Au Revoir, early days at HP

 I missed the obituary for Dean Morton, clearly a 'passing of the guard last spring.   Sue Chance, Doug's beautiful wife, passed away a few weeks ago, victim of a sudden stroke.   She was a great friend of Portola Valley children, including mine when I lived there some years ago.   Our paths had not crossed in recent years, but the last time I saw her, that radiant smile was still captivating.  Doug has been a blessed man for their long marriage.

Small factoids that pop up when you see something that jogs the mind.    Back in 'the day' an English lad named John Doyle came to America, and after being nurtured by Nancy Young's father in Omaha.  Doyle moved to the Bay Area, first getting a job cleaning outside windows on the Mark Hopkins hotel in San Francisco.   Gawd, can you imagine?   Having been a Royal Air Force pilot during WWII, he said it didn't give him much fear.   Soon, though, he got a job at HP Palo Alto (that was the only locale for HP at the time),  and he moved into a small Sunnyvale apartment where he met Doug and Sue.  Sue said, "there's this girl in our apartment, you might want to meet."   Turned out to be Judy, and soon enough, she became Judy Doyle, for the rest of her life.  (truth in advertising, Nancy Young and I were married during our Portola Valley time, where we first met Sue and Doug).

Okay, long preamble.  The point of this post is to lead up to the obituary of Dean Morton, which I had not heard of prior to searching the Palo Alto "Lasting Memories" pages while looking up Sue's obituary.  

First, a disclaimer.  I don't as a rule read all of the obit pages, but in doing so today, I found Jerry Carlson, one of the first hapless folk to try running initial parts of what became the HP Computer Group.  Packard had taken Bob Grimm out of running the Automated Measurements division (AMD) just before he left for Washignton D.C in February 1969.   He brought in Jerry Carlson, and then when Hewlett became President of HP (Dave never agan ran HP, and at the time, HP computing was $10M, a whopping 4% of the company).   Tom Perkins pissed Hewlett off big-time, and Bill brought Carl Cottrell out from Eastern Sales to be the Computer Czar over Perkins at Dymec and Carlson at AMD.  Disaster all the way around.

Another year, and Perkins, Cottrell, and Carlson were all gone from HP.  Bill Terry, who was the Division Manager for HP Colorado Springs (my boss) was pulled in to run the Computer Group, which gave me a great entree to pilot some early Logic Analyzer ideas in Cupertino.  Terry lasted a little longer, but then Packard and John Young helped Hewlett decide to have Paul Ely report to Bill Terry, which Paul found unworkable and soon enough took over.  Soon after that, Hewlett retired, and John Young became CEO.  John soon brought an old colleague back to Palo Alto from Boston--Dean Morton.   I'll say more about Dean in the next post.

I find it ironic in a way that Cottrell, Carlson,  Morton, and Young all have died this year.  And other 'giants' -- Al Bagley, Don Hammond, and John Doyle all were recent also.  Bill Terry and Paul Ely are still with us--the group is dwindling, and those of us left are a bit long in the tooth.  Ah, well.  Au revoir!