Sophocles Orfanidis

My friend (and former colleague) Sophocles Orfanidis died on March 2nd of Covid complications at the age of 76.

When I arrived at Rutgers, Sophocles had the office next to mine.  I didn't see him too often: Sophocles was truly old school: He would arrive to teach his class, hold office hours and then vanish.  I can't remember how we started to talk, but I may have introduced myself.  Sophocles taught all the DSP classes: Both the undergrad introduction, graduate DSP and finally "Optimum DSP".

But I really got to know him when he invited my family (including a toddler) up to his country house in the Hudson Valley.  I remember stopping by my local Italian food store (DiPietro's, now closed) to stock up on ciliegene to go with basil and tomatoes.  The country house looked across the Hudson Valley to the Shawangunk mountains.  There I learned to appreciate Sophocles innate generosity.

Together with his wife and son, they offered a slow pace, if only for a weekend.  Sophocles continued to invite us to the house and it was always a treat.  In fact, he sent me a set of keys to the house so we could use it if he wasn't using it.  This was typical of him. We went to visit him in Greece and he drove 1.5 hours to Athens to pick us up.  His custom house on the Peloponnese peninsula was designed by his best friend (who also built his own house next door).   The daytime was too hot to go outside, but in the evening light, we would swim in the warm sea and the retire to a nearby restaurant.

Sophocles was first, and foremost, a physicist --- an applied mathematician.  His PhD was on particle physics theory.  He used his formidable mathematical skills to analyze whatever was on his plate.  He would then use matlab to model and simulate the equations.  Somewhere along the line, he started to write down all that he was solving and simulating.  The result was his first book on "Optimum Signal Processing".  When the publisher refused to reprint it, he obtained the copyright and proceeded to update it and then released it for public distribution.

He also wrote his book on DSP, published it, and then once again, the publisher didn't want another printing, so he took the copyright back and publicly distributed it again.  But in the past few years, he turned his attention to Electromagnetics and proceeded to write another book... But this time, he just made it public from the get go.

All of his books follow the pattern of his thinking: First equations, then computer models, then simulation.  I learned this from him.

Sophocles was widely acknowledged as the best teacher in the department.  Maybe college.  He told me he only brought in a single sheet of paper with a few reminders on it and the rest of the lecture would spill out.  I deeply regret I never saw him lecture --- I was told he was energized when at the board.  I did see him give a paper on filter design at the Audio Engineering Society, but that isn't quite the same thing.

He was detail oriented, both in his teaching and in his writing.  Every little nuance was correct.  Most amazingly, he didn't grade on a curve.  No, he changed the subsequent exams to shift the distribution.  He knew how the students would perform on the exam!  I can't imagine how he did that.

Sophocles eschewed the modern university's demands by not applying for grants and not having graduate students.    He loved to teach and did so with incredible perspicacity.

Since leaving New Jersey, I saw Sophocles just a few times.  One forgets that intellectually vital people like him can just vanish.  But they do and the world is that much poorer.

I will miss his insights and warm generosity.   Sophocles' death leaves behind his family and friends.   And thousands of former students.  Literally thousands.

Bill Seiter

In 1970, I applied to exactly one university: The one I could afford (I was putting myself through school) --- The University of California.  After visiting Irvine and San Diego, I made UCSD my first choice.  I didn't want to go to a large campus like Berkeley or UCLA or the ag campuses like Davis or Riverside.  Of course now UCSD is the third largest campus.  But I digress.  I chose Revelle College because I liked the concept of a liberal arts education (even though I am a nerd through and through).  As I recently found out, Revelle was modeled after the University of Chicago.

So, when I arrived at Revelle, I was assigned to a four story single sex dorm (as was the custom of the day).  From my very first day in the university, I knew that the university was an exceptional place.  And I met all kinds of interesting and smart people.  One of them was Bill Seiter.

I don't remember how I fell in with Bill, but I know it was freshman year because I also met his precocious sister Ellen (possibly at a dance?).  I also remember discussing the differences in Calculus (Bill was taking honors Calculus).  After the first two years of requirements, Bill decided to major in Linguistics.  Bill could have done anything, he was incredibly bright.  He chose linguistics because he liked languages.

In the senior year, Bill, myself and Don Eigler (of atom fame) decided to rent a beach bungalow in nearby Del Mar (there is no way an undergraduate could do that now).  Bill and I had the bedrooms, Don had the garage (where, as I recall, he installed a water bed).  The house was two houses from the Del Mar beach.  By senior year, Bill was already taking graduate classes and had been accepted into the graduate school at UCSD for the following year with an NSF Fellowship.  I remember when he was taking a Field Work class.  The "informant" was Navaho and Bill used to come home with  Navaho words to share.

