User:Foxkid

Carl Mikkelsen

Information about me

These notes are not in order. There is no implicit timeline. I spend so much time pondering and building self-timed, asynchronous logic, perhaps the order of events matters less than that they don't all happen at once.

I worked for Oasis Semiconductor, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company which produces various mixed signal (analog/digital) chips used in consumer electronics, until Oasis Semiconductor was purchased SigmaTel, Inc. around September 2006. On May 5, 2008, SigmaTel was purchased by Freescale. As of August 1, 2008, my part of FreeScale has been bought by Conexant. Conexant went private with the help of private equity, after which it went bankrupt. Upon emerging, Conexant was private, and owned by a George Soros investment fund. In July 2017, that fund sold Conexant to Synaptics, which is where I am now. Seven (7!) corporate capital structures without changing my chair. All this ended on July 31, 2019, when Synaptics decided I was no longer worthwhile.

I founded Pixel Computer, back in the day, with two product ideas. One was, for the time, super high resolution raster graphics on a CRT, 2304x1728 2-bit greyscale pixels. 288 MHz video, which was hard then, and trivial now. The other was to put 2 Gigabytes of data on a VHS tape. This was before DAT storage, before ExaByte. We tried to find some interest and raise some money, with a working prototype in hand. I missed the point, though, that 2 GB was, at the time, a great deal of data. It was useless as a backup device, because the largest common disk drives to be backed up were 15 Megabytes. Why buy a 2 GB device to back up 15 MB? Right, no one else could see a reason, either. Still, it was a fun idea and got me thinking about data encoding and electromechanical controls.

So Pixel, rather than focus on the data storage device, built and shipped Unix (pre-Linux) systems before Sun Microsystems did. In our waning years, the graphics system gave us something unique that made us special, and provided some life (revenue).

When I landed at MIT having turned 17 and feeling that the world was a scary but comprehendible place, I started hanging out at the MIT AI Lab while building a computer I designed in high school for National Research Corporation. When the first summer came, I started being paid at the AI Lab to develop an interactive editor to work with the new CRT terminals. The lab was moving away from teletypes. A "real-time mode for Teco" was what I called it then. I was not a great programmer, struggled with program structure, devised for myself a concept of "virtual buffers" to add into Teco, suffered the rapid feedback of real users who knew something about software testing and version control, which were lessons I was just starting to learn. The Real-Time Mode did grow some legs, and with the work of others in the Lab a following grew. Richard Stallman replaced all the Teco code, and my attempts at PDP-10 assembly code, with Emacs built on Lisp. My obscure key bindings live on.

So, as for today, I am retired. This is OK.

As a hobby, I hack Stewart Platform machine tools, Barbershop Harmony, Amateur Radio, 3D printing, and hydroponic vegetable indoor gardening. I also make custom Judaica and other projects. Some woodworking projects are shown on Etsy. Like most things, I especially enjoy the challenge of pushing my artistic and process limits to make a new thing someone needs.

My family website is no longer operating.

The name "foxkid" is a variation on my last name, Mikkelsen. When in China in 1982, I wanted to have a chop made with my name. The phonetic spelling of Mikkelsen was too long, but my grandmother had told me that in the native Danish, "mikkel" meant fox, and "sen" means son-of. Should have been "foxkit", though, since foxes have kits, not kids.

Since then, it's been a general DBA name and was the logical choice for my domain name.

I'm back into Amateur Radio, with the call sign K1UZK (which was my father's call before he died). My son is also licensed as KB1NYQ. My mother, K1UZG, can no longer be heard working CW on 80 and 40 from time to time, as she is a SK (Silent Key).