Personal Recollections of Rick Cavallaro, who was the project manager in the development of the FoxTrax Puck Tracking System. Currently Rick Cavallaro is Chief Scientist for Sportvision.

Origin of the Idea

In late 1994, David Hill, the President of Fox Sports, and Stan Honey, the Executive VP of Technology at New Corp, had started discussing the idea of building a puck tracking system for televised professional hockey. Fox, having just won the broadcast rights to NHL hockey, was eager to find ways to expand the television audience for ice hockey. David concluded that any new technology that could highlight the movement of the puck would attract a larger audience. Stan had argued that for $2 million he could put together a team to develop such a technology. News Corp owned Fox. Rupert Murdoch, who was the CEO of News Corp, also liked the idea and gave the approval to go ahead. In 1995, Stan started to put his development team in place. It should probably be noted that Stan was pitching an idea to do virtual billboards to David. It was David that wanted to track the puck, but assumed it would be impossible to do. Stan explained that it could be done, but would be too costly. When David asked for an estimate, Stan made an educated guess and called it $2 million. Given that estimate, David wanted Stan to start right away. I believe they both talked to Murdoch before proceeding.

The Start of Syzygy, the predecessor to Atari

Nolan Bushnell impressed me. He had a company car. He had a Buick station wagon. “What's a company car?”, I asked. And he told me “it's a car you can drive and you don't have to pay for it.” “Wow! That's a concept I could go for”, I thought to myself. And he offered me a thousand dollars a month salary, and ten percent of the stock in the company. You know, I was already making $1,200 a month at Ampex as an associate engineer. And ten percent of the stock seemed worthless to me. At the time, I could care less. It was a nice token, but not that important to me. I accepted the offer because I thought that it would be fun. I had seen advancement inside the company ranks as kind of a slow process, through your whole career. But I had seen people who had left and come back would get bumped up higher.

Being at Ampex, I worked in engineering but I liked talking to the guys in manufacturing, in purchasing, and with the guys in personnel. But at big company like Ampex, you only had your little purview and you'd hand off your stuff to a draftsman or something. Working in a small company on the other hand offered a broad view of everything. I figured it would probably fail in a year or two, and then I'd go back to Ampex. I knew they'd hire me back. I was a young guy.

We came from the 60s, and that's important. We learned from the Vietnam War not to trust the government, not to trust authority, so there was this automatic kind of distrust and a skepticism and questioning of authority. Questioning the status quo was a fairly common thing to do for our generation. So I figured, “What the heck. I'll take this risk.” After all at the time we lived with the threat of nuclear Armageddon. The Cold War was going on. They were building bomb shelters. So all of us who started Atari was very young. We were in our 20s. Looking at the bigger picture, why not risk. We also contracted with Bob Herbert, one of the great hardware digital engineers at Ampex.

Contributors:

Delmar M. Fadden, Peter M. Morton, Richard W. Taylor, and Thomas Lindberg

Preface:
We, (Delmar Fadden and Peter Morton, Richard W. Taylor and Tom Lindberg) were all working at Boeing when the idea of the 2-person electronic cockpit for commercial transports was first talked about. Individually and collectively we had direct involvement in the early discussions leading up to the project and during various stages of the project’s design, development, and testing. What follows are our recollections of how this important development in aviation history came to be and the road we followed to make the innovation of a 2-person electronic cockpit a reality.

Contributed by: Morris Tanebaum, IEEE Life Fellow

For more on the life of Morris Tanebaum see IEEE Oral History with Morris Tanenbaum

Discovery of "transistor effect"

Contributed by:  Armin H. Frei, LSM
Former Research Staff Member Centre Electronique Horloger

Introduction

In July 1967, somewhat more than 40 years ago, the world's first quartz wrist watch had been created by a group of researchers at the Centre Electronique Horloger in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, assembled and successfully tested for proper operation. The watch baptized Beta 1 with the identification number CEH-1020 was fully meeting the regulatory requirements concerning men's wrist watches as postulated by the established Observatory of Neuchâtel and its famous yearly "Concours Chronométrique".

