This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This blog is about technology, as well as some of my personal interests. I am the CEO/CTO of Virtual Photons Electrons. I was the CTO for MEMEX for three years, the President and Chairman of the Board for the MTConnect Institute from May 2010 to January 2014 and prior to that I spent 23 years at Sun Microsystems.
I first went out with Frank going back to the early 1980s with the famous "Fishin Groene's" and always had a great time.
We had a record day today! We left out of Happy Harbor at 5:50am and by 6:48am we had caught our limit! I have never hit our limit THAT quickly!
Below are some pictures and a movie.
Above Matt and Tim on Loosen Up.
Above is Tim catching a big rockfish.
Big garbage can of rockfish.
Above is Tim catching one of his rockfish.
Matt, Tim and I holding our prize rockfish!
Tim won the "gold hook award" by Captain Frank for landing the biggest fish for the day's outing.
Above is is Kathy, who helped out as well and showed us some amazing photos!, with Matt, Tim and me.
Above is Matt, me, Tim, Captain Frank Carver and Captain Bryan Schmitt.
We were also VERY lucky that Captain Bryan Schmitt decided to mate for his buddy Frank. Just last week - per the FLW - Fishing League Worldwide: "LA CROSSE, Wis. – Pro Bryan Schmitt of Deale, Maryland, weighed a five-bass limit totaling 14 pounds, 10 ounces Sunday to win the FLW Tour at the Mississippi River presented by Evinrude.
Schmitt’s four-day total of 20 bass weighing 61 pounds, 6 ounces, was
enough to edge second-place pro Joshua Weaver of Macon, Georgia, and win
the top prize of $125,000 in the four-day event that featured 160 of
the world’s best bass anglers competing in La Crosse."
Huge thanks to Captain Frank, Captain Bryan and Kathy for all their help
Thanks to my father John Kenneth Edstrom who did two tours of duty in Vietnam as an officer in the Air Force. My father is also in the very unique category in that he was awarded TWO BRONZE STARS for the two tours of duty for his countless acts of bravery in his two years in Vietnam. The Bronze Star Medal is a United States Armed Forces military decoration that may be awarded for bravery, acts of merit, or meritorious service.
Thanks to my
cousin Chris Edstrom who has done two tours of duty in Iraq and three in
Afghanistan and who is doing work back to both countries now as a contractor. Thanks to Dr. Harry Foxwell, Brad Kirley, Bruce Adams and Paul Warndorf
for their service to our country.
History of Veterans Day as stated at TimeAndDate.com
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 an armistice between Germany and the Allied nations came into effect. On November 11, 1919, Armistice Day was commemorated for the first time. In
1919, President Wilson proclaimed the day should be "filled with solemn
pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and
with gratitude for the victory". There were plans for parades, public meetings and a brief suspension of business activities at 11am.
In
1926, the United States Congress officially recognized the end of World
War I and declared that the anniversary of the armistice should be
commemorated with prayer and thanksgiving. The Congress also requested
that the president should "issue a proclamation calling upon the
officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government
buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to
observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with
appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples."
An
Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U. S. Code, Sec. 87a) was approved on May 13,
1938, which made November 11 in each year a legal holiday, known as
Armistice Day. This day was originally intended to honor veterans of
World War I. A few years later, World War II required the largest
mobilization of service men in the history of the United States and the
American forces fought in Korea. In 1954, the veterans service
organizations urged Congress to change the word "Armistice" to
"Veterans". Congress approved this change and on June 1, 1954, November
11 became a day to honor all American veterans, where ever and whenever
they had served.
In 1968 the Uniforms Holiday Bill
(Public Law 90-363 (82 Stat. 250)) made an attempt to move Veterans Day
to the fourth Monday of October. The bill took effect in 1971. However,
this caused a lot of confusion as many states disagreed with this
decision and continued to hold Veterans Day activities on November 11.
In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford signed Public Law 94-97 (89 Stat.
479), which stated that Veterans Day would again be observed on November
11 from 1978 onwards. Veterans Day is still observed on November 11.
Harry
Foxwell always would send out a nice email to Sun employees (and I
imagine others). Two years ago, he asked the question: Do you know where your veterans are?
Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery:
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org/visitor_information/tomb_of_the_unknowns.html
National World War II Memorial: http://www.wwiimemorial.com/
Marine Corps Memorial: http://www.nps.gov/archive/gwmp/usmc.htm
US Navy Memorial: http://www.navymemorial.org/
Air Force Memorial: http://www.airforcememorial.org/
Korean War Veterans Memorial: http://www.nps.gov/kowa//index.htm
Vietnam Veterans Memorial: http://www.nps.gov/vive/index.htm
Vietnam Women's Memorial: http://www.visitingdc.com/memorial/vietnam-women%27s-memorial.htm
Iraq Veterans Memorial: http://iraqmemorial.org/
Department of Veterans Affairs: http://www.va.gov/
As Mr. Mercer points out regarding the initial requirements:
"There were five requirements from this experiment. The new language had to:
be “simple, object-oriented and familiar”
be “robust and secure”
be “architecture-neutral and portable”
execute with “high performance”
be “interpreted, threaded and dynamic”"
I often bring up that I think the phrase, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" was a HUGE factor in its success because EVERYONE could understand those four words versus listing the five requirements above.
I do remember seeing slides on what Mr. Mercer speaks about below:
"The first attempts looked at combining C and Mesa,
producing an object-oriented environment in C++, and Gosling even tried
creating a new form of C++ which he called C++ ++ -- which is a bit of a
mouthful, to say the least.
C++ would be cast aside as it required too much memory and
had a tendency to lead to developer errors thanks to its complexity due
largely to developers having to manually manage the system memory."
In my office I have a James Gosling signed t-shirt of the 10th Anniversary of Java. Oh, the good ole days.....
The article in Atlas Obscura titledHow San Francisco Chronicled Its Own Tech Boom, is definitely interesting, especially the photo of the famous April 1st, 1991 prank of having Scott McNealy's office moved to the shark tank at the Steinhardt Aquarium in San Francisco,
This references an Instagram Account worth following -- SFChronicle_Vault
"It's a big deal, particularly for smaller companies. The court voted unanimously to say that patent lawsuits should be tried where the defending company is based, rather than in a court of the plaintiff's choosing.
Legal analysts say this decision could shift a huge number of cases away from “plaintiff-friendly” districts and toward more “neutral” venues where a defending company stands a better chance of fending off a suit.
“From here out,” according to Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, “defendants can still be sued in a district such as E.D. Tex. if they have a regular and established place of business in it, but the decision is likely to shrink what I called in my January preview a ‘jackpot patent litigation sector.’ "
As Mr. Fung points out, the challenge has been that:
"Until the Supreme Court's ruling this week, patent lawsuits could be heard all across the country, giving companies the opportunity to seek out courts where the odds were tilted in their favor.
This led to a kind of clustering, where a handful of federal courts became responsible for deciding a huge number of patent cases. One major example is the Eastern District of Texas, which is notorious both for hearing a lot of patent infringement cases and also for handing accusers big wins. A 2015 study byPricewaterhouseCoopersfound that the court was far more likely to decide in a patent plaintiff's favor than other courts."
The Eastern District of Texas was infamous for its friendliness for patent trolls.
I always gravitate towards these "technology will take all of our jobs and we will need to pay people to exist because robots and AI software bots will have most of the jobs" articles.
"We have yet another study that debunks the widespread notion that robots — and other forms of automation, including “artificial intelligence” — will destroy our jobs and lead to a future of permanently high unemployment. According to the study, that would completely rewrite history, which has shown job creation to be an enduring strength of the U.S. economy.
Thestudy(”False Alarmism: Technological Disruption and the U.S. Labor Market, 1850-2015”) comes from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank focusing on technology. The study’s greatest virtue is to remind us that past changes have wiped out entire job categories without spawning a high-unemployment society."
He brings up a few examples that show panic over the years that all turn out to be unfounded.