The house in Del Mar was an absolute fun time: Bill and Don were great housemates.  We had people over for dinner all the time (I was really picking up speed on cooking).  I remember once I decided to make a shrimp recipe and rode my bike up to Solana Beach to a fish store.  When I returned, Bill was the one who knew what "devein" meant.  I didn't --- good thing he knew.

Bill was also a really good musician (he may have been a music minor like me, I don't recall).  He played the french horn in high school and could also play  piano.  But Bill was also a member of a recorder trio: I played soprano, Tyde Richards played alto and Bill played tenor.  We were playing a fair amount of renaissance music (I remember Machaut in particular) when we decided to tackle the Hindemith trio.  When we practiced (at home in Del Mar), we would eventually become quite giddy from lack of oxygen.  And then we'd stop and tell jokes and stories.

At the end of senior year, I left for graduate school at Berkeley and Bill and Don rented a different house in Solana Beach for the next year.  I saw Bill at least once more (at a wedding) but I haven't seen him in person for more than 40 years.

After Bill received his PhD, he decided to go to law school.   I believe firmly that Bill was so good that he could have obtained a faculty position in linguistics at a top school.  But his father was a lawyer (in fact a law professor at DePaul in Chicago), his older sister was  a lawyer and so I think that influenced him a good deal.  He went to Boalt (part of Berkeley).  And, as usual, graduated with honors.  He chose to practice trademark law --- I never asked him why.

I should note that it was through Bill that I met the entire Seiter clan. I found out about Bill's sudden death from his sister Ellen.

Bill was very funny (at least I thought so) and I found him constantly amusing.  But underneath it all was an amazing intelligence and scintillating mind.

Norm Hardy

Norm Hardy died at the end of October at the age of 85.  He was a very important mentor to me at a very unstable time of my life.  I'd like put him in perspective as well as remember his achievements.

For me, high school was a horror.  I wasn't exceptionally good and wasn't exceptionally bad and so no one took notice.  It was excruciatingly boring and I was just marking time.  I had no idea what I was going to do in the future except "go to college".  What saved me was Tymshare.

The Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) created an experimental program called the "Research Observers Program".  This was a great idea: The school district would find a student a "research" slot in a company.  My choice was Hewlett-Packard.  I was placed in the Microwave Lab because an engineer there thought it was important to mentor students and because I was intrigued by a particular microwave instrument in the catalog.  But I was way over my head.  But a curious event changed my direction: It was suggested that I learn how to program computers.  HP had a small room (more like a closet) with three teletypes.  The accounts and passwords were written above the teletypes.  And you could connect (via an acoustic modem) to two timesharing services: GE and Tymshare.  GE offered Dartmouth BASIC and that's what I started to learn.  I quickly figured it out.  What next?  Somehow I knew that the machine had an "assembly language" that was closer to the machine.  That's what I wanted to learn.

My nerd buddies Hal Sampson and Bill Parrish were a year ahead of me.  We used to go up to the Stanford AI Lab on Friday nights and explore the system (and play Spacewar).  Bill informed me that Tymshare had a machine room only a half a mile from my house.  Furthermore, there were teletypes in the room next door.  This was the best: I could ride my bicycle to the teletype room and work on my assembly language code to explore the system calls.  I used HP's accounts to do all this work.  Now I have no doubt that I was burning up HP's money at a fast rate.  I was frequently spending my weekends working on my program and that's how I met Norm.

Norm was a distinctive character: he was tall and lanky with a distinctive craggy voice.  He came in on the weekends (driving his white "bathtub" model 356 Porsche) to debug his changes to the operating system.  He was always friendly and offered me advice when I asked.   My mother, meanwhile, wanted me to be employed over the summer.  So she pestered me to ask Norm for a job.  Being rather shy, I was extremely reluctant ... But when I did ask Norm, he said he'd look around.

What Norm found was the same job that other high school students were doing: writing regression tests for Tymshare's top selling product "Super-BASIC".  I handed in my badge to HP and joined in the effort for $1.50 an hour (no benefits).  When the summer was over, I was rehired at $2.10 an hour.  At this point, I was reading  the kernel code and becoming part of the Tymshare crew.  I spent all my spare time thinking about code.   Whenever I had a question, I would head for Norm and he would explain why the code was the way it was.  My favorite example is this one: When a page is created for the first time, the memory should be zeroed.  So, a loop cleared the memory.  But the page clearing routine wasn't as short and simple as expected, so I asked Norm  about it.  He laughed and asked me about the branch instruction.  Such a insightful question: just one instruction gives the whole answer.

