Bennett's rock... and Colin Harris (guess which is which)

Colin Harris came to Bromont this week so we had a quick tour around. This is his last week at PMC-Sierra, he is retiring and will be working with a number of start-ups in and around Vancouver.

Colin reminded me of a story from the early days...

One of the HR Directors from Kanata came down for a celebration we were having and, coincidentally, he was thrown in a swimming pool (an astonishing number of bars had adjoining pools at the time). He made the mistake of taking off his wet clothes and piling them on a chair. Needless to say, his clothes disappeared instantly and he never found them. He drove back to Kanata at 3 in the morning, arrived at 6 am and had to run into the house in his wet underwear. Try explaining that to a loving wife.

Just for closure - the clothes were on the floor in the back seat of his car..

This from Peter Gillingham

I too remember the Calma. I joined Mitel in 1983, a little bit late for those helicopter trips from Kanata to Bromont. I remember long nights in the Kanata Calma tents putting together analog sections of the BLIC (later renamed DNIC) and the BPhone. I think there may have been a third chip for the Bullet system but can't remember what it was. We'll have to track down Ken Buttle or Pat Beirne to find out. Also remember fun days in the lab with massive coils of twisted pair tracking down transmission dropouts in the DNIC and SNIC. I think I achieved the record for the tallest stack of equipment actually used in a test. The one piece of equipment I could not use was a weird box with toggle switches and screwdriver adjusted potentiometers that Gregg Aasen purchased to test the DDX. It was only later after I joined MOSAID that I understood what the SRT-1 memory tester did.

The invention of the STM

The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was invented in 1981 and resulted in a Nobel Prize for Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer of IBM in 1986, That must be some sort of record, usually Nobel prize winners have to survive many decades to be recognized. It uses vacuum tunneling of electrons from a sharp metal tip to a surface and can obtain precision to the level of single atoms When they first submitted their paper it was refused as being preposterous, they had glued together pieces of thick cardboard which they had cut out after tracing single scans on them and then taken a Polaroid picture of the resulting 3D surface, 

I was at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal in 1988 and they had a guest speaker from one of the IBM research labs involved in STM development. He showed astounding video of real-time scans of cleaved graphite surfaces, identified lattice defects, and even demonstrated perturbations caused by single gas atoms when the vacuum was broken. At the end of his talk he said 'I have brought a few microscopes along to show you' and picked up a shoe box that had left on the counter! He pulled out little blocks of teflon with stacked piezoelectric devices glued to them and a metal probe tip with wires hanging off. I had been envisioning room-sized ultra-hightech equipment... How many more simple but powerful inventions are out there to discover?