Origin of Toshiba Computer Software Product Line “COPOS and PODIA” for Power-Generation Plant and its induction into the Software Product Line Hall of Fame at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
June 14, 2009
Haruo Kawahara,
IEEE Life Fellow(LF-06538995)

Toshiba "Computer Software Product Line" for Power-Generation Plant control and operation has been one of the most successful and the historically earliest large-scale real-time software for industrial plants.

This "Computer Software Product Line" has been inducted into the Software Product Line Hall of Fame at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in 2008 (The 12th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC2008)) .
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/plp_hof.html

Adventures at Wartime Los Alamos

Contributors: Lawrence Johnston, Professor of Physics, Emeritus, University of Idaho. Submitted on his behalf by the IEEE History Center Staff. Invited by Los Alamos Laboratory, Dr. Johnston gave this presentation on August 9, 2006. 

This article will discuss three major topics. First about how we experienced life in wartime Los Alamos. Second, the work we did on the Fat Man Implosion type of bomb, and third, the three wartime bomb events: the Trinity Test of the Fat Man bomb, and the job that took us to the Tinian Pacific base, and the delivery missions of the bombs to Japan-- Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Contributed By: Dean Chapman, IEEE Senior Life Member

For those of us who worked in the area of Radar Systems, it was not uncommon to jump from designing electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment designed to defeat radars to Electronic Counter-countermeasures (ECCM) equipment intended to defend against such devices. I first worked on ECM and then moved to the ECCM world.

Working on ECM System

December 1960: ”I never dared sell that”

During the trip when an agreement with JTAS was made to supply the test exchange ETS 3 to them, Reinders, who was sales manager at PTI in Hilversum, said: “The only telephone system I ever understood is the manual Magneto system. And that is as well. If I understood the complicated systems we make today I am not sure I dared sell them”.
About this time, Pierce, who was head of the Bell laboratories in the USA, made a statement comparing computers and telephone exchanges. One must remember that computing at that time meant batch processing, i.e. data and programs were prepared on punched cards, carried to the computer, read-in and processed, whereafter the result was carried back to be post-processed. It was quite a while before terminals at a distance became a rule.
Pierce said that the difference between computers and telephone exchanges was that in a computer a calculating error was a catastrophe while a total break-down was a minor nuisance. In a telephone exchange it was just the other way round.
A calculating error in a computer may result in a wrong bank-statement or a wrong salary payment, and that is a catastrophe. In a telephone exchange it would normally only result in a wrong number, and then you just apologize, goes on-hook and makes a new call.
A break-down in a computer would be repaired and the stack of punched cards read in again, only resulting in a minor delay of the result. But when a telephone exchange breaks down it is impossible to call police and ambulance. The customers must have the assurance that the exchange is always ready to serve them.

March 1961 to October 1963: ETS 3 development

Contributed by: Dean J Chapman, IEEE Life Senior Member

While attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the late 1950s (BSEE '61), I had the good fortune to be hired as a co-op student by General Electric. This was an excellent program and provided many benefits to the would-be engineer as well as being an excellent recruiting tool for GE. Incidentally, GE's "Advanced Courses in Engineering" or A-B-C Course for young graduates was also an outstanding program that provided mutual benefits to both the employee and employer. I was fortunate to have taken part in that program as well.

First Assignment

Contributed by: Morris Tanenbaum, IEEE Life Fellow

For more on the life of Morris Tanebaum see IEEE Oral History with Morris Tanenbaum

Silicon to Metallurgy

Contributed by: Thomas Cuthbert Jr., IEEE Life Member

I joined Collins radio with a B.S.E.E in 1959, after serving as a U.S. Navy pilot and electronics officer and attending M.I.T. and Georgia Tech. During my interview and thereafter, Collins designers talked about loaded Q in circuits, meaning the ratio of L or C reactance to the apparent resistance at a particular frequency; that is how much reactance power (vars) circulates relative to the real power (watts) passing through. In 1959, the main application of loaded Q was calculation of resistance transformations that are equal to 1+Q², "one plus Q squared" being the method's name. HF resonators usually are composed of adjacent L and C branches having equal reactances of opposite signs and operate at a chosen "parallel resistance" at the passband center frequency.

