Pictorial History of My Products

Honeywell made The Air Data Computer for the Bowing 757 and 767.  I did the built in test for the interrupt controller. Instead of burring little 'only a test' flags in every piece of code, I pointed the interrupt vector to my own routines so that I could measure the frequency of all interrupts.  At first I was accused of writing a bad test, because stimulating one interrupt showed activity on several other interrupts.  But then they discovered it was a real hardware error.  Fixing the error caused a lot of broken software to suddenly start working.

Honeywell developed Ring Laser Gyros for guidance systems.  They have to be in motion all the time to prevent quantum effects, so you have to shake them and then remove all that noise from the position.  The calculations are very complicated.  I was the first to show that that some calculations could be pre-calculated into a table and linear interpolation used to extract the result.  This was significantly faster and just as accurate, because it did not suffer from underflows.

 CPT made the first WYSIWYG word processors.  The had all the standard typewriter functions and emulated the look of physical paper flow.  They invented their own compilers, linkers and even dynamic loaders.  I worked on nearly every system in this old monster and wrote a virtual memory manager to get around the page size limit.  In the end, CPT decided to resist the trend to general-purpose computing and was left in the dust.

 The MCT 8812 was the largest integrated circuit handler the company ever built.  It is as tall as a person and almost totally automated.  It had 12 processors to control all the robotics as well as the temperature regulation and the UI.  We had to develop our own network to allow them to talk to each other.  We used a bottom-up programming technique to debug all the electronics and mechanics, but kept all the test hooks in the software and provided diagnostics in the UI.  This provided instant solutions to several very messy problems.

This CDC disk controller interpreted the high-level disk command into low-level commands that the drive understood.  Though we use the state of the art debuggers, debugging at the byte level is very slow.  We built in a diagnostic interface that supported rich diagnostic queries.  For example, it could display all the system data structures in English annotated tables.  This dramatically reduced the development time.

The WaveCrest Timing Measurement Unit is essentially a big stopwatch, but its accuracy is  in picoseconds !  There was no more accurate device we could use to test and calibrate it. We fed it random noise and then use Monte Carlo analysis to identify uneven randomness, which resulted from calculation errors.  I found an error in the circuit board layout made some paths longer than the complementary side. I also used an interpreter on a table-driven UI that was very easy to maintain.  

Tetra Pak makes huge machines for filling milk cartons a very high speeds.  But as they evolved from relay logic to microprocessor control, their UI had not evolved.  I did an ergonomic analysis to show them that breaking from the traditional UI could give them better control and much better monitoring.

 This was a medical device for making sure a baby is still breathing.  I did the risk analysis and the Quality Assurance on it.  The previous analysis listed the failure of each component as a risk.  I was able to show that ultra loud alarms and leads that could strangle a baby needed to be part of the analysis.

Data Key made digital security devices and the predicesor to the memory stick.  The products were aimed at a large market, so they needed the drivers for the devices to be easy to install and easy to use.  I used the new ergonomic standards being developed by the Human Factors Society Human-Computer Interface committee, which I sat on, to do the analysis.

I suppose the Sidewinder firewall looks like any other rack-mounted server, but it is a military strength firewall with extreme compartmentalization.  Each system runs in its own "sandbox" an has only pre-authorized access to other systems.  It is the only firewall I know of that has never been hacked.

Between corporate ventures, I did a project of my own, from start to finish.  It is a talking dart board for the blind. I gut an exiting dart board and add my own electronics, speakers and front panel.  It has a very easy menu system that is designed to be used by people who can't see.  The Voice chip has hundreds of recordings, so the board can describe every action and score. I used two AVR microprocessors and an RC-Systems speech chip.  I got the circuit board layout right on the third try.  The Audio Dart Master is available at: http://audiodartmaster.com