Grundig Satellit 300 whinge

It wasn't that what they were asking was wrong, just a waste of time. As we got later, the waste got bigger. Fortunately, my boss at the time was one of the best I've worked for. He felt his position in life was to hire good people and then run interference for them. ;-)

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Desigining and building one of a kind test equipment.

?-)

As I said, you don't push the envelope. You are basically doing minor variations of the same thing over and over again, which does make the design process rather predictable, and correspomdingly less than interesting.

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Sure. It's mostly turning the handle, but that kind of engineering isn't anything to boast about. Cambridge Instruments was the last place where I worked where we did stuff that pushed the state of the art, and did thngs that our rivals didn't seem to be able to copy.

When I was working at Nijmegen University, I introduced them to surface mount components, emitter-coupled logic and mixed signal connectors, some ten years after I'd done the same thing at Cambridge Instruments, who had been remarkably slow to get into surface mount components - I only did it because they were essential for sub- nanosecond rise-time circuits.

You can now. FPGA's have gotten a lot faster in recent years. 10KH ecl is a bit slow for that kind of work, and when I searched for examples of circuits that you could still buy, Google came up empty. Back in

1995 I published comment in Rev.Sci.Instrum. being rude about a paper that has made a fuss about 10KH being four times fast than TTL, when ECLinPS was four times faster than MC10KH - not their only or most serious short-coming by any means. It's difficult to see why anybody would use 10KH today unless they were seriously fixated on DIP packages.

I'd bought ECL static RAM for the electron beam tester in the UK in

1989-91 and we'd had no trouble getting it to work. The system as a whole took a while to get running but the ECL memory wasn't one of the problem areas. In 1997, in the Netherlands, I found that the only manufacturer who still seemed to be making ECL static RAM - Cypress - wasn't prepared to even start talking about selling it to Nijmegen University, so I didn't waste any time designing it into the new machine.

The design never got far enough forward to have had the possibility of working - after I'd put in roughly a year putting together a detailed design involving several boards, and then a second, rather cheaper detailed design, the customer within the university found out that he was closer to retirement than he'd realised when he wasn't allowed to take on any more graduate students who would have been the people actually using the machine. The design had been finished by then and I'd just started wresting with Orcad's peculiarly horrible new printed circuit package, which - at the time - wouldn't let you do manual routing at all, so I was a bit peeved. The programmer who'd been writing software for the system wasn't best pleased either, and went off and had a baby, which seemed to cheer her up, along with her recently acquired husband

It didn't get far enough to be a failure. I'm pretty sure that it would have worked brilliantly if we'd managed to turn it into hardware. The local practical problems had been sorted out when we up- graded the previous - all-TTL - delay generator with the minimum amount of ECLinPS and a few ECL-to-TTL and TTL-to-ECL converters, so I knew that we could put surface mount components on four layer boards with the gear we had at the university, and the conceptual design was essentially a simplification of the electron-beam tester test timing system, which had been working as intended in the prototype tester (along with the rest of the prototype hardware) for about a year when that project was cancelled.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Idiot. I'm always doing new things and pushing the envelope. I just know what I'm doing, and calibrate the risk.

Because it wouldn't sell, apparently.

Sure sounds like failure to me.

John

Sounds like one of those projects where a CER is written for and only a small portion is applied to the project that is destined to fail! Meanwhile, the rest of that CER goes in peoples pockets to fund their additions to their homes, renovations, new cars, RVs, boats and the list goes on.

Have you ever notice how many of those guys stay employed in big business while doing dead end projects? Gotta have a write off somewhere to hide that cash flow!. :)

Jamie

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Stuff that you claim is new and pushing the envelope, mainly because you don't know all that much.

In the same way that you know the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming isn't to be relied on, and want us to ignore the risk that the global climate could get to be 2C warmer by the end of the century.

You are ignorant and over-confident, which doesn't damage your business as much as it might because you don't know about the bleeding edge stuff that is being written up in the academic literature, and think that it is cutting edge when it percolates down to off-the-shelf products that you can buy from Digikey. Not buying stuff that you can't buy from Digikey (or Farnell) is actually a pretty good strategy, but it does preclude you from claiming to push the envelope.

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Actually, the logic prompted Cambridge Instruments to can the project was not that it wouldn't sell, but that they couldn't rely on selling enough machines within the following eighteen months to give them the cash flow that they needed to cover the costs of getting the machine into production.