These points in the Atkinson and Wu article were particularly interesting:
"Specific occupations usually grow when it is hard to improve
worker productivity. Forty years ago, economist William Baumol described what became
known as “Baumol’s disease,” where some industries that could not raise productivity (or at
least did not raise it as quickly as the rate of economy-wide productivity growth) would
become a larger share of the economy, at least in terms of the percentage share of the
workforce. A case in point is the education industry and teachers. It still takes one teacher
to teach 30 students in elementary school, just as it did 40 years ago. As a result, the total
number of elementary- and secondary-school teachers increased by 1.5 million, or 39
percent, from 1980 to 2015, but as a share of all employment hovered at 3 percent over the
past three decades.25 But technology doesn’t just eliminate jobs; it also creates them, although as noted above,
normally not as many as it eliminates. If we look at some of the occupations of today that
largely didn’t exist 30 years ago (e.g., distance-learning coordinators, green marketers,
informatics nurse specialists, nanosystems engineers, and cytotechnologists), we can see this
dynamic. These occupations emerged because technological innovation made them
possible. There was no need, for example, for informatics nurse specialists when virtually all
medical information was on paper. Likewise, why have a distance-learning coordinator
when broadband communications were largely nonexistent, or a green marketer when clean
tech was a niche product at best? In 2012, there were 466,000 U.S. jobs related to mobile
apps, up from zero in 2007. Indeed, if you examine the fastest-growing U.S. industries over
the last 15 years, certainly some are due to technological innovation. For example, support
activities for oil and gas operations grew by 537 percent, in part to support natural-gas
“fracking,” which was in turn enabled by innovations, much of it with U.S. Department of
Energy origins.26 Many fast-growing industries are, not surprisingly, in the IT industry,
such as Internet publishing, Internet services providers, software, and cellular
communications systems. Others—such as biological products and surgical and medical
instrument manufacturing—are also spurred by innovation, enabling new products to
come to market (but also by globalization, which enables access to larger markets for an
industry that the United States still has competitive advantage in)."
The statement by the authors in the above paper that resonates the most with me is: "Moreover, if we are going to realize the American dream of continuing progress and increasing standards of living, then the last thing we want to do is to constantly stoke people’s unwarranted and unfounded fears that their jobs are on the techno-chopping block."
The question I like to pose to these individuals that "new_insert_new_technology_here" will kill all the jobs is the following: "Imagine that we have Albert Einstein with us at a bar in 1917 and we ask him to predict out 100 years in terms of what type of jobs will be the most sought after? We ask Dr. Einstein to be specific. Do you REALLY think he would be able to list the hot jobs that are around today?" Of course not. It is just as silly to expect today's geniuses such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and the other prognosticators of doom and gloom to be able to do better than Albert Einstein.
At the end of the Samuelson article he references the following articles:
HUGE congratulations to my youngest son Tim for graduating yesterday from James Madison University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science!
Above is Tim before graduation with his favorite NBA player of all time on his cap #2 John Wall of the Washington Wizards. Here is a story of photos that John (Tim's oldest brother took).
Above is Tim's name listed in the 2017 Commencement Guide and below is his framed diploma.
Above is Tim's aunt, mom, grandma, me and grandpa. Below is oldest brother John, good friend Max, Tim's girlfriend Katie and brother Michael. It was 52 degrees and raining, BUT everyone was excited to be there!
Above is the video of Tim receiving his diploma!
Tim waving just after he got his degree.
Above we had a GREAT lunch at Tim and our favorite restaurant in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia - Edelweiss German Restaurant.
Above is Tim with the cake grandma made him.
Tim with grandma and grandpa.
Tim with his godparents - his aunt and Jeff.
Julie and and me with Tim.
Below is Michael, John, Katie, Tim, me and Julie.
Above is John Magnuson - Tim's long time buddy - they lived behind us and knew each other since they were two years old.
Above is Tim and Katie.
Above is John, Tim and Max - doing something :-)
His brothers lifting Tim to victory for his degree!
Below is us cracking up on a comment that grandma made.
Thirty years ago today, May 4th, 1987, was my first day at Sun Microsystems. This is a long post because it is fun to think back over all of the great memories. Note: if you want to share this blog, http://TinyURL.com/DaveSUNW is the URL.
First off, it was far and away the best 23 years of my work life! It was incredible working with the smartest, most creative and without question the most passionate people on planet earth. I started off as a 27 year old and left at age 50. When I
started Julie and I had no kids and when it was all over we had three
sons age 22, 20 and 16. If I started to list all of the great friends I made at Sun it would be literally thousands of entries.