Through the good auspices of Norm's wife, Ann (who was the main kernel programmer), I was able to be rehired constantly (mainly to work on the system call manual, which entailed reading the kernel code and writing the text to explain the calls).    I should note that I was reading assembler code constantly and doing the minimal school work to get by.  I did my homework during the lunch hour (with Arnold Wong)  and went to Tymshare immediately after school.  I arrived late for dinner because I was having a most excellent time and I could avoid the chaos of the family dinner.  Evenings were spent finishing homework and reading more code.

Norm always functioned as a kind of factotum for me.  One year, when I came back from college, Norm presented me with a paper about an operating system design.  This design evolved over many years to become an elegant and secure operating system and that's where Norm's passion really belonged.  Norm never really published in the technical literature but he was widely respected as a creator of a novel state-of-the-art operating system.  His blog (Cap Lore) is filled with stories and observations about computing.

But later I found out he had another passion: music.  I once visited him at his house in Portola Valley.  He had installed an enormous pipe organ!  Like Knuth, Norm liked his Bach both loud and very real.  And I had no idea.

At a critical time in my life, Norm appeared and showed me that one could be passionate about computers and make a life out of it (or from it in my case).  At a time when I wasn't sure "how to be", Norm was an exemplar of extreme competence in math and computers.  And he also exhibited a  joy and delight in explaining concepts.

My other recollection is that Norm had a huge collection of stories about various computers.  His first job was at Lawrence Livermore and he had extensive experience with many very fast and very expensive machines.  And he loved to tell tales about them.  And I liked to listen and learn.

Leo Beranek

Leo Beranek died this week at the age of 102.  He was a 20th century icon for anyone interested in acoustics.  He demonstrated an early interest in sound by playing drums in high school and then timpani in the Harvard orchestra.  His PhD advisor was Hunt, who was an early pioneer in acoustics and wrote a book giving a historical overview of acoustics.  After obtaining his PhD, Beranek became an assistant professor at MIT and then wrote his magnum opus "Acoustics" published in 1954.  This book is not to be underestimated even given its age.  It is a masterful exposition of the physics of acoustics.



Beranek left MIT to form Bolt, Beranek and Newman (a.k.a. BB&N).  BB&N started out life as an acoustical consulting firm but due to the "acquisition" of J.C.R. Licklider, they also became a computing company.  BB&N was responsible for a number of very notable achievements in the computing domain including the ARPAnet, the Tenex operating system and graphical computing.  They also were responsible for early research in speech DSP.


I met Beranek in 1993 when I was the general chair of the "Mohonk Audio Workshop".  I came up with the idea of having Beranek give a keynote address since I knew he was getting up there in years.  When I called him to see about his availability, he could only stay for one day since he was consulting.  Keep in mind, he was 78 at the time.  He was very proud to announce that he had been the first chair of the IEEE Audio and Electroacoustics committee (I was the current chair at the time).

When I met him, I was impressed.  Beranek was small, I'd say 5'4" maybe.  But you sensed a physical and intellectual dynamo.  He didn't move like he was 78.  He mentioned he  exercised every morning.  Jim Flanagan was at the meeting and I remember how deferential he was to Beranek.  Beranek was also a nice guy, he was very approachable and was intensely involved in the technical discussions.

Beranek published his last paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America earlier this year.  It was on concert halls.  He was devoted to the science and measurement of halls.  He wanted to know what physical parameters corresponded with the psychoacoustic experience.  He published several books on the topic.



Beranek was an amazing guy when you read about his career.  His critical life point (in my opinion) was when he helped a guy change his flat tire outside of his father's hardware store.  But this was no ordinary guy, this turned out to be the person who wrote the recommendation that got Beranek into the Harvard graduate school.

Leo Beranek's story is one of those quintessential American stories that charts the life of an exceptional mind from Solon OH to Harvard, MIT and beyond.  He lived a full and extraordinarily productive life and I mourn his passing but celebrate his accomplishments.

Remembering Andy Haas

I was preparing the morning tea yesterday when I was called in to ascertain the veracity of a facebook post: Could it really be that my grad school housemate of two years was dead from a sudden cerebral aneurysm?

