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PolarEngineering® - Work HistoryTom Bennett's Work History In 1974 I learned my first programming language, BASIC, while at a NSF summer science training program at Florida Atlantic Universtion (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida. There I was also exposed to Fortran and APL. That same year I built a computer around Intel's 8008 microprocessor. My largest application was a two player chase game played on a three inch Heath Kit oscilloscope. It used every byte of the computer's 0.000244MB memory, a pair of 8 bit D-to-A converters built from hand picked resistors and two crude homemade joysticks. (Historical footnote: This was the same year that Bill Gates formed Microsoft to market his MITS Altair Basic interpreter.) In my first year (1975) at Stanford University, I learned Algol/W and wrote a "cellular router" for a graduate student, Bob Rau. Bill vanCleemput, an associate professor in the school of Electrical Engineering, oversaw the research that year. From the summer of 1976 until I graduated with a BSEE in 1979, I worked part-time at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) on a Computer Aided Design system for designing printed circuit boards at SLAC. During that time I wrote a program for graphically editing component placement and wiring on a circuit board. I also wrote utilities for manipulating and viewing the circuit description database. Development tools on SLAC's IBM 370 mainframe included a line editor called Wilbur, a language called Mortran and core-dumps. In the fall of 1979, Bill vanCleemput, Kim Stevens, David Coehlo and I founded Silicon Valley Research, Inc. (SVR) to develop and market CAD tools for designing gate-array integrated circuits. From 1979 to 1983 I worked on placement and routing editors, graphics libraries, and programming tools. Most of my programming during this time was in Mortran and Pascal. All the software produced at SVR ran on Prime, Apollo, VAX and IBM computers. Writing portable software was a major concern. In the summer of 1983 I left California for Alaska. My wife grew up in Anchorage and she felt that Alaska had some distinct advantages over California. That winter I purchased a Radio Shack Model 100. It came with three integrated programs: TELCOM - a terminal emulator, TEXT - a simple page editor, and BASIC - a simple BASIC interpreter. What intrigued me most about the Model 100 was its vacant ROM slot in the back. Unfortunately, the ROM slot's pinout did not match the JEDEC EPROM standard. I built a cable to rearrange the pinout to match that of a 27C64 EPROM. The pinout problem looked like a hopeless obstacle until Craig Milroy, a product designer, suggested using a flexible circuit board to wrap the EPROM and reroute its pins to match that of the ROM socket. By the summer of 1984 I was making an 8080 assembler/debugger on EPROMs and selling them in Portable 100 magazine. Interest in an assembler was high and sales were good. Since, the Model 100 didn't have a disk drive, it used part of its 32K of RAM for the file system and a cassette tape recorder for backup. Having an assembler/debugger in ROM allowed power users to design machine code to augment their BASIC programs. But, many callers wondered if Polar Engineering could put their BASIC program into a ROM. Put BASIC into a ROM? Was it possible? The Model 100 was built around a 8080 with 32K of ROM and 32K of RAM. The vacant ROM slot in the back was bank selected against the 32K ROM which held the BASIC interpreter. That meant that the BASIC program code in the ROM would have to be temporarily moved to RAM so that the BASIC interpreter in the other ROM could run it. Enough callers seemed to want to put their BASIC programs in a ROM that I decided to try to solve the problem. In the spring of 1985 (after two thousand hours of hard work) Polar Engineering began marketing its Guardian ROM service. Each customer provided Polar Engineering with a Model 100 BASIC program on cassette tape. That BASIC program was sent through a series of transformations on an IBM PC/AT which produced a ROM image. The order was filled by burning the requested number of EPROMs and assembling them with the flexible circuit board. Sales were very good. Customers like the Associated Press and McDonalds bought lots of EPROMs. I spent many hours each day on the phone, answering questions, helping customers and filling orders. So much time that I decided it was getting out of hand. In the fall of 1986 I licensed the entire BASIC on a ROM business to Traveling Software (now call LapLink.com), the biggest supplier of Model 100 software and also Polar Engineering's biggest customer. During the summer of 1987 I received my first (and last) Macintosh, a MacII. That fall I developed the Macintosh half of LapLink Mac for Traveling Software. For the next two years I learned how to write GUI applications in Pascal for the Mac and developed LapLink Mac III which supported file transfer to other Macs or PCs via Modem, AppleTalk and direct serial link. Traveling Software brought LapLink Mac III to market in January of 1990. Starting in late 1990 I began to learn C++. I found the process of learning C++ both enlightening and arduous. Never had I encountered a language with so much potential and so much detail. I loved it. In the summer of 1991 I began to write a BASIC interpreter in C++. After two years of development Polar Engineering and Consulting began marketing WinWrap® Basic for Windows.In the fall of 1994 Sax Software began marketing the Sax Basic Engine, a Visual Basic extension (VBX) which adds Visual Basic compatible scripting to VB applications. Polar Engineering and Consulting still services the scripting needs of C/C++ application designers. In November of 1995, Sax Software started shipping OCX versions of the Sax Basic Engine for Visual Basic version 4. Both the 16 bit and 32 bit VB compilers are supported. In October of 1996, Bill vanCleemput asked me to help on a technical investigation for Texas Instruments' lawsuit against Samsung. It was an exciting experience and a lot of work. Our investigation into the operation of IC manufacturing tools provided technical support to the testifying expert witnesses in the case. Seven weeks into the investigation TI and Samsung settled the dispute. Each side ultimately agreed to share their intellectual property portfolios. However, since TI had substantially more IP, Samsung agreed to pay TI an estimated $1 Billion over the 10 year life of the agreement. My first exposure to technical investigation was over, but not for long... In June of 1997 Louis Touton of Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue (the same law firm that did the TI v Samsung cases) asked me to write a program to provide a court-room illustration of the algorithm describe in a technical paper. The technical paper was part of a prior art defense in a patent litigation case. The program was written in VB. It showed flow throw flowcharts, activity on hardware buses and actual displayed text. In April of 1998 I began working on TI's lawsuit against Hyundai. The investigation continued on and off until the trial in March of 1999. At the trial I testified as an expert witness with regard to the testing and data gathering that I did during the investigation. My testimony provided the eight person jury with an clear picture of how data is gathered in an Patent infringement case. Based on this data the two expert witness for TI, Costa Spanos and Raphel Reif, provided their infringement analysis for the IC manufacturing tools that I investigated. After a two week trial and one day of deliberation the Jury found in favor of TI. After that I continued to work for TI in another one of the TI v Hyundai cases. In June of 1999 TI and Hyundai settled the dispute. As in the Samsung case, both sides agreed to share their intellectual property portfolios. Again, TI had a larger portfolio, so Hyundai agreed to pay TI an estimated $1.2B over the 10 year life of the agreement. In October of 1999, Carl Oppedahl of Oppedahl & Larson LLP (www.oppedahl.com/) asked me to write several web data mining applications (Feathers, Partridge and Raptor). These applications are written in Microsoft's ATL (a C++ template library for ActiveX). Monitoring is done via HTTP using WinSock and E-Mail notifications are sent via SMTP also using WinSock. The applications are self-installing and digitally signed for easy and secure installation over the web. In 2000: Louis Touton, now of ICANN asked me to work on ICANN internal software systems for managing the CC TLDs. September 2000: In TI v LTC. Technical investigation for TI. Case settled out of court in 2002. January 2001: Digcom v Nokia. Technical investigation for Nokia. Case settled out of court in 2002. January 2003: MLR v Nokia. Technical investigation for Nokia. Case settled out of court in 2003. Who knows what will happen next...
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