Joel Birnbaum

 Barney Oliver, long in the tooth, was set to retire in late 1980 as HP's only CTO or VP of R&D.  While he had shepherded HP's successful entry into "Personal Computing" via first the HP 9100A Desktop Calculator (an incredible marvel for its day, one that computer historians eschew as being a 'PC' for purist reasons) and then via the stunning scientific calculators (HP 35, followed by a whole string of 'firsts'), Barney was agnostic at best about HP entering the mainframe / minicomputer business.  True, he did garner a number of new patents for his novel switching power supply designs for HP's 2000 family, but that had little to do with computing per se.

And truth of the matter be known, HP not only was a laggard in computing circles with old architectures, outdated machines, and a plethora of 'families' which did not interconnect (e.g. compilers for one would not work with another, nor were peripheral drivers consistent, etc.).   It was more and more a quagmire.

John Young had recently become the first non-founder CEO, chosen over his fiery colleague Paul Ely by David Packard as 'the responsible one.'   Ely had flogged the computer divisions much as HP leaders had always done, to be the best at their 'little fiefdom' whether it be CPUs, disc drives, or recorders.   This translated into NIH and general unwillingness to work with other divisions to assure that individual produdcts would work together.  The result was much duplication of relatively simple projects in order to have coverage for the disparate 'computer systems' that HP produced (e.g. HP 1000, HP 2000, HP 3000 and HP 9000 families), which were all independently derived and supported lines, each needing a full panoply of support hardware, software, peripherals, and ancillary equipments.   It was maddening for customers, and incredibly expensive for the development teams with very little advantage from unique contribution.

What to do about it?

The signal was a big one, not just a red flag but a RED FLAG OMEN.  Stanford University sponsored an architectural summit around this new idea from IBM, called Reduced Instruction Set Computing.   And, in a more than irksome fashion, HP was not invited to send anyone to the summit.   Hewlett and Packard at the time were the largest benefactors to Stanford in its entire history; John Young was a Trustee, and John Doyle was intimately connected to the school.   Moreover, HP had helped initiate, underwrite, and had become the flagship user of the Stanford Honors Co-operative program for working engineers to advance their education while working.   (Note: I was already one of the beneficiaries of this program, earning an MSEE from Stanford while working full-time at HP).

Young and team, chastened by this affront, met to discuss "What next?" and their conclusion was that they needed a strong computer systems leader to step into Barney's shoes, at least for the compute side.

Who?

This was a plum job for leading headhunters, and Joel Birnbaum, IBM's Computer Science leader, was the chief target, especially since his lead researcher, John Cocke, had led the first RISC design.  When approached, however, Birnbaum was diffident at best.   His observation--HP in computing was about one-twenty-fifth the size of IBM, and came in at about number fourteen in annual compute revenues.  Why would he bother with a job at such an also-ran?

Fifteen years at IBM had not created a great fortune for Birnbaum, but measured in terms of 'the team' it was a plush job.  For his Computer History Museum interview years later, he recalled some of his IBM teammates fondly, including 16 IBM Fellows and a Nobel Laureate.   The list he quickly recited as colleagues also included 11 Turing Award winners and 6 Eckert-Mauchly award winners from the prestigious ACM computer society.

HP had (and still has) no historic Turing winners, Stanford has nine.   HP did have two Eckert-Mauchly winners in recent years (Norm Jouppi and Josh Fisher, both earning their awards before their HP time).

After several entreaties, though, Birnbaum accepted an invitation to visit (he told an interviewer that he decided he could get a free trip for him and his wife to the Bay Area so that she could attend an opera in San Francisco).   As unforeseen events sometimes unfold, the net result was that HP was able to persuade him to join, as the replacement for Oliver's computer research leader.   This story, lengthy in its detail, is contained in The HP Phenomenon, pp. 265-273 (https://www.sup.org/books/business/hp-phenomenon)

A fascinating vignette in that book is when Birnbaum told two IBM colleagues that he was going to visit HP, and John Cocke said: "He's' going to give you the Barney Oliver interview."   Birnbaum asked, "what is that?" and Cocke replied, "Get ready to take another PhD exam."   Birnbaum said to Cocke: "Bullshit.  He's not going to give me any PhD exam."

Birnbaum went on in the CHM interview to say that he walked in to meet a scowling Oliver, arms folded, who commanded in a Jehovah-like booming voice, "Sit down."  Oliver then, according to Birnbaum, "went through all the pleasantries that he could handle, which was maybe eleven seconds."