Arthur Collins' Preference

Arthur Collins always preferred top inductive or magnetic field coupling between parallel resonators because of the greater harmonic attenuation, which increased with loaded Q. Despite only two years of junior college, Arthur Collins was an intuitive genius, who invariably could find a superior qualitative circuit without a quantitative method to justify it. Fortunately, the famous Seymour Cohn published "Direct-Coupled Resonator Filters" in the 1957IRE Proceedings, and it later dawned on me that resonator loaded Q was simply related to the microwave designer's normalized lowpass (LP) prototype network element values, resonators, and the connecting inverters. The impedance inverters Cohn employed between resonators were just the capacitive or magnetic couplings that always concerned Arthur Collins

Contributed by: Richard J. Gowen, IEEE Life Fellow

The Primier Global Network for the History of Electrotechnology

It was my privilege to serve as the Chair of the IEEE History Committee in 2007-2008 and guide the development of the IEEE Global History Network. This project involved members of the IEEE History Committee, leaders of several IEEE boards and committees, IEEE staff and contractors. Additionally, I have the honor of serving as the President of the IEEE Foundation with oversight responsibility for the fiscal operations of the IEEE History Committee. The GHN wiki was developed over a seven month period through the extraordinary efforts on the GHN Project Team. I have witnessed the cooperation and dedication that have made the IEEE GHN a reality and use this opportunity to recognize and thank the individuals that had a major part in making this a successful project.

Contributed By: Stanley Baron, IEEE Life Fellow

Inventing the Vidifont:

In 1966, Rudi Bass, Director of Graphics Arts for CBS News, was tackling a set of challenges in preparation for the 1968 elections. Among other tasks, the Graphics Arts Department was required to generate graphics, including title graphics, for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. In order to comprehend the magnitude of the task they faced, it is helpful to understand how television graphics were created in those times.

Contributed by: Sajjad (Saj) Durrani, IEEE Life Fellow

For more on the life of Sajjad Durrani see IEEE Oral History with Sajjad Durrani.

I worked on space-related projects for most of my career, but would like to start with some background. Accordingly, this write-up consists of four parts: a brief career history; general remarks about space projects; early education and formative years; and studies leading to the first engineering degree. Subsequent postings will discuss some satellite communications projects that may be of broad interest.

Adventures on the USS Intrepid: Personal Recollections

Contributors: John W. Meredith, Senior Life Member

       When I graduated from college in the mid-1960s, military service was expected of all male U.S. citizens who did not have an exemption from military service. I chose the U.S. Navy, joining a commissioning program that I completed during summer breaks while I was pursuing my BSEE degree. Following graduation I was commissioned as an Ensign and received orders to report to the USS Intrepid.

Contributed by: William Merton Nellis, IEEE Life Member

In January 1953, I reported for work at Remington-Rand Univac in St. Paul, Minnesota. I had been interviewed for a job at Engineering Research Associates (ERA) several months earlier while still in the Navy but prior to reporting for work the company became Remington-Rand. I worked on a project for the Navy that included recording on large drums as a means of delaying analog signals.

The surface of a drum was coated with a magnetic oxide that could be magnetized with a noncontact boundary displacement recording head. The drum surface was precise and concentric so that the heads could be placed within 1 mil of the surface. The drum was driven at a rather slow constant speed so that the transport time from recording head to pickup head was seconds and adjustable by changing the distance of the pick up on the track. A large drum with approximately ten tracks processed signals from ten hydrophones using this phasing method to turn the hydrophone array into a beamed listening system.