01/09/03
Pages 68-79
In 1965 while he was still at ARPA, Taylor had funded project GENIE, a project to permit time-sharing of a relatively inexpensive minicomputer, the SDS 940, made by Scientific Data Systems (whom Xerox bought much later, in 1969). Taylor viewed this project as a means of making computing available at the many places that could not afford an expensive mainframe. SDS was not at all enthusiastic about the project, however. As a consequence, Taylor contracted with the University of California at Berkeley to develop a prototype of GENIE rather than contracting with SDS. Although the prototype proved successful, SDS agreed only reluctantly to manufacture GENIE machines, arguing that nobody would buy them. The market proved them wrong, and Taylor right.
Taylor's extreme disappointment with SDS's vision of computing is at least one reason why he told Pake (in chapter 3) that Xerox had bought the wrong computer company.
In 1968 after GENIE was finished, some people who had worked together on GENIE formed the Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC). BCC envisioned building a large, complex, innovative, multiprocessor commercial computer and raised vast sums of money to carry out the project. Their design was so complicated, however, that they could never get it to work.
The BCC computer is an example of the second system effect: people build successfully a simple and streamlined system, then design a second system with many features not included in the first, and ultimately find that the second system is so complicated they cannot make it work.
When BCC ran out of money, Taylor hired Butler Lampson (who designed operating systems), Chuck Thacker (who designed hardware) and several other first-rate BCC people to work at Xerox PARC.
One problem: these people were committed to time-sharing computers, and viewed Taylor's notion of a display-based user interface as hopelessly incompatible with time-sharing a computer, and thus impractical. Only later did they come around to Taylor’s view.
Note that both Lampson and Thacker were physics majors as undergraduates, not electrical engineering majors. (Computer Engineering was not a separate major at that time.) In the past, many math and physics graduates learned various aspects of electrical and computer engineering and were employed by industry to do electrical and computer engineering. Technically (and legally), they are not engineers because they have not passed the tests necessary to become licensed by the state governments as electrical engineers. (Later, we'll discuss what you must do to become a licensed electrical engineer.)
It is more difficult for math and physics majors to become licensed as electrical engineers than it is for EE and CompE majors, so most do not become licensed. Indeed, many EE and CompE graduates in the past have not bothered to become licensed, either, because people who have no license, regardless of their undergraduate major, have been able to practice electrical engineering in industry under industrial exclusion. Roughly, industrial exclusion means that the business that employs the unlicensed people who practice engineering assumes all legal liability for any errors in engineering practice that they commit.
It is highly illegal to work directly for the public as an engineer without being licensed - there is no one to assume legal liability for your work. In many states, it is illegal even to call yourself an engineer unless you are licensed.
The theory of licensing engineers is that by passing the required examinations, someone demonstrates a certain minimum competence in engineering to the state and, thereby, gives some indication that they can do engineering without being likely to cause harm to the public. In electrical engineering, the common example given for the necessity of being licensed is the design of high voltage power transmission lines. If you are licensed and a power line that you design endangers the public, for example, it is, in theory, not because you were incompetent or did not know what you were doing.
A license obviously cannot guarantee that you will use good judgment in all situations, however, and hence does not remove the possibility of lawsuits. A license just helps eliminate the charge of incompetence. In recent years, many large companies have begun to encourage all of the people who work for them and do engineering work to become licensed. This change in attitude is, perhaps, due to their fear that, in lawsuits, unlicensed people who do engineering will be said to be incompetent or else they would have become licensed. Although that argument is not necessarily, or even typically, true, it is simpler to employ licensed people than to argue the point.
In any case, you, and all engineering graduates today, should plan to become licensed even though, in the past, you might not have bothered. Even though the licensing process is a nuisance even for EE and CompE graduates, you can be grateful that it is much easier for EE graduates than for math or physics graduates.
Note that Chuck Thacker struggled academically, evidently being suspended from Caltech before apparently completing his undergraduate degree at another school. Such a pattern of early academic failure and latter academic success, though not common, is not that unusual, either. You should not necessarily become discouraged about the possibility of successfully completing the requirements for a BS degree in EE or CompE because you do not achieve unqualified academic success at the start. If you think you might like some things about EE or CompE, hang in there for a while. Something that fascinates you in this extremely broad field might turn up.
One more point about Chuck Thacker. In later chapters, how much Thacker learned after he finally received his physics degree, and did not go to graduate school, is quite apparent. Thus, Thacker is a good example of what is meant by life-long learning. Most of what Chuck Thacker knows about engineering and computers, he learned after he left school. So, did he waste the time he spent in school? Hardly. In earning his degree, he evidently learned:
Fundamentals -- math, physics, English, humanities, …, -- studies that make later learning easier because you do not need to start at square 1 when you begin to learn something new. You do not have much time to spend on learning the fundamentals after you leave school as an undergraduate.
How to learn -- by asking questions, reading, talking with others or whatever is necessary.
How to think analytically -- understanding exactly what a problem is (people waste an unbelievably large amount of time solving what turns out to be the wrong problem); break it into smaller problems; find solutions to the smaller problems; combine these solutions to obtain a solution to the larger problem.
Such learning is arguably what a university education is all about. If you have learned these things, you are well prepared for a lifetime of learning. That is what we have in mind when we say that, if all goes well, you will learn far more about electrical engineering or computer engineering after you leave the university than while you were here. That's what Chuck Thacker did.