When I heard this description from Birnbaum, it instantly took me back to my own first interview with Barney almost twenty years prior--and his contempt for my lack of full understanding of the three small "C's" of calculus--conformal mapping, convolution integrals, and celestial mechanics (tools that were in extremely modest usage around HP laboratories).

Well, net net--Birnbaum offered that RISC designs could unify the disparate HP computer offerings, and HP leadership leaped on the idea, and forthwith, he came.  To run the HP Computer Research program.

But HP had more activity than computers underway.  It was a $2.5 billion annual revenue company, with just $1 billion in computing.   Most of the revenue, and most of the engineers in fact, were involved with scientific instrumentation -- for engineers of all stripes (aeronautical, mechanical, electronic, software), and scientists (chemists, biologists, astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, and environmental science).

Rather than saddle Birnbaum with all this, HP put John Doyle in place as the overall VP of R&D, with Joel reporting to him.   And then, in an unexpected move, Doyle and Young concluded that the basic R&D health of HP, especially the creativity side, had been ebbing with the constant emphasis on low-hanging fruit for short-term revenue improvement rather than longer-term breakthrough products (welcome to the Harvard Business Review management style--e.g. the last decade or two demise of HPE, Cisco, Boeing, and today's unfolding tragic story of Intel).   

My great advantage was that I was ready for a change, and I'd had some surprising success with two kinds of HP projects--first, stand-alone products: the large-screen displays that had irked Packard for a time, and then the highly successful leadership line of logic state analyzers that truly dented the old Tektronix armor; and secondly, "integrated systems" evidenced by the Microcomputer Development Systems (HP 64000 family), which decimated Intel's early leadership with chip developers.  This latter  program required integrating technology from 14 HP divisions to make a coherent system, something the computer divisions had singularly proven unable to do.  See the HP Journal, 32 pages, October 1980.   https://hparchive.com/Journals/HPJ-1980-10.pdf

So, Young and Doyle invited me to create HP's Corporate Engineering department to emphasize both increased innovation and increased productivity via co-ordinated development.  Tall order, and I won't here claim wild success, but it had the great advantage of letting me have the "D" side of Barney's job, while Birnbaum got the "R" side mostly (and Doyle picked up some "R" for instruments as well).

Thus, when someone sends a note about "Who was Birnbaum?" it causes me to reflect and just be thankful that I was privileged to get to know this incredible man more than most.

I'll add more about Joel and what he did for HP and for the world in a subsequent post.

Barney Oliver

 Odd questions sometimes arrive.   This one today was about Joel Birnbaum, viz the Computer History Museum blog post in the InnovaScapes blog.   Who, exactly, was Birnbaum, and where did he fit into the HP story?  The story has two parts, the first of which requires describing Barney Oliver and the lab he constructed for HP.   The second part is what do you do when a genius of the Oliver type retires after thirty years, for a company trying to transform itself from an instrument to a computer company?

It goes back, way back, to Hewlett and Packard at Stanford, where a much younger Bernard M. Oliver was enrolled, and became good friends with Hewlett and acquainted with Packard.   He graduated from Stanford at seventeen, and from Caltech with a PhD by 21.  Working at Bell Labs with Nobel Laureate Claude Shannon and Marconi prize winner John Pierce, he co-developed Pulse Code Modulation and laid the groundwork for satellite communications.  By 1952, at age 36, Hewlett persuaded him to leave Bell Labs and run research and development for a fledgling HP.   

Barney commented on the wide disparity in the two companies: "At Bell Labs, I became quite used to a very high, uniform technical level.  The lab at HP was assembled catch-as-catch-can, out of people who happened by. . .". On the other hand, "the pace was much slower at Bell, . . . you didn't feel the blowtorch on you to get the job finished to nearly the extent I felt it when I first came to HP."

I heard Barney give a talk at Caltech in April 1955, talking about the advent of satellite communications, two and a half years before Sputnik dazzled the world.  I was an impressionable fourteen years old, mesmerized by Barney's energy, enthusiasm and obvious brilliance, with no idea what a Hewlett-Packard company was.  But I did know about Bell Labs.

In July 1962, I was ushered into Barney's office at HP, on my first day working for the company.  He famously interviewed (and approved) every new engineer for HP, but he'd been out of town when I interviewed, so I was hired without his stamp of approval.  Since HP in Palo Alto (virtually the entire company at that time) only hired three engineers in 1962 (vs. eight in 1961), it was a small task.

