Perspective
The child of an educator and a musition turned engingeer, educated at MIT by scientists, I became a curious engineer, drawn less to formal credit than understanding complex systems' operation. Much of my early education came not from coursework alone, but from proximity to people who embodied experimentation, pragmatism, and originality.
“No end of progress can be had when there is no concern for credit.”
"Always a charmeing blend of Boy, Man, and Genius"
I pursued a long arc of research into machine intelligence, learning, and representation. Beginning with an MIT PhD proposal under Dertouzos on compositional problem solvers, I went on to build early graphics hardware, game systems, neural and constraint-based architectures, and multiprocessor visualizations. My work spanned neural networks, evolutionary computing, game-playing agents, music generation, physics simulation, and emotion-inspired intelligence, culminating in extensive studies of neural anatomy and the development of the Factal Workbench, documented in books and papers.
1962 — Early Experimental Biology
Conducted frog dissections and recorded neural impulse responses using a smoke-drum recorder. This work earned first place in a local science fair and marked my first hands-on experience with experimental measurement and signal recording.
1963 — Associative Memory Hardware
Designed and built a 10-input associative memory using fuse-link logic, for a high-school science fair that demonstrated the essence of modern FPGA's. It established my long-term interest in memory, computation, and hardware-level representations of knowledge.
1964–1965 — AVCO Lycoming with "Operation Paperclip" scientists.
Modeled turbine blade surface using bi-cubic splines. Worked amongst several German "paper clip" engineers who settled in my home time. My dad worked there heading their reliability department. This experience introduced me to numerical modeling, spline surfaces, and engineering computation.
1964–1967 Nanosecond Systems
I hired into Nanosecond Systems at the bottom level, on the production line. I worked up graduated to building custom photomultiplier tubes from schematics, a machanical button testter, and more.
Nanosecond Systems was founded by Dr. David L Hill, who worked on the Manhattan Project. He even had a lead role in the movie Openheimer, defending a congressional attack. It was an unexpected reminder of how closely my early technical work intersected with pivotal moments in scientific history.
I order parts for, built, and tested a rack size Scanning and Measuring Projector (SMP). It was used to digitize nuclear cyclotron traces with enough precision and throughput to support high-statistics particle physics. I installed on a 7040 at Stony Brook / Brookhaven National Laboratory, commuting across Long Island Sound, flown by Dr Hill in his Cesna. The system was used in the early 70's in neutrino studies of Neutrino-induced production of short-lived hadronic resonances
1965–1966 MIT Grad courses of interest:
Took Richard Feynman PANIC, a new introductory course authored and lectured by Richard Feynman (himself). Feynman's clarity and depth of instruction had a lasting impact on my understanding of physics. My TA for the course was Martin Deutsch, a Manhattan Project physicist known for his work on positronium.
Jerry Lettvin taught an interesting course, extending his landmark paper "what the frog's eye tells the frog's brain. A notable guest was by Konorsky, father of grandmother cells. Lettivn crucified him, I loved him.
1968–1971 Minsky, and my PhD attempt
PhD Thesis candidate of Mike Dertouzos. Generalized Marvin Minsky's K-lines with bidiractional factal bits, but I wanted more. Quit MIT with an EE degree to work at Dertouzos company, Computek
1969-1974 Computek Corporation Intelligent Terminals
I designed the Computek 100 Iintelligent Terminal supervised by Don Harring. Demonstrated at FJCC 1969 it was the fist terminals with a user programmable local processor, There were abot 2000 Model 100, and its's sussors the 200, delivered to customes like ATT and CIA. Years afterward, I learned these Langley systems were linked to Project SHAMROCK, a top-secret U.S. surveillance program seewping up telephone call records. This was an unintended but instructive lesson in how engineering artifacts can outlive their original intent.
1964-1979 Raytheon
Worked on diagnostics for the PTS-100 system's main memory which uses the Intel 2116 2KB chip. The failure mode involed increased cell leakage when surrounded by nearby active cells raising its temperature -- it was quite a hunt.
Participated in the architecture of an IBM System/1–compatible CPU, constructed and debugged.
1979-1985 Prime Computer
Contributed to the MicroMainframe project, including MMU design for the Motorola 68020 and development of a bitmap graphics engine with supporting microcode.
1985-1979 BBN (DARPA-Funded Work)
Participated in early architecture work on the Butterfly II parallel computer, interacting with researchers including Will Crowther and Phil Carvey. This period deepened my interest in parallelism, distributed control, and system-level design.