Unfortunately, it is true.

Andy Haas was one of my "littermates" at Rochester.  He was the most eccentric character of the bunch.  He was tall and kind of lanky, but the most distinctive characteristic was his voice.  He had an unusual speaking style and mannerism.

Andy became my housemate in my third year at Rochester.  When I lived in the apartment with him, I became used to his habits.  For example, more than once, I came home to find him happily reading the bible in latin (Andy was a lapsed catholic).  He had a number of specific musical tastes: The Grateful Dead, Steely Dan and Bach organ works.  He adored a recording I had of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor - preferably played loud.

His diet was fairly simple: Meat.  He had numerous broiled steaks.  In fact, when I eventually moved out, I had to use a wire brush to remove as much of the hard carbon from the broiler pan.  He also liked beer, not wine.  In fact, he met his wife Jo-ann when they went to a party and discovered they both liked to drink beer.  A lot.

One Halloween, Andy arrived clean shaven and dressed up in a suit.  He proclaimed "Have you been saved?!?".  Since he didn't look like that the day before, the effect was striking to all present.

Andy left Rochester before I did and wandered through the academic life eventually settling at SUNY Albany.  I didn't know much about his life there except I knew he had a daughter Katie.  I asked him if it was true he named her after the Steely Dan album and he said that no, she was really named after his grandmother ... but that the Steely Dan connection was a bonus.

But this summer, since I was driving right through Albany, I decided to look him up.  As it turned out, it was most convenient to spend the night.  The guest bedroom was filled with books on ancient history and astronomy.  There were very few computer science books to be seen.

Haas was a raconteur extraordinaire - I believe no one would dispute that one iota.  He had a way of spilling out a story and finding a connection to a delightfully obscure fact.  And he had stories to tell, either personal experience (like the time he hitch-hiked to Alaska over the summer) or an anecdote about a person or concept in Computer Science.

If I was to categorize Haas, I would say he was a formalist.  He was extremely fond of set theory and first-order logic.  He was very careful when reading books on the subject, digesting each and every equation and savoring the symbols.

But I remember Haas from the last time I saw him this summer: We had invited him to visit us in the Berkshires where we were staying at a friend's house.  It was an absolutely glorious day, with low humidity and a view over the Hudson to the 'gunks.  Haas was delighted and we sat on the veranda and discussed Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science all the while viewing the shifting light.

I never saw him again.

Memories of Joe Condon

Although completely unnoticed by the press, Joe Condon died recently.  I want to remember Joe in print: Joe was an important mentor of mine when I was at Bell Labs.  He knew an incredible amount about hardware design... And as well he should, since he was a physicist.  He always looked at design problems through physics.  He came from an illustrious family (his father, E.U. Condon was very important to 20th century physics).  So, Joe's most important lesson to me was that engineering problems can be reduced to physics.  And if you could reason about electrons and their (sometimes) irrational behavior, then you could find the problem in your circuit.

I can't remember all he taught me, but I do remember the time he found a power ground short in a wirewrap board by using a voltmeter and looking at the voltage drops.  I also recall how he helped me to find a catastrophic bug.  Tom Killian and I had invited Yamaha over to Murray Hill to see our multiprocessor synthesizer.  We moved the machine to the conference room --- and it died.  We couldn't figure it out.  I took it back to the lab and it was still failing.  Joe told me to use the Tektronix 2467B (what a 'scope, microchannel plate, 400 MHz, etc).  He told me to turn up the intensity and look.  Sure enough, there were glitches on a signal line.  He then advised me to add a terminator, which I did (the reasoning was that this was due to an impedance mismatch between logic families).  It worked.

When I first met Joe he was a smoker.  His teeth were stained and he had a fierce coffee habit.  In fact, when the first espresso machine arrived in Murray Hill, Joe was instrumental in getting it to work.  The deal was that the management refused to pay for the machine, but agreed to pay for coffee for a year.  So, a small consortium was founded and they arranged to buy a machine (as I recall, Alan Berenbaum asked his local coffee shop for help).  So, when the machine arrived, every coffee drinker was in a powerful hurry to get it up and running.  But, it used "house water".  So, this required plumbing ... and a plumber.  No body was going to wait for the work order.  Joe took charge and together with Tom (another physicist), they just connected it to the water line (soldering with a torch, etc...).  The end of the story is that management realized that the espresso machine was a huge draw (that's how I met many 1122 acoustics labs types) and agreed to pay for coffee.

