The CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) organization to which i belong, is responsible for the design and development of digital video solutions for cable and telco providers across the world. My position as well as the company ownership (General Instrument, Motorola, Google, and ARRIS) has changed and grown over this past ten+ years. At this time, I have a dual technical and managerial role with ARRIS. I am fortunate to be the manager for a team of system engineers. Our system engineering team concentrates on the requirements and deployment issues associated with DTA, OCAP and RDK based set-top platforms. My technical role is to act as the systems engineering technical lead for the ARRIS/Shaw Communication DreamGallery solution. This solution is based on ARRIS digital cable set-tops running an embedded browser. The Shaw developed, DreamGallery browser-based application provides a full set of subscriber feature such as interactive guide, VOD, IPPV, search, and DVR. This solution is one of the largest deployments of a browser based user interface on a digital set-top in the world.

Spyglass was responsible for the development of one of the first popular web browsers ever, Spyglass Mosaic. But after taking a beating in the browser wars of the 90's, the company began providing services and software development for a wide range of industries. Continuing with my experience in cable TV, I joined Spyglass as part of a 3rd party application development support team. Spyglass was hired by General Instrument to create an application development and deployment infrastructure for digital cable set-tops. The concept pre-dated what Apple did for the mobile phone application environment. The desire was to create a wide selection of applications that could be developed and deployed by cable service providers. We created an SDK, compliance testing labs, added features to GI set-tops, and worked with developers from companies such as TVGuide, Liberate, Wink, OpenTV, SeaChange, and Microsoft. My position was as system engineer for the development and analysis of the end-to-end system solution. This includes full analysis of cable system server integration, management of limited bandwidth and resources, as well as embedded programming recommendations. The project was successful from a technical perspective. However, the business model did not take off as the cable providers were reluctant to deploy applications. This was due to a variety of reasons, but only a select few applications, that were directly sponsored by the cable providers, were actually deployed. GI and Motorola were ahead of the curve technically, but could not initiate the revolutionary change to the industry and popular culture that the concept deserved. The Spyglass contract was purchased by OpenTV and then absorbed into General Instruments engineering. I became a General Instrument system engineer as the result of this purchase.

At AM Communications i had the opportunity to go beyond being an independent contributor. I joined Philip Faustine's organization as the manager of a team of developers. This proved to be a learning experience for modern software development processes. Our technical lead, Roger Jack provided the architecture and development strategy for the Omni2000 cable status monitoring tool. This tool provided real time monitoring, alerts, and root cause analysis for TV cable infrastructure. In addition, I gained experience with the management of off-shore resources. After a month long trip to India to train bright, young software engineers, we integrated a remote group of 20+ into our team. We were successful in deploying the tool. Unfortunately, my other experience was to layoff significant contributors as the company was bought and changed direction.

Audio development does not seam like a cut throat business, but Crystal Semiconductor was making a move to dominate the market with their audio silicon solution. To provide device driver support, we (Dave Doney, Doug Crawford, and myself) created a branch office for the Austin based company in King of Prussia PA. This was a great opportunity to prove we each could work independently and deliver results. In this environment, our group developed one of my favorite projects ever.. Virtual 3D audio. Using open research from MIT, we developed audio drivers that virtualized a pair of rear speakers with only two computer speakers. Mathematic convolution meets Hendrix's Hey Joe! We demoed this at customer shows and had heads spinning to see the other set of speakers behind them, but there were none. All things change and Crystal took our software work, embedded it into silicon, and closed up the branch.

This was a brief test at being a software developer contractor. It was here that i was introduced to the TV set top box embedded system. I wrote the audio device driver for a new General Instrument set-top platform. This was a very quick and successful development effort. However, the project was cancelled and so was my contract. I was fortunate to be asked to stay as an employee, but I decided to take a risk with a new adventure at Crystal Semiconductor.

ICS created audio chips for PCs. I joined Doug Frazier and Dave Doney (from Univac days) and Doug Crawford in the world of audio signal processing and device driver development. It was my job to write the device drivers for Windows and OS/2. Another great place to work and learn an appreciation for IC design and where software meets the hardware.

When you need a job, you need a job. I joined L&N near the end of its prestigious run as a process control equipment developer and manufacturer. The manufacturing floor was largely quite by the time I joined. We worked on PC based, MicroMax. My job was to write C based application that interpreted graphic ladder logic. The environment of a place slowly loosing its edge is difficult. But I was fortunate to meet and work with great folks like Chris Keegan, Jim Gwynn, and Weipo Chessen.

I was hired late into the Commodore experience. The C64 was already a huge success. The Amiga was released and proven to be rock solid and the best graphics machine available. But the IBM PC and clones were selling like hot cakes. Commodore attempted to join this clone war. It was marginally successful. My initial task was to write the BIOS for the Commodore PC. I had two great projects here, while both completely functional, neither saw the light of day. We created the first real mini laptop PC. I know you may be suspect of this statement. But our team created a 4x7 inch PC with a fold up monochrome screen. This was pre-Windows 3.1. It was text based PC compatible OS, actually DR-DOS. Two side-inserted PCMCIA cards for memory. Serial and Parallel ports on the back. I still have the prototype. I did the BIOS. The second was the first CD based game system. Yes, again you may laugh, but we created an Amiga based CD game system years befor the PlayStation. A full set of Amiga games were available on CD. It had game controllers, joystick, and keyboard as input, and component video outputs. The system booted into game system mode waiting for a game or audio CD to be placed inside the flip up lid. With a special key sequence, it became a fully functioning Amiga. It was my job to write the input device drivers. This would auto-detect a joystick, game controller, or keyboard. The device never made it into production. What a great, creative environment. For quite a while we had the Silicon Valley mode of operation. Free food for anyone working late, rooms with black lights, and very flat management. However, the company finances went south (to the Bahamas I guess)... You get a clue that the company is not doing well when the lights don't get replaced and no one cuts the grass. Many of us were let go, but the Commodore legacy lives on!

This was my first real job out of college. I was fortunate to join a group of steely eyed computer men. These are guys that created the first computers ever and brought them into practical business use. Engineers wore ties to work, every day. We created entire mainframes from scratch. No such things as SoCs in these days.. Individual 20 inch CPU, memory boards, and I/O processor boards all connected with a high speed proprietary backplane/bus. Our team developed the hardware and software for the I/O processor board. This I/O board supported all the "Univac 2200" mainframe I/O requests between terminals, tape drives, disk platters, and internal SCSI disks. We created in-house, every bit of software in Z80 assembly. We created our own task switching operating system, interrupt handling, debug/trace logs, and tasks associated to what would now be called device drivers. My assignment was to support the interfacing and error recovery for all actions of the I/O board to the main system bus. Beyond the outstanding computer engineering experiences, I was lucky to be mentored by great engineers, Bob Levin and Steve Liebowitz. Thank you gentlemen. The days of mainframes (and midframes) was coming to a close. Burroughs bought Sperry and created Unisys.