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by bayouborne 581 days ago
“I am going to a commune in Vermont and will [In my mind I've always heard a 'henceforth' inserted here for some reason] deal with no unit of time shorter than a season”

One of my favorite quotes in the book - when an overworked engineer resigns from his job at DG. The engineer, coming off a death march, leaves behind a note on his terminal as his letter of resignation. The incident occurs during a period when the microcode and logic were glitching at the nanosecond level.

1 comments

He didn't join a commune though, still working [1].

[1] http://www.polybus.com/hdlmaker/Resume.html

His resume doesn't really indicate he didn't join a commune. Leaving Data General in 1979 and joining ComputerVision in 1979 wouldn't preclude joining a commune for a season. However, a letter to the editor in 1981 [1] provides evidence that he left Data General specifically to work for ComputerVision, with both events happening in Spring.

[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/02/18/man-and-supermin...

There is a paper on the ComputerVision design in an AMD handbook from 1986 [1] (big PDF).

[1] http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/compone...

Wow, I love that web page / resume and that era of HTML authorship. Brings back memories.