So, Joe did eventually quit the tobacco habit: he went on vacation to Hilton Head with the express purpose of quitting.  Joe often had a smile on his face and he would always ask me what I was up to.  When I was maintaining the CAD system we would exchange thoughts on what was needed and what was in the infinite future.  When the labs split into Lucent and AT&T Labs, Joe went to AT&T.  I saw him there a few times but I lost track of him over the years.

He was always kind to me (which I appreciated in the aggressive atmosphere of the labs) and he took time to explain any and everything down to the last detail.  Even now, when I am thinking about a circuit, I think: "What would Joe tell me to do?".  The answer, as always, is "think physics!".

John McCarthy

I wanted to write down a few remembrances of JMC: He was colloquially known at SAIL as just "J M C", not John, not Professor McCarthy. He was at the lab daily and often at night -- his office was in the front of the building. When I first started "flirting" with the AI lab during high school, I was afraid he'd toss me to the curb if he would discover that I was just a high school student. But I believe he just didn't care. In fact, the lab machine would allow you to create an account just by logging in.

When I worked for the computer music project, I saw him often. My most salient memory is when he came into my office (I shared with Bill Gosper and Mike Farmwald) to ask about the radical left poster next to my desk. He wanted to know if I believed whatever was on the poster. I didn't, but I liked the sort of visual style. He said, "OK, I just wanted to know" and walked away. (For those who don't know, JMC took a decidedly right wing turn during the 1970s. Given the background of his parents, that's a remarkable trend).

I can't really separate the contributions of JMC and Les Earnest towards the ultra cool working environment of the AI Lab. To this day, I don't know whether it was the fact that I was fresh out of college or whether it was just a cool place that made the AI lab so special. One must acknowledge that JMC approved of the computer music people coming in over night to use the machine. Without this approval, would computer music have progressed so fast? John Chowning and company depended on this largesse.

McCarthy's contributions to computer science are well known and don't bear repeating. But I'd like to mention two of them in particular: The first is timesharing. As I understand it, the reason the PDP-1 could timeshare was that the drum (not disk, drum) had the ability to read and write simultaneously. So, when the current running user was swapped out, the entire memory was written to the disk while the next user was read in! Second, Markoff's obituary in the Times points out that McCarthy invented Garbage Collection of memory. What a concept!

JMC clearly had a potent vision of that was possible with computers: he sponsored research in AI but also sponsored the system research that would propagate from the lab. So, while we remember McCarthy and Lisp, we should also remember his creation of the Stanford AI Lab and all that came forth from that place.

Max Mathews

I am overdue writing about Max. Max' recent demise at the "hands" of Community Acquired Pneumonia leaves Computer Music without its founder. Max (incredibly) conceived of computer generated music in the 1950s --- a time when computing a single sample of sound could take forever. At Bell Labs he rose through the ranks to become the director of the acoustics center --- all the while maintaining his lab in a tiny space off the spine of Building 1.

Max was a unique individual. He had this very distinctive craggy voice and a very bald head. He was extremely enthusiastic and supportive of all efforts with computer generated sound. While at the Labs, I wrote a "Studio Report" with Max on Computer Music at Bell Labs. At that particular point, he had moved into the construction of interfaces and away from synthesis. He was working on the Radio Baton --- as the New York Times obituary pointed out, presaged the Wii and all other gesture based controllers.

I should point out that Max conceived of music synthesis assisted by computer languages in the early 1960s. He started with Music I and eventually it became Music V. One can not underestimate the effect of this concept and implementation. At Stanford, this became Music 10 and was used by the composers when one second of sound required one hour of computation. It was rewritten as cmusic and the lineage of "unit generators" continues to this day.

What made Max so important was that he was decades ahead. He had what I consider to be spectacular forward vision: he could see what technology could do for the arts long before it became even possible. Max encouraged this interaction personally by inviting guests to his lab (both scientists and artists). His early work with Jean-Claude Risset showed how analysis and synthesis of acoustic instruments could be done with computers. His fundamental contributions to the start-up of IRCAM are also not to be ignored.

Even in his "retirement", Max continued to teach and encourage at CCRMA at Stanford. I have no doubt that this leaves a void in the CCRMA environment and in the world of Computer Music.

