If ever you’ve left your desk a little messy, a tad disorganized and disheveled, if ever your piles of paper have grown so dense that they’ve begun to shift like the Hayward Fault, terrifying your workplace neighbors, you owe Jim Williams a deep debt of gratitude.
No one, you see, topped Williams in topping his work space. Williams, a superstar analog chip engineer who died in June, had a workbench right out of some techno sci-fi thriller. It was a cacophony of chaos — resistors piled upon capacitors, piled upon copper sheets holding trial-and-error circuit solutions destined to be designed into our everyday electronic gizmos. There was an old Coke can completing a test circuit; a soldering iron, of course; and a vacuum tube oscilloscope from the 1960s that Williams favored over newer models.
How epic was Williams’ mess? His bench, just as he left it before suffering a fatal stroke at 62, is now on exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Yes, a museum-worthy mess. via Silicon Valley News
November 18, 2011
