Night at the Museum with the heroes of tech
By Dean Takahashi
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 12:54 am in General, tech culture.
I spent a night at the museum. No fossils.
Just artifacts of the computer age and those who made them. One man wearing kilts. The Computer History Museum’s annual Fellows dinner honored four computing pioneers tonight in front of a crowd of more than 500. The elite crowd included everyone from Gene Amdahl to Frank Quattrone. Comedian Wayne Cotter was emcee and he regaled the crowd with jokes about his geeky past.
Morris Chang, founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. He created the chip foundry industry that enabled pure-play fabless semiconductor companies to get into the market with a focus on just designs. Nvidia was a co-sponsor of the dinner and rightly so because the Santa Clara graphics chip maker wouldn’t be around today if it weren’t for Chang’s vision. Carly Fiorina was supposed to congratulate Chang, but she didn’t show and sent a congratulatory note that Cotter read on stage instead. I thought he was going to crack a joke but he was serious. Chang said that more than 50 years ago he was painstakingly making single transistor chips at places such as Texas Instruments and now his company is making 700-million transistor chips for Nvidia.
David Patterson, chairman of the computer science departtment at UC Berkeley. Patterson co-wrote the seminal books on computer architecture that, starting in 1990, educated a whole generation of computer scientists on modern architecture. He took the stage in kilts. He cracked a joke that you had a better chance to get on stage if you wore a skirt. Among his accomplishments was co-writing the first paper on reduced instruction set computing, or RISC, and helping Sun Microsystems create the first SPARC chip.
John Hennessy, the president of Stanford University and a computer architect, also was honored as a fellow for co-writing the books on computer architecture with Patterson. He took a lot of chances starting MIPS and trying to take on Intel with RISC. He recounted how he was visiting Hsinghua University in China and people lined up to have him autograph copies of his book. He offered a quote from Helen Keller, saying, “The cautious are caught as often as the brave.”
Chuck Thacker of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was honored for being the chief designer of the Xerox Alto, the first computer with a graphical user interface and the inspiration for Apple’s first computer.
These are the modern heroes that we should be celebrating just as much as any pop stars or professional athletes. And heck, that Patterson looks like he can still bench 300 pounds. Applause.
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