Tragedy strikes the analog world… twice

I’ve come to dread middle age, where ─ despite your attention to diet and exercise ─ life threatening health issues seem par for the course. “I resent getting older,” I told a close friend (15 years ago), “every chest pain is a heart attack; every headache is a stroke; every stomach ache is cancer.” No jest. I’ve become wary of emails, of the EE Times Newsletter, the same way my father would warily peruse the back pages of his local paper, The Asbury Park Press. He could never tell when a friend would show up on the obit pages, but over time the probability increased, and, now watching editorial colleagues and mentors pass on, I experience the same trepidation.

It was with great remorse that I read of the death of Linear Technology Corp’s staff scientist, Jim Williams, and then, Monday, the death of National Semiconductor’s staff scientist, Bob Pease. I picked the news off my Blackberry just after the plane I was on landed in Dallas. “Oh no!” the people around me heard me exclaim.

Both Jim and Bob were ostensibly stroke victims. Both were analog design geniuses with many devoted followers among the engineering community. Both were quirky, charismatic and iconoclastic personalities. These were colorful people, about whom many stories will be told, for years to come.

Jim Williams was suffering from Parkinson’s tremors when I saw him at Paul Rako’s “analog aficionados’” party in February. His boss and long term mentor, Bob Dobkin, told me Jim’s condition didn’t impair his work; it was just when he sat still that the tremors became noticeable. I don’t know whether Jim’s Parkinson ’s disease had any relation to the stroke that killed him.

Bob Pease came to Jim’s memorial service at the Gallo Mountain Winery in Saratoga. But coming down the hill, his Volkswagen Beatle left the road and crashed into a tree. Bill Schweber’s account seemed to suggest that Pease had some sort of stroke himself, and was dead before the car actually crashed.

 The nose cone of a Minuteman Missile

Williams liked to build stuff, clever circuits that others couldn’t quite dream up. On one visit with him in Palo Alto, he showed me something distinctly illegal: a cell phone jammer. The machine, built into a briefcase, would spread radio hash across the dominant cell phone spectrum. It used to irritate him when someone entered a coffee shop, speaking loudly on a phone.  He thought it was rude and inconsiderate of the other coffee shop patrons, and he would turn on the jammer. He’d watch as the talker would suddenly stop, take the phone from his ear, and stare at its display screen. “Why do they always look at the screen?” he laughed, as if he were reviewing a tape from candid camera.

I had visited Jim at his home to take pictures a piece of wall art I had come to think of as “The Tapestry.” That’s certainly what you’d think it was if you saw it from the sidewalk, looking through his living room window. But up close, you’d recognize the Tapestry as an elaborate display of ancient electronics. These were circuit cards from the nose cone of a Minuteman Missile. There were arrays of color coded resistors and capacitors, transistors with gold and silver metal caps, all on green phenolic circuit cards.The pictures (different views of the circuit cards) were published as cover art for EE Times’ Planet Analog magazine supplement.

The colors of the electronic components were so vivid because the electronics had been soaked in liquid Freon. The missile was permanently armed, Williams explained, but the electronics ran so hot, that Freon was required to prevent the machinery from burning itself up. Without the coolant, the system would last about 10 minutes before burning up ─ roughly equivalent of the flight time of the missile to its intended target.

Jim had acquired the nose cone electronics during his student days at MIT, a period I wrote about in the “Mixed Signals” newsletter (a paper version) I once published. That article, too, described some of the goofy circuits Jim used to build. Published in the days before anyone knew how to use the Internet, the Ventura Publishing files are forever lost.  But the tribute article I wrote was appropriately entitled: “The Boy Who Loved Electronics.”

The three-cup brassiere

If Jim Williams seemed “the Boy,” well into his sixties, Bob Pease, bearded, regal was more your stern father figure. As I wrote on the PlanetAnalog website once, Pease took analog circuit design very seriously.** He was concerned that his colleagues “got it right,” and would often send them handwritten notes with barbed comments and suggestions. Dan Sheingold, the long term editor of Analog Devices’ “Analog Dialogue” was among those glad to have received what became known as a “Pease-o-Grams,” and proudly saved it.