Oliver had just joined the Palo Alto School Board, and he was intent upon changing the curriculum to "the new math."  He queried me about my math classes at Caltech, asking about the "three small C's" of calculus.   Many of you know about the "big three" -- Differential, Integral, and Vector Calculus".  Not so many know about the "small three" -- Conformal Mapping, Convolution Integrals, and Celestial Mechanics.   While I had taken them, I quickly found that I was nowhere near as proficient as he was.

I had won a Science Fair award years earlier for a color television exhibit (10 years before color TVs were to be sold in America), and based on that, plus my mother's birth in Colorado, Oliver assinged me to the Oscilloscope division which was scheduled to move to Colorado in a year or so, saying that it was HP's only 'failing' division, and they needed someone creative to help them overcome the key competitor Tektronix.  

His inducement was "this is HP's only division that provides a two-dimensional answer (e.g. an X-Y plot) rather than a scalar number.  You might do something with those displays."

Five years later, with Oliver's grudging tacit agreement, I bucked David Packard's dictum to cease work on a large-screen X-Y display, and we introduced the first commercially viable high-speed X-Y display for computer graphics.   This earned Packard's opprobrium for some time, but after a mere 18 years, he awarded me the "Medal of Defiance" for 'extraordinary contempt and defiance' of the CEO's direct order, and he mentioned it in his autobiography, saying "how do you handle insubordination when the guy is right?"

Barney was a true force for HP development.  Carver Mead summed it up nicely for the Franklin Institute, noting that while he got great credit for the first PC (the HP 9100A, by some definitions) along with the HP handheld scientific calculators,  "he is the one who blew the bullshit out of the HP design labs."   Many rued his strident, abusive style, but no one doubted his talent.

Barney's career at HP was outstanding, but he did other extraordinary things as well.   He was IEEE President along the way (1965).  Bill Hewlett had been President in 1954 of IRE, the predecessor group to IEEE.   He held 42 patents at Bell Labs, and another 25 at HP.   

Oliver calculated the re-entry requirements for the Space Shuttle tiles, he contributed to nuclear energy designs, and he helped perfect the safety net for the Bay Area Rapid Transit trains (BART).   Perhaps his greatest legacy was pioneering SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.   Here's SETI's bio for him.   https://www.seti.org/people/bernard-oliver/

One way to measure his impact is to realize that at his death in 1995, aged 79, he was one of only six Americans who had been inducted into both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science.   

What, you may be asking, does this have to do with Joel Birnbaum.  The answer is centered around the question of "how do you fill Barney's shoes when he retires?"   And that gives us the basis for the next post, which is quite a story in itself.

The questions we get asked

 I got a note from a budding documentary film maker the other day, that said: "Did you know Larry Lang at HP?"

Answer: "Sure, but not very well, and it was a long time ago.  Why?"

Well, it seems that Lang was a neighbor to Steve Jobs when he was twelve years old, and he (Lang) encouraged Jobs to consider electronics.

Here's the story, from one of several websites with this set of observations:   http://www.tlcfun.com/become-a-professor.php

Mr. Lang was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard.  An amateur radio operator and electronics enthusiast, Larry took the time to share something he was interested in with the kids in his community. His unselfish efforts helped launch the careers of Steve Jobs and many others.  You might say that Larry was a kind of Professor Know-How to Steve and the other boys in his neighborhood.

Steve Jobs, later in his life, spoke of the experience he and his friends gained working alongside Mr. Lang building electronic kits: "It gave me a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment."

Picture at right: Mr. Lang and four boys, including Jobs in front

The Technology Learning Center uses this story to amplify their consistent message.  That message: 

If you ever wanted evidence of the power of a person to have a positive influence in the lives of a boy or girl, and in a bigger sense, the world, Steve Jobs and the story of Larry Lang is a solid example.  Freely contributing their time and energy towards this cause and inspired by the real life story of Larry Lang, the men and women of the Technology Learning Center understand the pivotal role they may play in inspiring a lifetime of learning among young people.

Topping a short list of prerequisites, a passion for working with young people is by far the most important qualification to be a classroom presenter.  Next is recognizing a sense of urgency in advancing our country's educational system to a place of prominence in the areas of science and technology.  Lastly, is the desire to give something back to their communities, and to a greater purpose, the future prosperity of our nation.

It's been said that the best definition of teaching is a transfer of enthusiasm.  Our passion for working with young people is what energizes us and it's where we find life's biggest rewards.  

I tried to find Larry Lang in any of HP's many publications.  Alas, I could not.  Nor could our esteemed 'hstorian' John Minck, who could not remember Larry.   Perhaps someone reading this blog post knew Larry, and can share more info.

