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.