“If we think it can be done within the next five years, I’m not interested
and we
are not thinking far enough ahead. .We have a revolution to think through.”
Alan Kay - Atari Corporate Research - Brown Bag Lunch Talks 1981
I will never forget the day, the exact moment that I made the decision to quit collage. It was a bitter cold day, gray and windy with occasional bursts of snow. I was walking along by the river in downtown Denver. I was returning home from class, and thinking about my grades I had received the day before. I had slipped to a C in two classes and not an A insight anywhere.
Suddenly the reality in my mind of admission to MIT next year had become a tragic fantasy and continuing a sad farce. And that was the only reason I had been being a starving student at Metro State for the last year. In my typical abruptness I decided that I was done, that was my last class. I’d run away for a while and then go back to work full time as a technician, a low level fixer of others designs. And forget about my dream of becoming a world class R & D engineer. It became the pivotal moment in an amazing career and I could not have been more wrong at the time about just what this decision would mean in my life.
At the time I was working at Rocky Flats for Rockwell on the DOE Small Wind Energy research project as an electronics technician. We were right next door to the nuclear weapons facility. I didn’t know what I was going to do but hanging out in Colorado wasn’t going to be it. So I applied to the Peace Core and I tried to quit my job.
But it wasn’t that easy, my bosses wanted to know why and weren’t willing to just let me go. They knew I was in school and of my MIT dreams; I couldn’t face them and say I was dropping out. So I made up a story that I had given up on a EE and had settled for an EET degree that I was able to qualify for now with life experience credits. So I was quitting to look for a job as an engineer. To my total surprise they said fine but you don’t need to quit, we will make you an engineer. Drum roll and lighting flash, you are a R & D Engineer, as long as you will keep things working around here too, OK? Oh and by the way, that also means you get engineering wages, your salary is tripled.
Well there I was, by dropping out of collage and telling a little white lie to make crawling away easier, both a major technology company and the Department of Energy had given me a chance at doing research engineering. Sometimes the world is weirder then is to be believed and one simply has to smile and enjoy.
A few months later Regan cut the program and I was laid off. But now I was a research engineer with Rockwell and DOE references saying so. This led me to NASA at Ames Research in the Silicon Valley. Which lead to Commodore where I helped with production engineering and introduction of the C64, (now in the Smithsonian). Then I was recruited out of Commodore to Atari and eventually to Atari Corporate Research. Where my boss’s bosses the Co-VPs running the place were Alan and Ted. Dr. Alan Kay, the Xerox PARC legend who invented the point and click and Dr. Ted Hoff who invented the microprocessor at Intel.
Less then two years after dropping our of a Podunk school and giving up on ever becoming a real engineer, I had the title of Sr. Research and Development Engineer at one of the truly great computer research facilities. I found myself on first name basis with legends and giants of the industry. Life can truly be stranger then fiction and I felt like I was in a movie. Any day they would all figure out I wasn’t a genius with top credentials like all the rest of them; that I really didn’t belong here. But the opposite happened, everyone liked me and I did well. It was Nirvana and I never wanted it to end. Everyday I could hardly wait to get to work.
We were in the White Castle,
it was a funny white reflective two story building that the second floor was
larger then the first. The first floor was Research Engineering, where I was.
We had real projects that intended to produce real, out there, pushing the edge,
products. The second floor was RESEARCH SCIENCE, the realm of the gods. Their
product was papers presented to academia. Atari had essentially unlimited funds
and they spent it to get the top talent, they wanted a Xerox PARC or Rand Institute.
I had been introduced to Alan Kay when I transferred into Corporate Research
and had seen him in the halls. While he was a very casual, first name kind a
guy, Alan was already a living ledged. And my bosses boss, so I kept my head
down. Then one day I got a flyer, Alan had decided to hold weekly technology
lunch “chats”. Wow, what a great chance to sit at the feet of the
master. I would be a sponge while he lectured and suck up every idea and drop
of wisdom.
But it wasn’t the lecture series I had thought it would be; it really was a “chat”. Like a collage professor he politely insisted everyone present participate. I was so awe struck and self-conscious; I was sure I could add nothing to this discussion except to reveal my unworthiness. But he was not to be put off; he waited, they all waited and finally I spoke.
And to my astonishment I had not exposed my ignorance; instead I realized I had exposed a part of all of our ignorance. I thought I didn’t know the answer because I had not finished my education, actually I didn’t know because no one at that point did. I found myself participating in discussions about where we were going. About a revolution that would change the whole world and we were planning it. He planted dreams of a future and then challenged us to make it real. He taught me a lot about technology but far more importantly he taught me it was not really about the technology. It was about creating a revolution that would change the world far more then the car or the airplane. About connecting people, making information freely available and creating a global village. This was hard to even imagine in 1980, but Alan did and he showed me.
And everyday after that for more then twenty years, when I racked my brains and beat my head against the wall in frustration, working endless hours trying make some bit of the puzzle work, it was good. Good because Alan had shown me the future, because he had shown me the higher purpose in our struggle. He had lifted my eyes from the everyday slog and taught me how to see into the future. And as he is famous for saying, predicting it by inventing it.
Most important
to me was that he and the others at Atari Corporate Research showed me myself,
in a light I never would have believed. That even self taught I had earned being
a Sr. R & D Engineer. And regardless of my self image problems, forever
more I could never again feel second rate and doubt myself intellectually or
as an engineer.