I've had an incredible career as an R&D engineer at Sun since 1994. I'd been at Sun before that for about four years working on SPARCstation 1, 1+, 2 and IPC. I came to the Technology Development group run by Jeff Rulifson ( who worked with Douglas C. Englebart on early work that led to the Internet ). Jeff directed a free-thinking environment where I was able to try new things and explore my geeky interests. I joined the group while they were bringing up a Sun SPARC based tablet computer.
One of my first duties was to redesign the power supply to fit in about 2 cubic inches of space. I quickly gained a reputation for creating PCB designs that could fit in very confined spaces.
One of my side projects was wearable computing. I started to mock up prototypes that would use the tablet's CPU board that I could wear on my belt. I found an off-the-shelf head mount display what worked OK but the problem was input. How do you type stuff when you're wearing a computer? I worked on the wearable problem for a couple years. I bought a few single hand input devices but was never satisfied. I eventually came up with an idea for a glove you could wear that would let you type and still handle physical objects as needed. The glove even had mechanical feedback that would click when a key was pressed. Other keyboards required the user to hold it in their hand or had no feedback when a key was actuated. I was granted patent 6,262,355 in 2001 for this design.
After the tablet we moved on to a laptop design. This was Sun's first and only SPARC laptop. It was based on the microSPARC-II processor running at 110MHz. We crammed a 800MB SCSI drive, four PCMCIA slots, 10-baseT networking, 16-bit audio, 24-bit graphics and an external SCSI connector into the box. The screen was a 12" diagonal XGA LCD. I was the PCB designer and it was my task to creatively cram all that stuff into a 10"x9"x1" chassis. It was nice to have a Solaris SPARC box you could take home or on trips. As a development group, we built the laptop with the possibility that it could be a product, but it's main focus was to enable our Nomadic Technology engineers to work on development of new networking protocols such as WAP, VOIP, SSL, Tunneling and SLP, which they did.
We moved on to thin computing next. I was still working on wearing my computer and I had come up with a mock-up that measured about 6"x3"x1.5". I mocked up the entire guts of the computer, including the actual connectors and packages for each chip, glued to an old PB board and wrapped in a plastic project box. Most non-engineers could look at the system and board and think that it was a real computer. My boss borrowed it and I didn't see it again for a couple weeks.
When he returned, we had $250K in funding to build a thin-client Java-on-the-metal computer. There was one catch. The operating prototype had to be done in one month and my boss was going away for a one month honeymoon... to Italy (no phone, no email). My lead went to all the planning meetings and worked on the political stuff. I locked myself in my office and proceeded to build the thing I mocked up a few months earlier. The coolest part was the Java bringup. The Java guys were in a lab in Santa Clara or Sunnyvale and all they had was the IP address of the serial port server that was connected to our board in our lab. The prototype was plugged into our network. The Java guys did a remote bringup of the JavaOS on the system. The cool part was letting the Java guys know over the phone that we indeed saw an image on the screen.
We built about five of these systems and showed them off at Demo96, a show-and-tell conference for companies to wow the press and the world. Soon after, we built about 200 prototypes and showed them off at the Sun pavilion at the Atlanta games. Guests were invited to browse the newfangled world wide web on our thin Java clients.
Next we did a refined version of our thin client using the turboSPARC processor running at 200MHz. We also doubled the memory, moved to a 3.5" drive and added a second SBus slot. We even had Palo Alto Design ( a competitor to Frog Design) design our chassis, complete with shark fin air intake vents. We never made it to product as we were trumped by another Sun group that introduced the Java Stattion 1. That idea flopped like a limp pancake and Sun moved away from the thin Java client model.
In 1998, We began work on a new tablet design. This one was about 6"x5"x1" and resembled the Portable Media Players that are popular today. Our goal was to develop a wireless media platform. The system was to have a microSPARC-IIp processor and 802.11 Wi-Fi. The storage was to be flash memory only, no disk. We had IDEO ( another competitor to Frog design) develop the look and feel. The project ran into various problems. One of which is that we tried to cram ten pounds of fun into a five pound box. The chipset, batteries, keyboard and screen weren't going to fit. The project was unceremoniously canceled.
I briefly went over to an offshoot group at Sun that was developing an "Internet Answering Machine". The device had a microSPARC-IIp processor, two modems, ethernet with four port hub and audio. It was basically an answering machine that you hooked to your phone line. It provided the networking for your small office and used the modems to dail to your ISP as well as answer the phone for voice and FAX. It even had a hard drive to serve as a 4GB NAS. And it was based on JavaOS. Very cool stuff. I was only there briefly to design the electronics and PCB. Once bringup was complete, I went back to my Technology Development projects.
It was about this time that Technology Development pulled in a group that was doing stuff with cars. These guys had taken one of my second generation Java systems and booted it with Solaris. Since the system had an external power supply that ran at 12 volts, they thought this was nifty, threw away the power supply and plugged it directly into the car's electrical system. They hooked wi-fi, Metricom and CDMA modems up to the system. They could now drive anywhere and get a network connection to their car. This is 1999 folks. Nobody was doing that. They promptly got a Saturn EV1 all electric car (or as I called it, a battery on wheels) and migrated the electronics into it. I was soon sucked into their group to develop the next generation of in-car computer for the system.
It's now about 2000 and everyone is getting Linux happy for embedded applications. I choose mostly off-the-shelf components but it needed special packaging to do it right. I worked with our mechanical engineer to design a chassis that could grow in half inch increments as the software developers changed their mind about what went into the system. I filed my second patent for the enclosure #6,359,218.
I started to explore the future of media delivery. I'd worked on computers that were always networked since 1989. Storage capacities were growing at a pace that would exceed the ability for a consumer to fill them up in only a few more years. I realized that very soon, consumers would be able to store all their movies on a single storage device. Cable modem speeds would also be at rates that could deliver HDTV to an IP address at faster than the movie can be watched. I knew that media delivery over networks would make DVDs obsolete. A solution that I came up with is covered in patent #7,016,496. Using a smart card, one could purchase a card and plug it into any media player. The movie would download and the card would facilitate the decryption of the stream. The card could be rented, loaned or sold, unlike many of today's proposed DRM schemes that tie content identity to a specific user or player hardware.
About a year later, I and a co-worker proposed to our CTO to create a group that explored R&D projects that were outside the norm for Sun. We had planned to explore areas of media, consumer devices and stuff that needed stealth. We called it the "Skunks". Our proposal received a green light. However, a few weeks later, Sun started slipping on the stock market. Something was wrong. Something we are still recovering from. Needless to say, we were cancelled. Within a year, many of us were forced to take early retirements in the form of a Reduction In Force.
All in all, I'd had an over the top incredible experience at Sun since 1989. Those were the best twelve years of my life and I have Sun to thank for it. Getting RIFed came with a little resentment for a little while. But once that passed, I never took my eyes off Sun. I even returned after a relaxing sabbatical.
Too be continued.....