Pease, if the truth be told, did not suffer fools very well. Early in his career, Pease had a run-in with the president of the company he worked for (Teledyne Philbrick), and made it absolutely clear how he felt about attempts to micro-manage engineers. Philbrick’s president, Bill Earley, an appointee of the Teledyne corporate parent, may not have known much about the analog engineering role when he publicly remarked (apologies in advance to the women in my audience): “If we let engineers talk to customers, we’ll wind up making three-cup brassieres.” The remark must have enraged Pease, whose successful 4701 voltage-to-frequency and 4702 frequency-to-voltage converters were by-products of interactions with customers.

Guess what Earley received for Christmas? According to the late Frank Goodenough, the Electronic Design magazine analog editor, who worked at Teledyne Philbrick at the time (circa 1975), Pease wheeled it in on a scope cart during an office party. Cameras were snapping away. Under one cup of the bra was the 4701; under the opposite cup was the 4702. And under the middle cup was Bob’s resignation from Teledyne.

The account published by Pease in Electronic Design magazine was less venomous and more politically correct than the version that appeared in the “Mixed Signals” newsletter. The office party was actually a “Golden Camel” awards ceremony, the engineering team’s acknowledgement of management support and/or meddling. It was a “roasting” based on the parable of a desert Arab who makes the mistake of letting his camel put his nose in the tent. In Pease’s account, the artifice that carried his resignation was a camel’s back with three humps.

One other thing that Williams and Pease had in common: They loathed the EDA tool vendors who believed automation could supersede personal analog design knowledge. Pease’s familiar refrain was “why use Spice if it’s going to lie to you?” And Williams, in a luncheon address at the one of the analog conferences I used to organize for “Computer Design” magazine, flashed a picture of a computer terminal. “Is this the way you do your engineering?” Williams asked. A glass of red wine was positioned close to the computer screen, and a rose was draped across the keyboard.  The audience laughed.

Williams and Pease were colorful personalities whose antics will be remembered for a long long time. As I wrote years ago, at the death of Frank Goodenough, with the passing of these people ─ Bob Widlar, Art Fury, now Jim Williams and Bob Pease ─ we enter a new and entirely different emotional era. The engineering world will be painfully dry without them. []

 

**A correction to the original EE Times' article mentioned here (and I'm grateful to Dan Sheingold for looking over my shoulder at this): ADI’s seminar books were re-published by Newnes. These include “The Op Amp Applications Handbook,” by Walt Jung, “The Data Conversion Handbook" by Walt Kester, and "The Linear Circuit Design Handbook" by Hank Zumbahlen. Much of ADI's seminar material is now available online through its website with podcasts, "Circuits from the Lab," and "The interactive Engineer Zone." See http://www.analog.com/en/index.html

Comments

[Edwin]

I only received one fairly mild admonition from Bob over the years we communicated. I was having a problem with drift in a precision voltage regulator, I had mentioned it to Bob off-handedly and he asked to see the schematic. So I sketched up a schematic and e-mailed to him, awhile later, Bob sends me an e-mail telling me I had made some really piss poor resistor value choices in the circuit! What?

I looked at the sketch and realized that I had put the wrong resistor values on the sketch from another circuit version, they weren't the same values as the actual circuit. I sent him a corrected sketch with a sheepish apology for the wrong values. He was right, those values weren't good at all for this one. We decided there was enough of a temperature coefficient miss-match between the two references to be causing the drift, I had to do a little part selection to get better drift tracking.

I will sorely miss him!

[Loring Wirbel]

Beautiful and deserved. Williams' house was a little bit of magic, and your description of The Tapestry nailed it.

[Bruce Baker]

If you want to know how to solve your middle age health problems, send me an email. I have been studying human nutrition for almost 40 years. I have 48 years of engineering experience, a lot of it with analog. I worked for Electronic Associates back in the '60s and continued using analog computers for 14 years. I am 69 and expect to continue working another 40 years. I do not have any health problems. The last time I saw a doctor was 30 years ago.