Words can not express how grateful I am for having had the opportunity to have worked at Sun Microsystems for almost 23 years. I have had more fun, learned more than anyone thought possible, and made a ton of lifetime friends. My wife and I have been to 7 Sun Rises (Sun's Club and trip for top achievers) and were able to see parts of the world we never would have seen without Sun. My favorite Sun Rise memory was sitting on the beach at Waikiki and watching my 12 year old son John and 10 year old son Michael swim out 100 yards, get up together and surf all the way in for the first time in their lives. My oldest son, John, became Sun's Campus Ambassador at Virginia Tech and had a blast doing that for Sun.
I have been asked many times over the years (especially during the tough times at Sun):
"Why do you stay at Sun?"
My response has always been the same:
"Scott McNealy and Sun's employees."
When they would ask me to expand, I would tell them about all the
things that were/are so great about Sun - the people, the mission, the
products, the integrity of the company, and it all starts with Scott. Scott will always be a hero to Dave Edstrom.
Sun was founded February 24th, 1982 with Sun standing for Stanford University Network (SUN). Below is the canonical photo of the four Sun founders (all of whom were 27 at the founding of Sun in 1982) with (from left to right) Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla.
In 1986, I was a Systems Engineer (SE) for SDC and technical lead for a HUGE and
extremely challenging opportunity for High Performance Workstations
(HPW) opportunity where Sun Microsystems was the digital workstation and
Masscomp was the analog workstation of choice. At the end of 1986 and
long after the completion of the bid and benchmarks, I started talking
to Sun Microsystems about working there. I started on May 4th, 1987.
Betsy hired me and was a great manager and leader. My mentor was Neil Groundwater who was clearly the smartest person in computers that I had ever met.
In the summer of 1987 we found out we won the HPW business that has
since been worth at least $2 BILLION to Sun Microsystems over the years -
yes that is B as in BILLION.Steve Ferry was THE Sales Rep on this opportunity and to this day is far and away the best Sales Rep I have ever seen/worked with and a great friend to this day.
When
I started for Sun I remember seeing this orange logo (without the word
workstation), when I was out in Mountain View at 2650 Garcia Avenue in
Mountain View (from Wikipedia), on a sign, but the logo to the right
below was logo Sun had up until 1996, and the large Sun logo below both the logos was the
logo from 1996 until Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Vaughn Pratt of Sun designed the famous Sun logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word "sun"; it is an ambigram according to Wikipedia.
Scott McNealy always said to "work hard and play hard!" At Sun, we were known for our April Fools Pranks. In the McLean, VA office we had a few great ones as well. Longtime Sun employee, fellow Sun Prankster, SPARC God, Corvette and biking buddy, and all-around great guy John Meyer has captured these for historical purposes and absolutely worth checking out.
SunCLONE ONE in particular really needs to be checked out as this was "insanely great". Please note Steve Jobs STOLE that phrase from us :-)
Meet SMI's newest subsidiary, SundEnPjMsF,
the brilliant minds behind the SunCLONE ONE:
Neil Pierson,
Java MRI Real-Time Imaging Architect (JMRIA)
John Meyer,
Java Physicist and Quantum Computing Architect (JPQCA);
Dave Edstrom, Chief Genius and Technology Architect (CGTA);
Steve Fritzinger, Java DNA Neurosurgeon Architect (JDNAC)
One of my favorite Sun "foes" :-) over the years was Dr. Dennis Govoni. We had WAY too much fun pulling practical jokes on each other over the years, as well as doing some very important work. Dennis presented at VT's ACM Meeting. When Dennis left Sun, I wrote this blog post because Dennis was one of the best that Sun had ever hired. My all time favorite customer visit was when Bill Joy's office called and asked Dennis, Conrad Geiger and me to visit a company in Chicago. This company claimed to have *invented* a storage device using sub-atomic particles and aspects of quantum mechanics. We all made the trip out there on a very cold winter day. Let's just say, that this "company" clearly did *not* invent anything. Makes for great memories though... Dennis, Conrad and I laughed all the way back to the airport :-)
Above is my all time favorite Sun t-shirt! We often joked about how many t-shirts, polo shirts, jackets, sweaters, and yes - even Sun underwear one time from the storage group, that we would get at Sun. One of my favorite Sun apparel stories was the suggestion in the DC office that we should all bring in our Sun shirts that we no longer wanted and give them to a homeless organization in DC. Everyone thought it was a great idea until someone said, "do we REALLY want EVERY homeless person in DC to be wearing a Sun Microsystems shirt?" Oh yeah, good point. We then talked about chipping in and having "IBM Global Services" t-shirts made up, but did not go that route. We did have many homeless drives, but we decided to keep our older Sun shirts at home :-)
In April 1995 I exercised 4,000 options at $4.45 a share (split adjusted) to purchase a fully loaded 1994 Ford Taurus. Those 4,000 options gave me $17,800 to purchase the car and I took a little money out for some other minor things. Most of the money went for the 1994 Ford Taurus.
