Everything Else

Since college I've worked mostly in MS shops... either C# or VB.net (heh..)

First job was working on this guy http://www.chemringdetectionsystems.com ... ion/JBPDS/

Lots of great people working there... Only real regret is I didn't get to work on any of the other projects they had in the oven while I was there.

I just got another job with a company that makes large scale sorting machines doing a variety of work... I recently visited one of the installations in the field also. I must say very cool and very large machines Its predominately database driven software as well as interfacing with industrial controls. I may end up designing controller boards for some of their newer designs at some point as well which all is pretty rewarding IMO.

Oh before I forget.... I'm here for anything Sun Microsystems related a friend introdueced me to them in college so I started collecting them and seeing what all I can run on them. Currently I'm having a go at updating Gentoo/Sparc32 to run on my sparcstations http://gh0stwriter.net/getoo/ . If you try it out ... beware the dragons notably you have to use ld.gold rather than ld.bfd otherwise gcc compiles crash... and my livecd uses an older kernel so the toolchain I have is gcc 4.5.3 + binutils 2.20 so I'll get around to building with a newer kernel at some point.

cb88 wrote: ...Currently I'm having a go at updating Gentoo/Sparc32 to run on my sparcstations http://gh0stwriter.net/getoo/ .

Dude, you typoed that link, you meant http://gh0stwriter.net/gentoo/ , sheesh!

For what it's worth I own a sparc too, a Blade 2500, but I've been through a bunch of them at work, starting with an Ultra 60 which I got after they took my Indy2 away (reverse evolution). My sparc runs Solaris 10 though, since, as we say on the Slackware forums, gentoo is an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me."

Getting started (again) as a System Engineer at a local HPC cluster solution & cloud hosting company.

Fellow Emeritus for EMC Corp. Retired at 53 after 26 years. Work mostly on Symmetrix/DMX/VMX the last 5 years. HW design, System Architect, Chip/board designer, 48 patents. Even got my picture in the lobby, heh!

I liked the ASIC design stuff the best. I did the first ASIC for Symmetrix, a Dual port BUS and TAG controller. My favorite design was a 3 ASIC chipset that totally 256 chips on the largest sized system. It was a fault tolerant shared memory controller for 1st gen synch DRAM with chip kill. Although the basic control logic and datapath wasn't that complicated, trying to design chip level systems with a 'pair and spare' architecture with 'totally self checking' check logic, using logic synthesis and a layout tool with logic resynthesis that loved to remove all the redundancy was a lotta fun. I never worked on a chip 'as a team'. I did everything soup to nutz. As long as they threw everyone else on simulation I was happy.

I didn't want to retire late in life with my hearing and vision impaired. I planned on working on music and astronomy in my retirement. At 53, I'm in pretty good shape for that :-)

skywriter wrote: Fellow Emeritus for EMC Corp. Retired at 53 after 26 years. Work mostly on Symmetrix/DMX/VMX the last 5 years. HW design, System Architect, Chip/board designer, 48 patents. Even got my picture in the lobby, heh!

I liked the ASIC design stuff the best. I did the first ASIC for Symmetrix, a Dual port BUS and TAG controller. My favorite design was a 3 ASIC chipset that totally 256 chips on the largest sized system. It was a fault tolerant shared memory controller for 1st gen synch DRAM with chip kill. Although the basic control logic and datapath wasn't that complicated, trying to design chip level systems with a 'pair and spare' architecture with 'totally self checking' check logic, using logic synthesis and a layout tool with logic resynthesis that loved to remove all the redundancy was a lotta fun. I never worked on a chip 'as a team'. I did everything soup to nutz. As long as they threw everyone else on simulation I was happy.

I didn't want to retire late in life with my hearing and vision impaired. I planned on working on music and astronomy in my retirement. At 53, I'm in pretty good shape for that

Very impressive list of accomplishments, and well played on the retirement timing, sir! Hope you enjoy the next 3-5 decades and more in good health and high spirits.

skywriter wrote: Fellow Emeritus for EMC Corp. Retired at 53 after 26 years. Work mostly on Symmetrix/DMX/VMX the last 5 years. HW design, System Architect, Chip/board designer, 48 patents. Even got my picture in the lobby, heh!

I liked the ASIC design stuff the best. I did the first ASIC for Symmetrix, a Dual port BUS and TAG controller. My favorite design was a 3 ASIC chipset that totally 256 chips on the largest sized system. It was a fault tolerant shared memory controller for 1st gen synch DRAM with chip kill. Although the basic control logic and datapath wasn't that complicated, trying to design chip level systems with a 'pair and spare' architecture with 'totally self checking' check logic, using logic synthesis and a layout tool with logic resynthesis that loved to remove all the redundancy was a lotta fun. I never worked on a chip 'as a team'. I did everything soup to nutz. As long as they threw everyone else on simulation I was happy.

I didn't want to retire late in life with my hearing and vision impaired. I planned on working on music and astronomy in my retirement. At 53, I'm in pretty good shape for that

Some heavy duty stuff there Did you worry you might eventually miss working on complex stuff like that... the challenges?

@sgifanatic, you bet I will! :-)

kramlq wrote: Some heavy duty stuff there :-) Did you worry you might eventually miss working on complex stuff like that... the challenges?

So, well.... no. Maybe it's just me, but anything gets old after a while. I went right into computer engieering and manufacturing right out of highschool; got a job at DEC in 79 working on DECsystem-10's and 20's - test and debug in mfg, then engineering with VAX. I worked at DEC for 6 years, then a couple of years or undergraduate work on a Physics degree at WPI, then joined EMC in 88. So I've spent nearly all of my working years working on the largest systems* short of the top500 class size. Made it to the lofty heights of engineering (no management for me) where the only really complicated stuff left is the interdepartmental politics. Which I had no stomach for. So, I'm done with it. Now it's 'me and my family' time :-)

*- Reverse engineering IBM 3090 memory systems for a plug compatible memory system product(s) was fun :-)