I did find another squib, though, about Steve Jobs and another encounter he had at HP early in life.  This one was carried in Fortune magazine https://fortune.com/2025/03/16/steve-jobs-teenager-hp-cofounder-career-success/

"When Steve Jobs was just 12 years old, he called up HP cofounder Bill Hewlett to ask for spare parts to build a frequency counter.  That phone call got him the tools, and a job . . . .   He found Bill Hewlett's phone number in the Yellow Pages (this seems dubious to me--"in the Yellow Pages?"), and called him up for a favor.

Jobs recalled that Hewlett laughed when Jobs introduced himself as a 12-year-old highschooler in need of the parts.  Ultimately, he offered him the components, and a job. The HP cofounder was so impressed by his drive that he set him up with a summer job at the company, putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters.  (Again, the purist in me--was Jobs really twelve for both events?  He certainly was not a highschooler at 12, never mind the article's slant).

Ignoring the quibbling details.  These stories are the stuff of legends, right?   That was HP folk, for sure.

Nothing lasts forever

Our local weekly newspaper, the Yamhill County News-Register (think McMinnville, Oregon where the fabled Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes' immense plywood seaplane, is hosted), had a Viewpoints column this week, from local historian Steve Dunn.  He begins with an interview of Don Vollum, the son of the Tektronix founder in 1947, quoting Vollum as lamenting the virtual death of the high-tech industry in Oregon in recent years.   Timely?   Intel Oregon announced this weekend that they were laying off 2,400 employees from their Oregon facilities, nearly two-thirds of their current worldwide purge (https://hillsboroherald.com/intel-layoffs-rock-hillsboro-2400-jobs-cut-across-local-campuses/.)

The thrust of the article is that 'big business' has changed the character of companies, to the detriment of local communities in many ways.   Vollum was teary over Tektronix being acquired and the headquarters moved from Oregon to North Carolina (c.f. the March announcement that the new owners of Tektronix would move the headquarters of Oregon’s legendary technology company from its Beaverton campus to Raleigh, N.C.). Here is Dunn's article (https://newsregister.com/article?articleTitle=steve-duin-exodus-of-major-corporations-leaving-barren-wake-in-oregon--1752253563--52423--commentary

Vollum’s lament is shared widely.   If someone in 1990 had said that Ted would fail, and be moved out of Oregon, it’d be like saying HP would suffer a similar fate and leave Palo Alto, or Boeing, imagine this, would leave Seattle for Chicago.   And Palo Alto, and indeed the entire Bay Area, has become a rich-kids ghetto, where the local executives haven't got time or interest to become part of local service groups, and all of the service folk are completely priced out of the local housing markets, etc.

Dunn's article cites a dozen Oregon firms who started, thrived, and then were acquired and "folded" in terms of their local impact.   He doesn't tackle the question about the Willamette Valley wine industry (which we are loving), and the probable evolutionary path that it is on, thirty years behind Napa Valley.  Ahh, progress.   Maybe we'll get lucky in Oregon, and most of the high-tech jobs will disappear, and the consequent lack of wealth will save us from 'success.'

Certainly the stories of Mentor Graphics, HP Oregon, Intel Oregon, Sequent Computer, Floating Point Systems, and so many others (most of which Dunn doesn't even list) are cautionary tales.

For me, it is a bit personal.

HP has known Tektronix (Tek) "forever.'    Or I should say, Keysight (nee Agilent, nee 'the real HP'), knew them deeply.  The Colorado Springs division of HP, competed head-on with Tektronix for years, and their derivatives still do.   

Vollum and Jack Murdock founded Tek just after WW II, after Vollum interviewed with Dave Packard at Bill Hewlett's insistence.   Some of that story is told in my essay about Melville Eastham and General Radio that has been featured at both the GR and Tek museums   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257429741_You_Should_Meet_Melville_Eastham

Hewlett met Vollum at MIT in Bill's role as the Army liaison officer for new technologies,  Vollum had invented a major improvement for the Dumont and General Radio (GR) oscilloscopes of the day, a trigger circuit that would synchronize the signal in a repeatable way.  This allowed switching circuits to be viewed in operation analogous to the continuous wave communication signals for AM and FM radio.  

Packard and Vollum reportedly sparred; Vollum vowed to go set up his own company, and to beat HP, which was still a very small company itself, less than one-third the size of GR.  Vollum had done his thesis project at Reed College, a small liberal-arts college in Portland that would later enroll Steve Jobs briefly (that's where Jobs fell in love with calligraphy, which spurred his later interest in graphical Laser Writer products).

