Barry - Re: "can you or anyone else fill me in on his pre-DEC background. "
Robert Palmer was an engineer at Texas Instruments in the 1960's. In 1969, he helped co-found MOSTEK, along with L.J. Sevin, and several other TI engineers. Note the year 1969 - one year after Intel's founding.
MOSTEK was the company to make the first chip sets for HP's HP-35, their first scientific calculator - around 1972, 1973. In 1974, MOSTEK stunned the semiconductor memory world (TI and Intel!) by inventing a multiplexed CAS/RAS addressing scheme for a 4 kilobyte memory device requiring only 16 pins - as opposed to TI/Intel's 22 pin 4 kilobyte chip. (Bob Probsting was the engineer that came up with this idea).
From that point, MOSTEK became THE MEMORY leader for the next few years. They dominated the 4k and 16 Kilkobit memory markets - overshadowing TI and Intel.
In 1976/77, Mostek introduced an integrated microcontroller to try to gain a foothold in that developing market. This coincided with Intel's 8048/8748 microcontroller introduction. Intel's marketing and EPROM expertise (allowing microcode to be erased on the CPU) held the day, and MOSTEKs efforts fizzled out.
Unfortunately, MOSTEK stumbled at the 64 kilobit level for memory, as did Intel, and the Japanese took over the market in 1979 - 1985. In 1980, MOSTEK was on the ropes and sold out to United Technologies - A Mr. Gray comes to mind, head of United Technologies at that time
Robert Palmer became an executive with United Microelectronics - the old MOSTEK. In 1985, he joined DEC as head of semiconductor manufacturing operations. In 1990, Palmer became VP of all of DEC's manufacturing and logistics operations.
He worked his way up the DEC organization and was chosen to replace Ken Olsen in 1992 as President of DEC.
In summary - Palmer has competed with Intel both at DEC and MOSTEK and has fared poorly in both situations.
Paul |
