[MisterTea]

The guy was a serious eccentric who's wild antics are the stuff of legend. Just google for some of his images and you'll get a full sense of how out there this guy was. Bob Pease even corobberated a lot of these so they are more true than legend. Though he apparently was a master at his craft. Pease recounted how Widlar would disappear into mexico following some bohemian crowd for many months, come back to work and design a revolutionary circuit, get paid big bucks and disappear again like a wizard. True genius.

[rauchp]

I remember how in undergrad, my Circuit Theory professor who studied at Boulder and also worked at Ball Brothers would corroborate the myths of Bob Widlar. They were contemporaries, and my professor really emphasized his insane output and work ethic. He recounted how Widlar would routinely disappear in bar crawls for 3-4 days, and then return to ace his exams. While many of Widlar's actions might not have been exemplary, his contributions to modern IC's is still pretty underrated.