Tek's story, vis-a-vis HP, is told strongly in the book that Ray Price and I wrote, The HP Phenomenon https://www.sup.org/books/business/hp-phenomenon.   I won't bore you with the details here, but suffice to say that Tektronix made more actual profit dollars than HP for many years in the 1950s and 1960s on sales that were routinely about half of HP's total.

In 'scopes, Tek had something like 91% of the market when I joined that division in 1962--HP had 6%, and DuMont about 2% with Iwatsu in Japan at about 1%.   Dominant, in other words.

I led two groups, the Large-screen X-Y-Z displays group and the Logic Analyzer group, that bested Tek in the 1970's, and in the process I got to know some of the Tek folk pretty well.  I only knew Vollum from a distance, along with Norm Winningstad (Norm ran their displays business, then left Tek to set up a wide-word computer company, Floating Point Systems).

I got to know Oregon three ways--I wrote the 77 page Oscilloscopes chapter for Barney Oliver's tome on Instrumentation https://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Measurements-Instrumentation-Inter-university-electronics/dp/0070476500, and worked with Tek engineers to do it; I used Portland wholesale nurseries to stock my first garden center; and I demo'd Tek's new 7000 scope at the New York IEEE show when their own sales folk didn't know what it did.  

As a consequence, I did get to know a number of Tek employees very well, including Merle Kaufmann who helped design their 7000 series "do-all" 'scope; and Jack Grimes, who led their first computer entry, and then their graphics displays group.  Jack died a few years ago from leukemia, but his resume shows an outstanding contribution (https://www.roundtablegroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/JackGrimesCV.pdf).

I knew Bill Walker at Tek, Engineering VP, and Doug Strain (founder and CEO at ESI) very well.  And later I taught at OHSU Engineering School with Jack Raiton and Jim Huntzicker.  Jack was Tek's controller for awhile, and later CTO at Planar Systems.   I never worked at Tektronix, in fact I was probably their chief thorn, and that led Bill Walker to tell Gifford Pinchot III to meet me when I became HP's chief engineer in 1982.   That meeting led to the picture of the "Medal of Defiance" that Gifford published in Intrapreneuring.

Don’s article is timely.  Let's consider some of his points:

The idea that Tektronix, once the state’s largest employer, would leave Oregon is as daunting as the possibility that Nike, or Columbia Sportswear, would someday give up on its home.

That’s because the Portland-born founders of Tek, Don’s father Howard and Jack Murdock, were deeply rooted in Oregon when they created it in 1946, some 700 patents ago.  “Tek was in Portland because my dad and Jack Murdock were from here,” Don Vollum says. “It had nothing to do with economic development, lower taxes or a better work force. The same is true with Phil Knight [and Nike].”  Microsoft? “They were in Albuquerque, and [Bill Gates and Paul Allen] wanted to go home [to Seattle],” Vollum says. “Businesses begin in a place because they have a connection. The better question today is if and why they stay.    “That next generation of professional managers is when people look at education and taxes and workforce.”    And in Oregon, today’s view and tomorrow’s forecast are bleak.

“The combination of high taxes, poor services and poor schools isn’t a winning one, and that’s where we are,” Vollum says. “You put those pieces together and you have a place that’s not desirable for people if they’re starting or running a business.”   That’s not all you have.   You have Dutch Bros, the state’s second-most-valuable company, moving its corporate headquarters from Grants Pass to Phoenix.   You have REI closing its Pearl District co-op, Adobe abandoning its Southwest First Avenue digs, and KEEN Footwear shuttering its Swan Island factory.  You have a 35% office vacancy rate in Portland’s central city and its tallest ghost town, the U.S. Bancorp Tower, burning money.

You have door-maker Jeld-Wen — which founder Dick Wendt built into one of America’s largest privately held companies — moving its corporate headquarters from Klamath Falls to North Carolina after a change in ownership. And in May, Jeld-Wen announced it would dead-bolt its Chiloquin factory, adding another 128 people to the ranks of the unemployed in that Southern Oregon county.  You have distant, detached ownership of several of Oregon’s largest companies: PacifiCorp, Precision Castparts, Teledyne FLIR and The Standard.   You have Intel, currently Oregon’s biggest employer, on the ropes.

