Herd instincts?

J

John Fields 18 years ago

In _your_ opinion, and with conclusions reached, by you, without having access to data which your superiors were obviously loathe to share with cannon fodder. But, then, that's always been your problem. That is, you believe yourself to be the ultimate authority on just about everything but, when in the pinch, you've always knuckled under and taken subservient roles because you never had the balls to do it your way, regardless of the risk. And now, in the autumn of your life, it's getting to be too late for you to make the mark you would have liked to.

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bill.sloman 18 years ago

Sure, but I did have access to information which my superiors probably didn't have the time to absorb and certainly didn't have any inclination to acquire.

What would you know about it?

From your point of view, I probably do look like the ultimate authority on anything that isn't a 555. There are other perspectives. As far as knuckling under and taking subservient roles because I've never had the balls to do it my way, regardless of the risk, you haven't got a clue. The electron beam tester I proposed and worked on from 1989 to 1991 at Cambridge Instruments stretched the state of the art to some tune - it used a fast digital timing system (realised in Gigabit Logics GaAs backed up by 100k ECL) to take a number of stroboscopic samples (up to 1024) per timing cycle and a tolerably fast digital signal processing system, (mostly realised in 100k ECL) to up-date up to 1024 digital data points in parallel.

Even the incidental innovations - it introduced Cambridge Instrument's to surface mount components - frightened some of my colleagues.

Despite all the technical risks of the project, what finally wrecked it was the fact that the guy who'd written the daft specification -

10psec timing resolution - that had forced me to go for GaAs in the timing logic - chickened out when it came to selling the machine once we'd got the prototype working, and bailed out to set up a company in a rather different field, leaving us with insufficient real customers to justify the expenditure required to get the machine into production.

Perhaps.

But your opinion isn't exactly influential.

Pencil and paper?

No. The customer kept on changing the specification, as they always do if allowed to get away with it.

What you think you can see hasn't got much to do with reality. The laws of physics haven't changed in the last five years. Some of the components I've worked with have become as obsolete as the 555, but that's the kind of problem I've been dealing with since I started doing electronics back in 1967, and I've gotten pretty skilled at coping with it.

Dream on.

Thompson's kind of skill in analog integrated circuit design is certainly in demand over here - Kevin Aylward had a job offer in Nijmegen not too long ago to do that kind of work - but its not an area where I've had any experience.

John Larkin has his own business, which he promotes with some enthusiasm

No, but if they did want more work, they certainly wouldn't admit it; they'd be much more likely to spend time drawing attention to themselves in the hope that someone would come to them. It gives you a much better bargaining position, and is much easier on the ego.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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