Ron Surak

I received mail in late February that my friend, Ron Surak, died in late January. Ron was a friend from Rutgers days. We met when somehow he heard that someone over in Engineering was interested in Computer Music. He called me up and he came over to the EE building. I remember our first meeting: He was dressed in a kind of natty way: tweed jacket and he was smoking. He was unapologetic for the cigarette --- but in the end, that's what killed him: he was struck down by a cerebral hemorrhage. What I didn't know is that smokers are much more likely to die of brain aneurysms than non-smokers. I wish he hadn't smoked.

What I liked and appreciated about Ron was his wry sense of humor and also his taste in music. We would agree on the aesthetics of many (but not all) computer music pieces. In my experience, the computer music community is all too eager to accept trashy music as good just because someone used a computer to create it. This may have changed in recent years, but Ron and I often agreed about what was trash and what wasn't.

After Rutgers, Ron retreated to his parents house in Coal County in the very center of Pennsylvania. It wasn't on the freeway path but I visited him twice. It was a small house and was attached to the remnants of his parents' store. He had his grand piano there. It still looked like the store it was many years ago. I can not imagine cleaning that out now.

When Noah was showing signs of musical talent, Ron was my source of valuable advice on how and where to educate him. I made a special trip to visit Ron with Noah so that Noah would have a chance to talk about music with an active composer.

Besides music, Ron liked fly fishing for trout (catch and release mostly). When I visited him last, he offered me a fish from his freezer. I didn't take it.

Ron was 70 years old but I thought he was younger. He had been having issues with macular degeneration but we used to exchange email now and then. He followed Noah's musical education with great interest. In his last email, he promised me a copy of his score for vibraphone and piano as soon as his printer was fixed (so that Noah could see it). Three weeks later, he was dead.

Ron's manuscripts are in the hands of his son and "consort". I believe they will find a good home. They are a lasting legacy of his taste and artistry.

Marshall Leach

I find obituaries fascinating. There are so many interesting people that we never meet. I think it's only fair that I contribute. In this case, I never met the man. Marshall Leach died at age 70 as a full professor at Ga. Tech. He was certainly not retired and had a full teaching schedule. What's notable about Leach is that from all appearances, he was an idiosyncratic type with a great sense of humor. But what I know of him is his academic legacy. My last paper on SPICE modeling of headphones is a direct descendant of his paper on SPICE modeling in Electroacoustics. It was his paper that led me into all of Olson's papers on electroacoustic modeling and simulation. Unlike many, he published sporadically but his papers were always interesting to read. His paper on low noise electronics in Proc. of the IEEE is a clear exposition of the problems and solutions to low noise design. He received four teaching awards from the students. Clearly, he was perfect in his roles as teaching and advisor. His legacy comprises the papers he published and the many students he taught. And that's a life well lived.

Stephen F. Adam

Steve Adam died recently. He was my "mentor" in the HP Microwave Lab when I was but a tender high school student. Palo Alto had this fabulous program called "ROP" (Researchers Observer Program) that would place students in various research labs. I was excited by the HP 8410 Network Analyzer and said so. And so, I ended up at the passive components section of the HP Microwave Lab. It was a small group with Steve Adam and Larry Renihan -- I don't recall anyone else, sorry. Located at 1501 Page Mill Road, I used to ride my bicycle up there after school. I had a orange HP badge that would get me in the building and the guards were constantly amazed.

Unfortunately, enthusiasm is no substitute for calculus or E & M, so I think they didn't know what to do with me. I was pointed to the computer terminals and that's how my computer career begin -- burning up HP's money on timesharing systems. When I was offered a job at Tymshare for $1.50 an hour, that's when I stopped going to HP. But I never lost my interest in microwave measurement. Or sampling.

But what I remember about Steve Adam was that he was interviewed by someone and he said "If you ask a high school student what an engineer does, they think it's the guy who drives the locomotive!". True then. True now. I missed my opportunity to say hello at the last IMS convention I went to in San Francisco. I regret that even more now.

Ed Klima

Ed Klima died recently at the age of 77. He was a linguist extraordinaire and also a very nice guy. When I was an undergraduate, I was infatuated with formal languages and their application. While taking musicianship, it occurred to me that harmony was a set of rules that could be formalized with grammars. Somehow (and I don't remember how), I was sent to Ed Klima. At the time, he was chair of the linguistics department, so I had to make an appointment to see him. He was soft spoken and quiet but interested, and so he set me to work on an independent study. My lasting impression of him is sitting out in the warm La Jolla sun. And my lasting conversation from him is this: "Klima: Do you read French?" (Me: "No."). Klima: "For an intellectual to not read french is a shame". (He wanted me to read his friend Ruvet in the original). (n.b. I can read technical french... now).