And you have Oregon ranked fifth in the nation for total tax burden. As ECOnorthwest’s Michael Wilkerson told the Oregon Legislature in April, the ongoing migration of high-income households out of Multnomah County alone has produced, year after year, “over $1 billion in income loss.”   That’s the equivalent of a cool 1,000 millionaires departing annually, leaving someone else to fund the Oregon Symphony and Preschool for All.

“Why does this matter? That part seems to be missing for the political class, just what this is costing us,” Vollum says. “You see it in philanthropy. We don’t have the next generation or donors for the arts and our cultural institutions.  The older generations created a lot of wealth, and then gave a lot away, which supported all those institutions. There is not really a younger generation of wealth creators coming along behind them in Oregon, and some of the few who are promptly leave for other states, taking their charitable contributions with them.”

Vollum, co-founder of Vista Ridge Capital Partners, is well familiar with how philanthropy serves the region.  The estate of his father’s partner, Jack Murdock, launched the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, which has given more than $1.4 billion to Northwest nonprofits since 1975.  And Vollum, over the years, has chaired the boards at OMSI, the Portland State University Foundation and the Columbia River Maritime Museum, and served as president of the Providence St. Vincent Foundation.

When you live in a city, be that Hermiston or Coos Bay, you are much more likely to invest your time, energy and discretionary income in the upkeep of the neighborhood. Oregon has struggled to attract major sports franchises over the years, but Portland landed an Indy car race in 1984 because Norm Daniels, CEO at G.I. Joe’s, and Bob Ames, president at First Interstate Bank, believed their hometown deserved the upgrade.

When Daniels died in 2021, his wife, Rickie, illuminated that connection. “He loved to work. He just loved the company,” she told The Oregonian. “It was his baby because he grew up there. That’s where he wanted to spend his time. But he also cared deeply about what the company could do to service the community.”   It’s one helluva lot harder to care about Oregon’s universities, museums, foundations or communities when company owners are parked in Texas, Omaha or Florida.

Carrie Hoops is executive director of the Miller Foundation, which provided $12 million in arts and education grants in 2024. Recipients included the Painted Sky Center for the Arts in John Day and the Britt Music & Arts Festival in Medford.   As Hoops notes, corporations accounted for just under 7% of charitable giving in the United States in 2023. But, she adds, there’s an “economic ripple effect” when a corporation moves on:   “Many employers encourage their employees to volunteer. When a corporation leaves, it can lead to job losses, which then affects individual donations. People are laid off, and those people don’t have the money to contribute to their favorite charities.”

The slow vanishing of Oregon-based companies may be picking up speed. A January 2025 report by the University of Oregon’s Institute for Policy Research & Engagement found that Oregon businesses are routinely recruited to expand outside the state, leading to a loss of “thousands of potential jobs and billions of potential private investments in the past five years.”

That two-thirds of those recruited businesses have reported “moving or expanding outside Oregon” isn’t surprising.

How much faith can one retain in the local workforce when Oregon’s fourth and eighth grade test scores for reading and writing are among the nation’s worst?

Ponder that for a moment. Even as spending per pupil has soared, Oregon’s test scores have bottomed out. The state is dead last in fourth grade reading and math scores and — thank heaven for West Virginia — the numbers are almost as discouraging at the eighth-grade level. Those scores are terrifying forecasts of economic growth and stability.

How does one recruit talented tech workers to Portland’s central city, where they will be forced to pay the highest income tax rates outside the island of Manhattan? And how long will entrepreneurs continue to believe Oregon is fertile ground on which to build or keep their companies?   “We have so many regulations [that] it is very difficult to do business here,” Jordan Papé, the president and CEO of Eugene-based Papé Group, wrote in an e-mail. “[We] need a public policy agenda that wants to lure, rather than lose, business investment.”

Our cultural institutions may not otherwise survive.

Is that panic in the wings?   “Panic? Panic is the wrong word,” Vollum says. “We’re long past the panic stage. We’re in the stages of grief.”

Denial? Anger? Bargaining? Depression?   Cratering test scores. Self-defeating tax policies. Empty office towers. And the lingering exhaust fumes from the Oregon companies that are moving on.

"Can't happen here?"  That's what Palo Alto said about HP.   That's what Seattle said about Boeing.

HP Readership

Someone asked recently, "are you still doing that old HP blog?"    They could have looked it up,, but instead they just asked.  The answer, after some 17 years, is 'sort of, on occasion" 

"What occasion?", they asked.  And I sttruggled to mention that now it is more because one of my idols or colleagues has passed away, than some monumental breakthrough at our favorite company.

So this is a bit of a review for 'how it's done' over the years.

