Adventures with Danny

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Adventures with Danny
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Shared Experiences (Epochs)

• Computer Graphics on Steroids
• Harvard 3D Display, Evans Sutherland
• The VLSI Revolution
• Caltech, USC/ISI, ARPA,
• MOSIS The ARPA Silicon Broker
• ATOMIC Network _at_ ISI Mosaic multicomputer _at_
  Caltech
• SDI (Star Wars) Adventures
• Eastport Study Group, chaired by Danny
• The early years of Myricom
• Chuck Danny were the senior founders

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MOSIS (MOS Implementation Service)
A die with 4 different projects
A wafer with 18 different die types
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MOSIS in its early days
Why did Danny agree to lead the MOSIS project
initially?
Putting many projects on one die started with
Carver Mead at Caltech, who got student projects
fabricated this way as a favor. Lynn Conway
extended this idea with MultiProject Chip 1979
(MPC79) done by Xerox PARC for multiple
universities. ARPA asked ISI to take over this
service for the ARPA VLSI program because ISI had
the necessary people, computer resources, and
infrastructure. Technical challenges faster
turn, new technologies,
MOSIS Express service between Southern California
and Silicon Valley
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Strategic Defense Initiative
Eastport Study Group -- Our main
conclusion Software technology is developing
against inflexible limits in the complexity and
reliability that can be achieved. The tradeoffs
necessary to make the software task tractable are
in the system architecture. As indicated in the
Fletcher Report, the applique approach of
designing the system first and then writing the
software to control it is the wrong approach for
SDI. System architecture and battle management
must be developed together. One promising class
of system architectures for a strategic defense
system are those that are less dependent on tight
coordination than what is implied by the Fletcher
Report. The advantages of this type of
architecture include robustness, simplicity, and
the ability to infer the performance of a
full-scale deployment by evaluating the
performance of small parts of the system. Did
our efforts make any difference?
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My children also wish to honor Danny
Danny giving my son Russell a flying lesson
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One thing Danny taught me about flying

1. Try to stay in the middle of the air.
2. Do not go near the edges of it.
3. The edges of the air can be recognized by the
   appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees, and
   interplanetary space. ?It is much more difficult
   to fly in the edges.?