Anyway, back to the story. On August 28th, 2000 SUNW was trading for $255.62 a share (adjusted for splits). Sooooo, my 1994 Ford Taurus was worth $1,022,480 (which was 4,000 * $255.62)
I told the story back at a Sun meeting and the funny part of it was once
(years later) I was at a large Sun meeting and this Sun VP gets up
there and tells MY STORY. I raise my hand and say, "I'm the guy. I
STILL OWN that Ford Taurus." The Taurus was still "worth" $36,880 when I gave it away.
An event that was sold out and had a long waiting list was the Sun Microsystems Founder night at the Computer History Museum. I was in town and it was the hottest ticket in town with very limited seating. I knew I could not work the normal Sun channels because everyone at Sun was trying to do that, sooooo, I thought for awhile and came up with a plan that worked. Ask me in person on how :-)
A very interesting trip for me was visiting the old Sun campus after Facebook purchased it from Oracle. I was visiting because my oldest son John now works for Instagram/Facebook.
Below is the Facebook sign that you see from the road. Mark Zuckerberg had the old Sun Microsystems sign turned around so that when all Facebook employees leave the campus they see the old Sun Microsystems sign and are reminded that if they do not continue to execute they will end up like "that technology company." Obviously, I have mixed feelings about that message :-)
The first time I visited the Facebook campus John pointed out that they had forgotten to take down one of the old "Sun Badges must be displayed for entry"
Above is the signature of Scott McNealy on the 10 Year Anniversary of Sun Microsystems book we all received. Scott asked me how to sign it and I said, "how about to the east coast Bill Joy?" Scott laughed and agreed to sign it that way :-)
At VT on November 6th, 2007 Chris Melissinos surpassed anything that I have ever witnessed before.
The
audience was 60 extremely bright Computer Science students who are also
members of the ACM at VT. VT is one of the top Computer Science and
Engineering Schools that is well known for their deep Linux expertise.
The students started showing up early at 7:00pm and Chris spoke until 11:30pm with no breaks until we finally had to leave. The President of the ACM said:
"I have seen countless ACM presentations by every company you can think of and I have never - ever - seen this type of response and this amount of incredible interest."
Above is Mike Geldner finishing up a tremendous presentation at the same conference.
In 2013 John Meyer and Steve Fritzinger gave the opening keynotes and did an AMAZING job!
Processing Zetabytes: The Technologies Enabling Big Data and Analytics
– John Meyer of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group will put in
perspective where computing technologies have been and how they are
adapting to a big data future. Most importantly, John will discuss how
industry is positioning itself for a future where massive data analytics
will be in common use and how it is applying these technologies for
competitive advantage.
Manufacturing with Darwin, Moore, and Metcalfe
– Steve Fritzinger of Network Appliance brings together a unique blend of deep technical
expertise and economics knowledge to address problems for clients. Steve
is the economics commentator for the BBC program Business Daily.
Manufacturing is going through a great deal of change and it won’t be
the strongest that survive, but rather those companies that can adapt,
scale and connect. In this talk, Steve will describe how trends in
software, international trade and education policy will affect
manufacturing in the coming decade.
