User:Thingmaker

I am Bill

I was previously UPCMaker but that name became too restrictive.

I am twenty years old but my body is about to turn 78 this year, 2014. Both my body and mind experienced the following adventures.

I will shamefully present the things I did with the hope of establishing my credentials as strange as they are.

From sixth till the start of ninth grade I acquired a large part of my self-education in various fields of science ranging from hypnosis to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity the most complete in a none mathematical level of electronics.

One month after graduation from high school I joined the army for three years with the intention of going to college on the GI Bill. My last two years were sent repairing Launcher Control equipment for the Nike Ajax system. Near the end of my enlistment I discovered a design flaw that could have caused a premature launch that would have killed at least two crewmen. When Douglas Aircraft heard of this they wanted to talk to me about a job offer when I got out but my Battery Commander would not allow it.

Near the end of my enlistment I applied to IBM for a job as a technician. They first told me it would be a waste of time for me to take their test as my army background never was sufficient. After taking the test they offered me a job in the field or at the Endicott, NY Glendale Lab.

July, 1957 I joined IBM as a technician. Near the end of the year I solved a transistor circuit failure problem that three Associate Engineers could not solve. Then the Guidance Counselor from my high school offered me a full expense paid college education including the expenses for my wife and two baby daughters. When Bob O. Evans, my forth line manager heard of my offer he told me I would do better staying with him. I have recently concluded that Bob Evans had a plan for me or at least an expectation even before we actually met.

I retired from IBM in 1990 as a Senior Engineer. Most of those years I worked in Advanced Technology or similar activities. Except for about seven years as a manager and chief engineer of my department I worked as an electrical engineer.

By the end of my second year with IBM I received my third promotion to the rank of Designer. I was doing Associate Engineering level transistor circuit design.

From August 1959 till August 1961 I designed mostly digital logic circuits for a new DTL family and other digital functions. I was turning out a new circuit about every week. In addition to our DTL family I designed or had involvement with all of IBM’s discrete logic families including their high speed Drift Current Mode family which was the predecessor to the well-known ECL circuits still in use in integrated circuits. At this time I also designed a number of analog circuits.

I taught many graduate level courses that included Solid State Physics and Digital and Analog transistor circuit design.

In 1960 when the IBM High Density 650 Magnetic Drum sense amplifiers were failing I designed a new one using only one transistor that would not fail over the full adjustment range of the heads. The old ones were failing at any adjustment level. The old amplifier required about one hundred transistors. The schematic for the old amplifier was crammed onto four 22” x 34” sheets of paper. My new schematic fit on one 8.5” x 11” sheet with plenty of room to spare. This made Thomas J. Watson Jr., IBM’s President and future CEO very happy. The IBM 650 was his proof that the world needed more than just two computers.

From1963 till 1965 I designed an FSK MODEM family for leased telephone lines. That design resulted in five patents one of which used two diodes to create the sine waves for transmission eliminating the need for a transmit filter. My Diode Filter received my first Outstanding Contribution Award. One of the patents allowed me to drive and receive signals from the phone line with a transformer that was 1/27 the volume and even less the weight of a normal transformer design. I also received an Outstanding Contribution award for that family of MODEMS.

In 1968 I invented the architecture for a 201B type PSK MODEM providing 2400 bits per second over leased phone lines. Challenging the Bell Lab’s design I used a limiter which allowed me to eliminate most of the analog circuits and all the huge filters and analog delay lines. I also added a digital clock recovery that eliminated the last two huge filters. Most of the design occupied one MSI integrated circuit chip.

In 1969 I invented the first Capacitive Keyboard that was later developed for general use and used in the first IBM PC’s. The amplifier I invented allowed me to accurately sense the extremely small changing capacitance of a small metal plate moving near a printed circuit board.

In 1971 I invented the Delta C bar code that allowed the Universal Product Code label to be reduced in area by sixteen to one. I built a simple wand that read the first UPC like label and convinced the Super Market Committee that the code was robust. I was one of three engineers that have firsthand information of the origin of the IBM UPC Proposal (see the Wiki article in the above link under History).

Starting in 1973 I had a career related mostly to satellite telephone communications. Initially I designed a 32Kbps Delta Mod in discrete transistor circuits including Echo Suppressor and Voice Activity Compression.

In early 1975 after two failed attempts from other sources I designed the first pass architecture for Satellite Business Systems (SBS) defining most everything about the system and the Satellite Communications Controller (SCC). The architecture could support all domestic long distance phone service for the nations largest company or several small ones on one transponder of a satellite. I later received an Outstanding Technical Contribution Award for that work.

In late 1976, after an engineer with a PhD failed to design the analog functions to interface six voice ports to phone lines on one card I did the design.

In 1977 when the 24Kbps Delta Modulator needed for voice coding failed to meet phone line quality and it appeared impossible I started a new department with one Associate Engineer with no engineering experience and a technician to help me. We developed a special Programmable Signal Processor system to greatly enhance our development efforts. In six months we designed a new Delta Mod, an improved Echo Suppressor and Voice Activity Detector. Human listening tests proved the Delta Mod was indistinguishable from 64Kbps PCM or a good phone line. The Echo Suppressor was superior to the Bell Lab’s standard and nearly as good as an expensive and complex echo canceller. The Echo Suppressor used with the echo canceler was as good as a line with no echo. The whole speech processing function had six voice ports implemented on one LSI chip. One SCC could have up to sixteen cards providing six long distance phone ports per card or up to ninety-six ports per SCC.

With a logic designer added to my department we designed and built an advanced high speed signal processor. That architecture was later implemented twice in LSI chips.

Using our signal processor I led my department in the investigation of 16Kbps speech coding techniques including Sub Band Speech Coding.

About 1982 my second line manager, who had been the Lab Director of the IBM Yorktown Research Lab came to me to suggest that with my experience with IBM I should be able to qualify to get a PhD. I never tried. I sort of liked achieving what I did with only three official college credits. By this time I had advanced to Senior Engineer.

The end of 1983 I chose to get out of management. At that time the Lab Director was put on notice that his job depended on solving a Bi-Modal Jitter problem on a vital chip function for the Token Ring or IBM Cabling System. He formed a task force of seven engineers with PhD’s from around IBM and me to solve the problem. Bi-Modal Jitter had a name but no one understood what caused it. Working with one other member we identified two circuits that needed to be separated to fix the problem. I derived the theory that explained the cause and that theory prevented choosing a solution that would have soon failed. The Lab Director found a job with another company the day after we solved the problem.

For the rest of my career I did a variety of things mostly consulting on various problems that were declared impossible. I always liked the impossible. Often it didn’t even take longer. I found quite often impossible problems could be solved with extremely simple methods.

In the end I achieved 30 patents plus 15 patent publications in 33 years including 2 (non engineering) years as a technician. This was one patent shy of IBM's Ninth Patent Achievement Level. In 1987 at IBM's Research Triangle Park, NC Lab the average engineer achieved one patent every one hundred years. 24.163.119.91 (talk) 12:51, 31 July 2014 (UTC)24.163.119.91 (talk) 19:46, 6 August 2014 (UTC)24.163.119.91 (talk) 22:48, 6 August 2014 (UTC)