User talk:YoungGeezer

"Spice a circuit" -- does anybody actually say that?
Just wanted to check on a claim made in the SPICE article.

I doubt the claim that SPICE was so virtually synonymous with circuit simulation that people said "to SPICE a circuit" meaning "to simulate a circuit." The claim is backed up with a citation, and to a U.C. Berkeley newsletter, but ... I'm not sure the author of the cited article is right.

I worked at U.C. Berkeley's Electronic Research Laboratory, in two separate stints, one of them supervised by a Pederson protege, the late Richard Newton. I took an EE course from Pederson. I knew Ellis Cohen personally, and chatted with Tom Quarles occasionally. And yet ... I can't remember anybody there ever saying "spice a circuit". I later joined a circuit simulation startup in Silicon Valley (Shiva Multisystems, later Simucad), which at the time sought to commercialize the (then-somewhat-premature) technology of mixed-mode parallelized circuit simulation, claiming orders of magnitude improvements in simulation throughput compared to SPICE. Every third word was "SPICE", because that's what we were trying to beat. (No, please don't get me started about that experience, my head will explode). However, IIRC, nobody used "SPICE" as a verb there either.

So maybe "SPICE" as a verb meaning "simulate" got started later, in the late 80s or 90s? But when I Google on "spice a circuit" and "spice the circuit" and other variations, I find only ONE likely use. Whereas "simulate the circuit" gets thousands of hits. So maybe, at best, a few people say "spice the circuit" only because Wikipedia says that's what people say?

Then again, I've been out of the picture for a long time, and maybe my memory is poor anyway. What's been your experience? (Reply on my talk page, if you feel the need, I might not stop by here any time soon.) Yakushima (talk) 16:21, 20 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your reply on my talk page. Not a big deal, just annoying (to my ears, anyway) and annoyingly hard to verify. Obviously there are bigger fish to fry on Wikipedia, and I'll go fry some of them now ;-). Yakushima (talk) 08:34, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Deletion of a Woz2 edit in SPICE article
See SPICE article discussion page under 'Blog links, etc'. YoungGeezer (talk) 13:54, 17 July 2009 (UTC)