Getting together with Sun friends over the years is always a true pleasure. Folks such as John Morrell, Joel McClung, Brian Raymor, Brian Wong, Tim Wallace, Sue Walls, Joy Warfield, Harry Foxwell, Jim Fiori, John Gardner, Gary Grimes, Dick Bowman, Mark Connelly, Tom Merical, Bruce Haddon, Marie O'Brien, Anita Weber, Dave Profozich, Garry Jakoby, Dennis McLain, Cynthia Renshaw-Lion, Bob Ebling, Brad Kirley, Faye Melissinos, Wayne Gifford, MaryBeth Cockerham, James Hollingshead, Phil Morris, Paul Krein, Ray Voight, Rey Perez, Mike Dye, Mike Dergurahian, Mike Briggs, Adrian Cockcroft, Hal Stern, the other folks I mentioned in this blog post, as well as countless others that I wish I could list here are lifelong friends that all came out of the great Sun Microsystems.
It is very sad to think of Sun employees you are no long with us. Great individuals such as Brian Carney and Todd Hathaway come to mind immediately.
Below are some photos from the "40 Years of Patterson" blog that I put together of that amazing weekend celebration that I was lucky enough to be invited to!
Above is Dave Patterson and me.
It was great seeing the old Sun gang. To my left is Dr. Bob Sproull a legendary computer scientist who was at Sun for 21 years and next to Bob is the world famous John Gage
- known as the fifth Sun founder - the person who coined the term, "The
Network Is The Computer" and created "Net Day" where John convinced
President Bill Clinton and VP Al Gore to wire classrooms across the
country for Internet access.
Above on the left is Ed Kelly (former Sun Distinguished Engineer
who developed the first SPARC computer, Sun-4 systems architect, MBus
systems architect, SPARC-64), Dr. Bob Gardner in the middle (former Sun employee and father of SPARC - Lead instruction set architect of first SPARC microprocessor and
hardware co-designer of the Sun-4/200 workstation, the first SPARC
system, in the Advanced Development group (SunLab's precussor), defined key
aspects of 64-bit SPARC and co-sponsored SPEC consortium. Manged the I/O
ASIC design group (of 7) for the SPARC-Center-2000 "Dragon"
high-performance server.) and me.
I sat at the table with Ed, Bob and Bob Sproull and we had a great time
reminiscing at the Saturday night Dave Patterson dinner at the Hotel
Shattuck Plaza in Berkeley.
My most proud moment in those 23 years was working with Dr. Dave Patterson on MTConnect. In
March 2006, AMT asked me to come up with a speaker from Sun
Microsystems who also had knowledge of manufacturing to speak at AMT's
Annual Meeting in Lake Las Vegas. I went through three such speakers
over a six-month period as each one either left Sun on their own or had
their position eliminated. After the third speaker left the company, I
was out of candidates. I felt embarrassed for both Sun and myself that I
let AMT down. When I apologized to John Byrd, AMT's President at that
time, for not being able to deliver a Sun speaker, John suggested that I
do the keynote. I was more than happy to do this, but I knew little
about machine tools. John came up with a great suggestion: I could spend
two days at IMTS 2006 with AMT's CTO and VP of Technology, Paul
Warndorf, in preparation for the keynote. It was a brilliant idea and I
jumped at it. Paul took me around to countless exhibitors to learn about
the different technologies and ask questions about them.
After we finished the two days, I met with John and Paul where I made two observations and two suggestions.
My observations:
Manufacturing does not have a manufacturing problem. Manufacturing has a computer science problem. The
manufacturing industry was like the computer industry back in the
mid-1980s. There were too many network protocols and the fight was to
own the winning protocol. Back then it was very expensive and you had to
place a bet on which network protocol was going to win. It could easily
be an additional $700 to enable your PC to be networked in the
enterprise. TCP/IP and ethernet eventually won the network battle. When
this happened the number of computers networked grew by multitudes, as
did the software that would take advantage of the ubiquitous networking.
It was the classic story of a rising tide lifting all ships.
Until
you have an open and royalty-free way for these machine tools to speak
to the rest of the world, nothing else really matters and manufacturing
will just continue to struggle. The technologies are already out
there today with XML, http and TCP/IP. There was no need to reinvent the
wheel. A usable solution could be built on the de facto internet
platform that already existed. Additionally, it was important to avoid
the "country club approach" that had failed in the past in manufacturing
and other industries — the kind where you charge for the protocol and
you charge for each deployment.
