my first work there. They had a 1401.