I am copying this response to Ed and my dad.
From: Bob & Cecelia <n3lym@amsat.org>
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 10:25:59 -0400
Is this the Clark Baker who worked at Project Delta?
Yup.
If that's you, please
respond with what you've been up to and your current vital stats.
I started working with Project DELTA from its beginnings in 1970 when
I moved back to Wilmington, Delaware from New York. In the fall of
1970 (my Junior year at Brandywine High School), I used the computer
system and eventually connected with Teresa (sp?) Green who was the
real creator (along with a lot of support from Dave Robinson and Dan
Grim (who is now at the computer center at U. of D.)). Funding came
from the Delaware Schools Auxiliary Association (DSAA) and individual
schools.
While each school had several representatives, I remember George
Robbins and Alan Hockberg (who I ran into in Cambridge Massachusetts
in the '80s) and I as being the most involved.
The first hardware was housed in the Data Information Center for
Education (DICE) and we later moved to the Electrical Engineering
department at U. of D.
We started out with a DEC PDP 8S which had no disk and could timeshare
4 small BASIC users. Later we got a PDP 11 with an RK 05 removable
disk drive and a internal hard disk drive (perhaps 20 mbytes) and then
a PDP 11/70 with 2 200 mbyte removable multi-platter disks and
DECtape. We ran an early version of RSTS and later RSTS/E.
I graduated high school in 1972 and went to MIT. I returned and
worked summers at Project DELTA until around 1975. I graduated with a
S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1976 and
entered graduate school at MIT. I graduated with the S.M. and E.E. (a
degree between a Masters nd a Ph.D.) in Electrical Engineering (really
Computer Science) in 1980 and continued to stay at MIT in the research
staff for another year.
My graduate work at MIT eventually focused on computer aided design
tools for helping people design and verify VLSI chip designs. This
work started in 1978 and by 1981 I had run over 100 designs through my
tools. A friend invited me to join a startup company (Symbolics,
Inc.) which was going to commercialize Lisp and the MIT Lisp Machine
(a single-user machine very good at running Lisp, complete with a
bit-mapped high-resolution display, a mouse, and ethernet). I started
there in 1981 as employee 24 and watched the company grow to over 1000
employees, $120 million in sales, and go through 2 public stock
offerings. The stock went from $6 per share to over $15 and, when C,
Unix, and SUN took over and we were unable to change and adapt, the
stock crashed and eventually became worthless and Symbolics entered
Chapter 11. I mainly worked with the hardware designers helping them
design and verify PC board (TTL) designs and later VLSI chip
(i.e. 40-bit Lisp microprocessor) designs.
In 1990 I went to Kendall Square Research a startup which designed
supercomputers. Our 64-bit computers were sold in groups of 32 and
the largest we sold had 4-5 groups. We designed all the chips
ourselves. I worked in the CAD group. This company also had 2 public
offerings and then ran into trouble and also entered Chapter 11.
In 1994 I joined a startup in Acton, now called Fujitsu Nexion. We
design complex communications equipment (an ATM switch which can make
various quality of service guarantees on a per-connection basis). I
work in the hardware group helping designers and doing design
verification.
In my free time, I square dance and call square dances. I met my
wife, Miriam, at square dancing at MIT in 1974 and we were married in
1980. We have two girls, Eva in 9th grade and Laura in 3rd grade. We
are a Macintosh family and, while both girls have used the Macs from
an early age, none have showed any interest in programming them. Of
course, my interest in computers didn't start until 9th grade when I
wrote my first BASIC program.
None of my success would have happened if Teresa Green hadn't pushed
hard to 1) get computers in the Delaware high schools (via timesharing
on a central computer), and 2) said that they would be run by the
students (a radical view both then and now).
I'm
trying to update the Delta alumni list. I'm also hoping to put together
a Project Delta alumni web page including various pictures and writings
as well as a PDP-11 emulator running RSTS/E. If you still have any
Delta memorabilia, pictures, or backup tapes, please let me know!
I don't think I have anything to contribute here. Teresa gave me an
engraved beer mug which I still have.
We're having a little trouble trying to locate Ed Baker. Can you help
with this or any other DELTOIDS?
Ed Baker <ed@kronos.com>
Regards,
Bob Mader [1,50]
--
Clark M. Baker
Fujitsu Nexion, Inc.; 289 Great Road; Acton, MA 01720-4739
(978) 266-3445
Internet: cmb@nexen.com