The suggestions:
You need an economic wake-up call on why it is important to have an open and royalty-free way for these machine tools to speak to the rest of the world.
You need someone who has led a revolution or two,
since this is what we are really talking about. They asked me who I
suggested. I said the only person I would recommend would be Dr. David
Patterson of the University of California at Berkeley (UCB). Dave
Patterson is a computer pioneer and a true legend in the computer
industry. Dave is one of the most recognizable names in computer
science. I knew Dave because he was the advisor at UCB to Bill Joy. Bill
was a co-founder at Sun and has been called "the Edison of the
internet" by Fortune Magazine. Bill is a legendary programmer and system
visionary. I also knew Dave from working with him when I was chairman
of a futures conference in 2000.
John Byrd asked if I would reach out to Dave Patterson. Luckily, Dave agreed to work on the project provided I come out and brief him and that we work together on both presentations. I was thrilled to work with someone of Dave Patterson's stature. It was like being a high school basketball player and having Michael Jordan say he wants to work closely with you.
Dave and I worked very hard together to create two hour-long keynote speeches. Dave joked that if he knew how much time he was going to put into it, he might not have said yes to me. But our presentations were a huge success. Rick Kline of Gardner Communications came up to me afterwards and said that our presentations were two of the best that he had ever seen in manufacturing. It was great to see that we'd had such an impact.
In 2013, I wrote a boot titled,MTConnect: To Measure Is To Know, answers the question, "how and why a royalty-free and open source standard is revolutionizing the business and technology of manufacturing."
This is the world's first book on MTConnect and open systems. This book is not just about MTConnect, but it is first a book that discusses the many lessons learned in the world of open systems. Dave Edstrom has spent 35 years in the computer industry, where he worked at such companies as Sun Microsytems for over 23 years. Dave helps the reader understand that MTConnect is not an evolution in manufacturing, but it is a revolution and a true game changer. MTConnect is making possible the dreams and desires of generations of manufacturers, machine tool builders and manufacturing equipment providers who all want to see the same goal of different devices having a common connection on the plant floor.
Learn
how and why the lessons of open systems are being applied to
manufacturing and changing the business and technology of manufacturing
with MTConnect. It is available at Amazon in paperback and in Kindle format, at Google Play aka Android as well as on iTunes at Apple.
Above is the front of my book and below is the back cover. I am eternally thankful that both Dave Patterson and Scott McNealy wrote the recommendations on the back cover.
In the spring of 2014, I received an email from Dr. Richard Zurawski, who was referred to me by Dr. Dave Patterson of UCB, to to write a chapter
on MTConnect for the Second Edition Industrial Communication Technology Handbook. Dr.
Zurawski's book is THE book on industrial communications and was an
honor to be asked and an extreme honor to be included in this very
important book.
For everyone else, there are way too many people to thank from fellow employees to customers to partners and most importantly - family and friends.
Sun is just a memory now - much like Burroughs,
DEC, Apollo, Data General, Sperry Univac and countless other computer
companies that either acquired, merged or simply went belly up.....
Thanks to Sun and selling half my SUNW stock, (near the peak - it is better to be lucky then good and having my accountant drive home the point to diversify and my mother-in-law telling me stories of her friends at IBM that watched their stock go in the crapper drove me to sell and being a paranoid guy led me to sell 1/2 - thank god!) the photo above I took on our 25th Anniversary in 2008 when we spent a month in Europe with a 12 day cruise in the middle.
On Thursday the 27th, 2009, we held aSunDC Sunset Party
for former (and some current) Sun Microsystems employees. We were
hoping to get 20 to 30 to show up since it was a Thursday, it was a
prime vacation week and it was simply a get together. This was not Sun
sponsored and Sun did not pay for anything. We were shocked and
thrilled to have over 300 Sun employees (past and some current) show up.
We created a tradition where the third Thursday of July at Coastal Flats in Tysons, VA. It is an annual event that always puts a perpetual smile on my face thinking back on those great years.
This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This is the same name of the blog I had for Sun Microsystems for many years. I am the CEO/CTO for Virtual Photons Electrons, LLC. More info is available at http://VirtualPhotonsElectrons.com I was the CTO for MEMEX for almost three years. More information on MEMEX is at http://MemexOEE.com