The situation was complicated by the fact that the pointy-headed boss who had insisted on the 10psec quantisation in the first place had been demoted from technical director to manager of the electron-beam tester project about half-way through the life of the project, much to his disgust, and he'd proceeded to betray the team by spending his last six months in the job setting up a new company (which still existed a few years ago) based on two of the companies better senior engineers (neither from our team), while failing to sell the electron beam tester.

When he actually resigned, the marketing department - who had hated his guts for years, not without reason, since he was a dishonest (if very intelligent) bastard - had had to go through his list of sales prospects and figure out who was actually likely to buy a machine.

They figured out that they could sell twelve in eighteen months, which wasn't quite enough. There were probably more prospects than had been listed - the pointy-headed boss hadn't been trying all that hard - but the marketing department were in a particularly sceptical mood at the time/

o y r

There was a management failure by the man who ran the science faculty workshop, who had let the project chew up a couple of person-years of work for the benenfit of a potential customer who turned out not to be in a position to use it, but the technology didn't get to a point where it could be said to have failed. I had essentially no contact with the guy who had commissioned the project - he had a long established relationship with the guy who had developed the amazing - if excessively handcrafted - TTL-based pulse generator that he was using at the time, and since I got on fine with our guy I was happy to let him do the talking. Obviously, I shouldn't have been, but I liked the people involved, and went out of my way not to upset them more than I had to. Implicitly telling my friend that he should have been using ECL ten years earlier was not something that I enjoyed doing, but I didn't have any choice about that.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

There's a small-scale effect that nobody in an organization wants to be the first to say the obvious "this ain't going to work." If the issue involves a few people and some kilobucks, it's easy to say. At the thousands-of-people gigabuck level, nobody dares. Some of the meetings parade astounding levels of group delusion; everybody knows what nobody will say.

The big-scale version is exemplified by the 2008 economic crash: nobody wants to be the guy who says the thing that starts the panic. Let somebody else do it.

John

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You are a lunatic. The project was an in-house development for the Nijmegen University Science Faculty, and all the money that was spent was spent on paying peoples salaries - we did buy a couple of mixed- signal connectors and inserts, but only so the guy looking after the technicians could see what I had in mind, and show it to the technicians - which was peanuts.

The people would have been paid the same whatever they were working on.

Perhaps, but this was a university project and a very long way from big business. I did work for ITT for a while - back when it was the epitome of big business - and there wasn't any significant extra cash flowing into any of our pockets, or the people directly above us. This was in the U.K. ITT in the US did waste a lot of money at the time, but most of it seems to have gone into management follies - there was a pulp and paper mill in Canada which soaked up a billion or so, but purely because the trees that it was supposed to turn into pulp and then paper couldn't actually be cut down cheaply enough to make the project work.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I'm sure it makes you feel happy to think that, and that does seem to be what determines your opinions.

In the beginning was the DEMO Project. And the Project was without form. And darkness was upon the staff members thereof. So they spake unto their Division Head, saying, "It is a crock of shit, and it stinks."

And the Division Head spake unto his Department Head, saying, "It is a crock of excrement and none may abide the odor thereof." Now, the Department Head spake unto his Directorate Head, saying, "It is a container of excrement, and is very strong, such that none may abide before it." And it came to pass that the Directorate Head spake unto the Assistant Technical Director, saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer and none may abide by its strength."

" And the assistant Technical Director spake thus unto the Technical Director, saying, "It containeth that which aids growth and it is very strong." And, Lo, the Technical Director spake then unto the Captain, saying, "The powerful new Project will help promote the growth of the Laboratories."

And the Captain looked down upon the Project, and He saw that it was Good!"

Try reading "The Big Short". Most of the people involved were making too much money to want it to stop. Some of them knew that it was unsustainable, but they weren't going to lose money when the bubble burst, and the longer it kept going, the more they'd take away when the bubble finally did burst.

There were certainly guys around who were betting heavily that the bubble would burst - Michael Lewis talked to a few of them, and the book is built around these conversations - but the finance community as a whole were fairly slow to see the writing on the wall, and not all that interested in a message that was going to tell them that they weren't going to be making as much money after the bubble had burst. It's not so much that nobody wants to be the guy that says the thing that starts the panic - hardly anybody is willing to recognise the thought that there is going to be a panic.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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That would be 1981 when I was working for ITT-Creed in Brighton, on the communicating word-processor that was going to replace the TWX/ Telex machine (and eventually did - for a few years - in Germany and Sweden). I was spending most of my time reviewing software and communications protocols. We did point out to marketing the hardware would actually make a handy office computer - it was pretty much exactly equivalent to the IBM PC, but with an 8086 rather than a 8088

- but marketing didn't think that they could sell more than 150 a year in the UK into that market.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen