Dan Shoup: Fill & Download for Free

Recently, GEN Jim Mattis — both as a combat commander and thinker, and now Secretary of Defense. I’m assisting in a biography of Mattis, whom I personally regard as a key adult supervisor of the Commander-in-Chief.GEN David Shoup, best known for his command of the beach at Tarawa, for which he received a well-deserved Medal of Honor. Became Commandant; could have been more proactive, during Vietnam, as a member of the JCS.Sergeant Major Dan Daly, who received two Medals of Honor in WWI.I’ll vary from direct troop leadership to leadership for the Corps in a future: Earl H. Ellis was a U.S. Marine Corps officer, both brilliant and eccentric, who devised, in 1921, the fundamental Allied strategy for World War II in the Pacific: a campaign of "island-hopping" closer and closer to Japan. He died under mysterious circumstances while visiting a Japanese island. Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia

They actually left long ago and helped built other big tech companies in the valley. eBay's prime was 2000-20005 in terms of initial scaling of the site and creating basic building blocks, still there are lots of interesting problems to be solved in the space.There are still lots of talented folks in eBay, that's how still this business is running. But the crème de la crème who worked initially to scale up the site and built one of the most stable, scalable, and reliable auctioning/e-commerce platform left long ago to work and build other valley companies.Notables one's, that I know who are no longer with eBay1) Jeremy King | LinkedIn2) Jeff Nelson3) Eric Billingsley4) Randy Shoup | LinkedIn5) Dan Pritchett | LinkedIn6) Hugh Williams - Joined 2009, contributed a lot during eBay's turnaround and bringing/promoting tech culture.Notable one's who are still with eBay1) Nick Whyte | LinkedIn - Tech Fellow2) Rami El-Charif | LinkedIn - Tech Fellow3) User-10649862155213947417 - VP of Platform and Architecture, started as an Engineer.4) Mark Carges - CTO5) Sami Ben-RomdhaneI'll update the list, as I remember more names.

Parc started up in 1970–1, coincidentally with the advent of the first VLSI chips: the 1103 dynamic RAM from Intel (all of 1024 bits, but in a much: smaller package, lower voltage, and lower cost than core memory).For the first time, just a few people could make an entire mainframe “pretty easily”, and we used the 1103 in 1971 to make an emulated PDP-10 (this was perhaps the first whole computer to use an entirely integrated circuit main memory).We did many experiments for displays, all of them driven by digital bit-maps of the characters to be displayed. This allowed some outlaw thoughts, such as: I wonder if we could afford to use the 1103s for a general bit-map display buffer memory for a personal computer?There were lots of reasons why we soon determined to afford this. One was that none of the previous computer displays were general with respect to the images that could be displayed: but a bit-map display could be general if there were enough pixels. Gary Starkweather was starting to print bit-maps on his new laser printer — these were general. Ben Laws and I did quite a few early bit-map character sets and started to understand what resolutions were needed, and Dick Shoup and I started looked at display of images using both half-toning and continuous toning (as the U of Utah was using for its 3D rendering).Making an early “printing quality” bit-map character in the font Lydian Cursive (1972). The character in the size it will appear on the display is shown at the top left. This also is a good capture of the phosphor color we used at Parc.A page of text rendered using the Lydian Cursive font on the experimental display system (1972)Cutting to the chase …Because we liked — whenever possible — to do an extensive experiment before trying for a combination of invention and engineering, we used our experimental display generator in 1972 to try out a number of avenues that a bit-map display could support. These included character display in printing-like fonts (above), half-tone images and painting and generating them, and “2 1/2 D” Disney-like real-time animations in multiple levels of depth. We did the same for real-time multiple timbre generation for music playing.The first digital drawing and painting at Parc was on a system I designed — which was fabulously well built, and with a number of additional designs by Steve Purcell, a truly gifted Stanford student who was an intern in our research group.I did most of the early drawings and paintings. We first used an actual Engelbart/English mouse from SRI for this (which was a bit tough), but the Alto project also produced a much smaller and higher res digital mouse that was much better behaved, especially for drawing.Quora will not allow me to put up “actual bits” here, so I advise that you copy these images and look at them “actual bits” to see what is actually there — otherwise the single-bit images will produce moire patterns with the displays you are using.Drawing PoohSequence of painting the PegasusThe menu of halftones and brushes can be seen at the top of the screen.These strengthened the case for going all out on the display for the personal computer for Parc that a number of us wanted to do (later named the “Alto”), and this project was started (under the radar) in Nov 1972.We had adopted Butler Lampson’s urgings to have every Parc invention engineered for 100 users, and this meant we had to be able to build at least 100 Altos. The original desired cost for the Alto was around $12.5K in 1972 dollars, but it wound up being more like $16K (or a bit more). This was before microchip CPUs, and they would have been too slow for many years in any case. So the CPU was made using MSI components (bit-slices etc) on a few boards.The memory budget was 128KB (in 16 bit words), and the tooth gritting part was to decide to allocate fully one half of this to “just the display buffer” of about 500,000 pixels (808 x 606). In practice, the Alto could allocate regions of memory for display purposes, and had a “fat-bit” mode, so there were many possible tradeoffs to put up a “full-paged display”. Pragmatically, this allowed working memory in the Alto to range from about 64KB to around 80KB, and a bit more for very restricted purposes.Most important was that the Alto was microcoded with dynamically reloadable microcode, so almost every part of what is normally hardware was emulated. This allowed many experiments with the display system (entirely in microcode), including both Steve Purcell’s “CHAOS” 2.5D animation code, and for Dan Ingalls’ now everywhere in the world: BitBlt.The small high res optical shaft encoder early Alto mouseThe Alto with the Cookie Monster, now animated with a Pegasus, and about 80 “ping-pong” balls at about 10 fps. Animation system: “CHAOS” by Steve Purcell.And here is what I wish Quora — and all places for text and pictures on the net — would do: allow a drawing to be done in place in a galley of text and images (why not for goodness sake!). This is from around 1974–5 on the Alto in Smalltalk. The idea in the UI is that it will sprout in a frame around the object when you go into it (UI and this painting system by Ted Kaehler). The image/painting object had most of the features of MacPaint 10 years later.Note the multiple fonts in the text, the live font editor which is being used to render the text into the Elvish script Tolkein devised, and the drawing in place in the image of Frodo and Gandalf.Below is a little movie of the place within Parc that we built for learning with children ca 1975 or so. You will see that some of the Altos still just protect the users from the display using cardboard containers.The music — “The Happy Hacker” composed by Chris Jeffers of our group — is played in real-time on the Alto using Steve Saunder’s FM synthesizer and Ted Kaehler’s Twang music system. The sound this produced was really good. It has been compromised a bit from several generations of recordings, 16mm film tracks, sprocket jitter, etc. But I think you can still hear the polytimbral voices pretty clearly on headphones.A few years later, the Notetaker Smalltalk kernel was done for both the Notetaker and the Dorado (called “Smalltalk-78”). Here is a screen in actual pixels (again: please copy and display elsewhere to get rid of the moire on the background) from a revival of this system (from a file on a Xerox disk pack) using the Dorado screen format.You can see this system being demonstrated, including the painting, in the tribute video I did for Ted Nelson a few years ago:This system is partly of interest because it was the one that was used in the infamous “Parc Steve Jobs” demo.