Category: Aphorisms

• Whenever you find a problem, fix it

Mad Phil taught me an absolutely fundamental rule for debugging electronic gadgets: when you find something unexpected, it’s either:

• part of the problem you’re trying to solve
• another problem you haven’t discovered yet

In either case, ignoring evidence that something was just a little off or that you didn’t quite understand or that didn’t seem important was a sure recipe for missing the cause of the problem.

That algorithm could trigger a depth-first search that distracts you from the real problem, which was where Mad Phil’s magic came in: he knew where the problem was and simply carved his way through the underbrush toward it.

• If you can’t be smart, be square

Father Vaughn spent many years in IBM’s semiconductor biz, where he realized that the proper shape for a silicon chip was not long and skinny.

His engineers would argue that they could lay out the logic much more easily on a rectangle. While that was true, he knew something they didn’t: high aspect ratio shapes snap much more easily during processing. An optimum layout doesn’t matter when you can’t build the chips.

His aphorism also applies to human behavior: you’re rarely as smart as you think you are. Being square, in the stodgy, conventional, risk-averse sense, may save your bacon.

• Show me an order of magnitude

Father Vaughn, one of the best managers I ever had, evaluated new project proposals on a simple basis: if you couldn’t demonstrate that the result would be ten times better / faster / bigger / smaller than the existing product, then it wasn’t worth starting the project.

He knew that all benefits are overestimated, all problems underestimated, and that if you couldn’t show an overwhelming advantage right from the start, it’d never actually work.

He was right far more often than he was wrong.

• This project is doomed, but you can have fun for the next two years.

That’s how a friend of mine introduced the IBM Digital Video Disk project. She was absolutely right on both counts; before the project went down the toilet, I wrote the killer hard-real-time track-following code that:

1. Laid a one-micron laser beam dead-nuts on a one-micron data track while the one-foot-diameter floppy disk rotated at 3600 rpm with a few hundred microns of eccentricity.
2. Acquired and mapped the aforementioned spiral track’s eccentricity from a cold start, so Step 1 would actually work.

Everything I’ve written after that has been pretty straightforward.

The project was a Skunk Works deal, running well outside the mainline IBM planning hierarchy, and had plenty of capital & expense budget to go around. Unfortunately, the technical foundation was a bit, mmm, flaky; one of the marketeers insisted that some combination of primary light colors would project black on a screen.

It eventually imploded, of course, pretty much on the timeline she expected. For some reason splitting the assets off into an independent company and moving the neutron-star remnant to California made sense to the higher-ups. They offered a few key guys good jobs in sunny CA (the rest of us got token offers that didn’t get any takers), the core group lasted another few years, and then the thing went into a black hole.

Would it surprise you to know the spinoff was called “Disc-O-Vision”? Bear in mind this was before the whole disco music era, but, still … and it’s entirely unrelated to the MCA laser disk of the same name, independently developed somewhat later.

Word had it that the single most valuable asset was a patent on slapping digital data on a disk: that patent yielded a quarter-cent royalty on every pressed CD ever made. I have no way to know whether that story is true, but you can do the math.