The blog started a bit in self-defense, when Ray Price and I were striving to finish our HP history tome, The HP Phenomenon, which finally published (after seven years) in October 2009.  I wrote twenty apologetic posts in 2008, another 40 in 2009, and 43 more in 2010.  No, I didn't put the whole book in the posts, but it might seem like it.

Toward the end of 2010 (August), Mark Hurd resigned (I almost wrote "fired" but officially he was allowed to resign after the investigation of his conduct with Jodie Fisher turned up only " a few inaccurate expense reports").  Recall that the government chased Jimmy Hoffa for years, and only got him on tax evasion changes finally.  The mob got him on other grounds . . . . 

I don't think anyone admitted to the purported Hurd/Fisher sexual pictures that the HP pilots surreptitiously took, so that stayed out of the press.  My blog in august 2010 carried an epithet attributed to HP employees at the time (a nickname of Mark Turd) that got picked up by eastern journalists and boosted my blog page-count numbers considerably (like 40,000) for a few days.  I did see Mark the next spring at the Menlo School graduation where his son and our grand-daughter were graduating, but Mark didn't stay for conversation with me.

Anyway, the book did well, with plenty of speeches and hoopla, and even a few polite reviews.  Three years later, gigs both at Stanford Business School and via a Harvard/HP workshop generated new material, and another 155 posts occurred between 2013 and 2015.  And then only eleven posts in seven years--the story had gotten old, and HP with its multiple CEOs and corporate subdivisions were, if not the laughing stock of the Valley, close to it.

And then, 2024, and I had time to post a few updates and some reflective notes.  Nothing big, but certainy some nostalgia.  And a teary eye for some wonderful colleagues who now rest in peace (I trust).  The page count?  283,579 in the first sixteen years (to 4/1/2024).  If you back out the Mark Hurd spike, that is about 15,000 page views per year.  Over the past fifteen months, we're up to 315,928, which is an astonishing 25,000+ per year, higher than ever.  What?  Why?  Never mind, just write a few more.

Here's the blog-post graph for the HP blog, plus three others that I do (much less well-read).

Bill Atkinson gone also

 Okay I hope this trend doesn't continue.   First, notes about John Young passing.  Then a retrospective about John Doyle.   As I was about to close the computer for the day, John Markoff sent along his obit for Bill Atkinson, which is a very nice tribute to an incredibly inventive guy   https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-dead.html

Bill was 'bigger than life' in the early Apple days.   HyperCard was perhaps his biggest intellectual contribution from my standpoint; others loved QuickDraw and of course it and 'regions' enabled the entire graphical metaphor of the Lisa, followed by the MacIntosh.   

We got close to some of this work, for various reasons.  Despite the laudatory comments from Markoff, I believe that it is fact that HP, and in particular my Colorado Springs team, got the patents for pull-down menus for our logic analyzers circa 1976, long before Bill's more visible contributions.  Much later, 1990, our team at HP Sunnyvale, with HP VUE, "won" the Design Awards for icon designs rather than the Mac.  See the HP Phenomenon, p. 235

june 1, 1990, great falls, virginia: For the second time in two years, HP graphics artist and user interface designer (and leader of HP’s Corporate Engineering Industrial Design team) Barry Mathis got a letter from the Industrial Designers Society of America. This one opened, “It is with great pleasure that the jurors bestow the 1990 Gold IDEA to the HP Visual User Environment . . . with over 535 products, VUE 2.0 stood out.” The three-dimensional elements of VUE—called Motif—had won the year before, not long after the design swept the OSF Graphical User Interface (GUI) competition against forty-two other entries.50 BYTE magazine also selected Motif as its User Interface Software of the Year in 1990. Once again, HP had solid reason to be proud of the industrial design and human factors heritage begun forty years earlier. When Microsoft later embedded the “New Wave look-and-feel” of the Motif design widgets into Windows—Windows 3.1—it gave them near parity with Apple’s MacIntosh GUI, and ignited a patent suit filed by Apple against Microsoft and HP over intellectual property rights for industrial design.51 To many observers, it was a laughable suit—the common Silicon Valley view was that Apple itself had stolen the Xerox PARC GUI design shamelessly; to sue others for building an open systems software design tool was ludicrous.   in a fast-track decision, the judicial system agreed with HP and Microsoft that the suit was groundless, and the suit was tossed out.

I had worked with Doug Engelbart starting in 1966 because of my novel (for the day) graphics box, and we put a lot of user-interface design thought and time into these areas over many years.  It is from this 'first-hand' perspective that one could really appreciate the work and genius of Bill Atkinson.

