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Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells Erhard and I, on the other hand, were to work on the next generation full-blown TIMS, to be code named TIMS-II, which would bring the benefit of the new microprocessor technology to the original TIMS concept. Erhard had been working on the general design plan, which is known as the ‘system level design,’ for some time before I got there and had the technical plan for developing this product generally laid out already. Erhard took the greater part of my first real working day after I’d settled into my new apartment to explain to me what a TIMS was and what TIMS-II was going to be. He was planning to incorporate most of the designs already going into Mini-TIMS. This is known in engineering as ‘leverage.’ But a full-blown TIMS had to do more things than the Mini-TIMS could do. In particular, there were measurement functions TIMS-II had to have that the Mini-TIMS did not have, and the old TIMS designs for these functions had to be brought up to date and changed to take advantage of microprocessor technology. That was where I came in. I was to start designing the new electronics for these functions. And Erhard knew which one he wanted first. “You’ll be designing Hits and Dropouts,” he told me. “Great! What’s a ‘Hits and Dropouts’?” I asked. I’d never heard of such a thing. Erhard answered my question by handing me a several hundred page manual entitled Theory of Operation of the HP 4940. Along with it he handed me a telephone company pamphlet entitled Bell Publication 41009. “It’s all in there,” he said with a grin. This is what I meant when I said my education had prepared me very well for the theory side of my work. One of my senior year courses had explained a little about ‘transmission impairments,’ but there were others, such as Hits and Dropouts, it hadn’t mentioned at all. In point of fact, over 99% of the EE world doesn’t know what ‘Hits and Dropouts’ are. The fact I didn’t know wasn’t a reflection on my education. It was a reflection of the fact that every high technology corporation has engineering problems very specific to their business that other high tech companies neither know nor have to care about. An engineering education prepares you in the fundamentals that are used regardless of whether you are designing a TIMS or a toaster. And it also prepares you to be able to teach yourself what you need to learn in order to work in whatever specialized problem areas your company has to deal with. If it didn’t do these two things, it wouldn’t be an ‘education’; it would be ‘training.’ In 1975 the managements of America’s high technology corporations knew that and knew the difference between education and training. Today I’m not so sure they do. Anyway, I lugged that four inch thick stack of documents over to my desk and set to work learning what ‘Hits and Dropouts’ was. Within about a week I thought I had a pretty good handle on what it was and had managed to sketch out the general technical plan for the electronics that would be needed to measure it. (This kind of technical plan is called the ‘block diagram level’ of the design). Erhard looked my work over and pronounced it a good start. He also pointed out a few practical things I still needed to figure out in order to get my developing design to fit in and work with the rest of the instrument. The nice woman in Personnel on my first day had told me ties weren’t required at HP, but she hadn’t said anything about them being forbidden so I was wearing a tie at work each day. No one else did, but I like to wear a tie. To me it’s a constant personal symbol that I’m not working in the bakery anymore. You might say it’s my own private little badge of triumph. Yes, I know a lot of men complain that ties are uncomfortable, that they’re ‘choke collars’ and so on, but that actually isn’t true. Buy a shirt with a neck size that’ll go around your neck without needing a winch, guys. It’s your shirt, not your tie, that’s choking you. Anyway, about the third morning of real work I was sitting at my desk deep in thought about Hits and Dropouts and scribbling some things in my lab notebook. My desk sat along the corridor of the lab and it, along with the short wooden bookcase sitting on it, formed part of the ‘wall’ that defined the corridor. Suddenly I heard a stern sounding Voice From Above: “WHO gave YOU the day off?” it demanded. Startled, I looked up and there was Bob Allen, the Lab Manager, standing in the corridor, peering 195 Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells down at me with a scowl from over the top of my bookcase. My face must have been a study in bewilderment because he suddenly broke out in a big, toothy grin. “Everybody knows you can’t think with a tie on,” he added. Then he strolled off down the corridor, still grinning. He left in his wake a fairly unsettled twenty-one-year-old. I didn’t know if he was just kidding me or not. I knew I didn’t know him well enough yet to be able to tell. I did come to find out later that Bob liked to tease people; he was a bit like Grandpa Teters in that regard. So it’s possible he was just teasing me. On the other hand, no one else wore a tie, these people didn’t know me yet either, and Bob might have been letting me know in a jocular way that I was violating some kind of unwritten HP folkway. Clearly, judging from a couple of the guys in the lab, HP didn’t mind its engineers coming to work looking like they’d just finished weeding their gardens. But maybe they did mind it if somebody wore a tie. Maybe some of them would think I was trying to show them up or something. It was keenly in my mind that I was in that six month probationary period, so I decided discretion was the better part of valor and I should quit wearing a tie to work. At least for six months anyway. In the grand scheme of things it was an awfully minor matter. Still, though, I was pretty irritated about it. Apparently it was okay for somebody to exhibit his freedom of expression by wearing blue jeans that let his kneecaps show, but it was not okay for me to show my freedom of expression by wearing my little badge of accomplishment. Fair? No. But I’d known life is often unfair since I was ten years old. My ties stayed home in the closet after that. For the time being. I’d been working on my assignment for about two weeks when Del called a group meeting. The ten members (including Del) of the TIMS group gathered in the division’s conference room just after lunch. There Del told us the U.S. Navy was interested in our Mini-TIMS except for two things. They wanted it to be able to measure a transmission impairment called ‘phase jitter’ (which was one of the transmission impairments that had been covered in my senior course) and they wanted it to supply output signals they could use to drive an old-style analog X-Y plotter to make a permanent hardcopy record of the testing. Phase jitter was one of the measurements TIMS made that Mini-TIMS did not. The other feature, which came to be known as ‘analog outputs,’ was something even TIMS did not do. Del did not explain that adding the U.S. Navy to the list of Delcon’s customers would be a very good thing for our small division. I didn’t think that needed any explaining; it was obvious. So when he told us he had decided to put TIMS II on hold and reassign Erhard and me to the task of designing a second version of Mini-TIMS that would have these features I wasn’t surprised. Apparently I was wrong, though, about how self-evident the benefit of bringing in the Navy as a customer was. Some of the older guys were pretty upset about the decision and voiced their disagreements right there in the meeting. This surprised me for a couple of reasons. The first was just because they didn’t see the self-evidence of the benefit like I did. The second was because the guys who spoke up really weren’t personally affected by the decision. They weren’t the ones having their assignments switched. Only Erhard, me, and one other guy, a young engineer named Dave Novotny, who was a couple years older than me, were directly affected, and Erhard and Dave weren’t among the guys objecting to Del’s decision. But Del listened calmly to the guys’ objections and quietly responded to them one by one. By the end of the meeting the guys in the section might not have agreed with his decision but at least they accepted it. I was impressed for two reasons.

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