David Smith, now at Croquet Corp, had a nice squib a few months back about Bill that adds to Markoff's 'regions' story: A very interesting story is that when Bill Atkinson was watching the demos of dragging windows he thought he was seeing the actual window being moved and the screen being updated dynamically. That was not what was actually happening though - they were using a much faster to draw outline and then the screen refreshed after the drop. But Bill, not realizing it was a very good magic act, decided he needed to figure out how they did what they hadn't actually done. The result was Bill invented "regions", perhaps one of the most beautiful concepts in computer graphics ever realized. It, more than anything enabled the Macintosh user experience we first saw. A quick aside was that Dan Ingalls, who gave the demo to Atikinson and Jobs - invented BitBlt, which was the foundational element of the Smalltalk/Alto graphics engine and how it was able to do so much. I actually wrote the first realtime 3D adventure/shooter for that first Macintosh. I was actually able to use regions for most of the rendering and bitblt for updating the screen. Did you know that the first 128k mac enabled page flipping? And just like on the Alto, the screen ate all the memory - actually on the Alto, the memory would eat the screen...

Smith himself is a major contributor to this space, and we cited Smith's work in filing for our AstroVirtual patents several years ago.   I cannot help but think that this era is drawing to a close--Atkinson was one of the giants who defined it all.

Czatch-up on previous news--John Doyle

 A year ago, I posted a small note about John Doyle's passing (c.f.  March 20, 2024)

And I vowed to pen a few words in that note, but time intervened and that never happened.

Given the recent passage of John Young, I thought about that, and I found Doyle's obituary notice   https://www.mercurynews.com/obituaries/john-l-doyle-portola-valley-ca/

John, as the obit notes, was an engaging, incredibly smart, curious, adventuresome sort.   Like, the one-liner about becoming a outside window washer on the 19-story Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco.  

Nor did it mention that his sponsor in America was George Young, in Omaha, NE, which among other things led to George's son Richard and daughter Nancy both working for HP at various times.  So, irony--Richard Young and Nancy Young each consulted for HP CEO John Young (no relation).

I first met John when he came to Colorado Springs along with Bill and Dave and Barney Oliver to review what became the Logic Analyzer line, circa 1971.   John had just returned to HP after leaving to become CEO of a Hexcel Corporation division launching a new ski and a line of ski equipment.   The experiment didn't last long, and Packard offered John a 'new products' overview role to return to HP.   Later, he became HP's VP of Personnel, and then still later the VP of HP Labs, where he was instrumental in hiring Joel Birnbaum and launching the RISC computer architecture.   Still later, he became VP of Computing Systems before retiring.  His obit omits all of these titles and roles, simply saying "HP provided John the chance to wear many hats as engineer and manager."

In 1978, I got a phone call at HP from "John Doyle" who did not introduce himself (assuming that I remembered him from years earlier), but asking "are you the Chuck House who signed the cairn at the top of Hunewill Peak in the Sierra?"    Which, yes I was, and I'd done so twenty years earlier while working as a wrangler in Bridgeport, CA (population 324).   We 'bonded' over mountain climbing stories.  It also turned out that John and his family had stayed at the Hunewill Ranch multiple times over the years, and it was just total coincidence that he had climbed that mountain and found my name.  Four other names had been entered in the intervening twenty years--not exactly as popular as Mt. Everest.

Still later, I moved to Palo Alto to start Corporate Engineering, working directly for John, one desk away.  It was a fabulous learning experience, from a sagacious fun-loving 'graybeard by then (at HP, turning 50 was 'ancient' but John never let that slow him down).  Our start date was April 1, 1982, a date that I objected to, but he said, "NO, NO, that's the day the Royal Air Force (Britain) was founded."

I got to know John a bit differently as well.  I had married Nancy Young, mentioned above (met her when she consulted with HP Colorado Springs), and when we separated, John offered me time to 'settle' by moving into his Portola Valley guest home, which was wonderful because I got to know his wife Judy as a result.   The two of them were a wonderful couple, and they were very supportive at a tough time.

John and I continued to meet long after we had both retired from HP, and he and Bill Terry were the two most thorough readers of the 2009 book that Ray Price and I produced about HP (The HP Phenomenon).  He offered pages of corrections and amplifications, including that "Personnel" was really "Human Resources" which has an altogether different ring to it.  His last note to me, just a newsworthy catch-up note, was lengthy, hand-written, about six months before he passed.   Indeed, an elegant man.