Joel Grodstein - Background

• BS in Electrical Engineering, 1981
• Spent two years as a board-level logic designer for Evans and Sutherland (which was arguably the first computer-graphics company ever). It was founded by Ivan Sutherland, who has been called the father of interactive computer graphics. However, I never met him -- he left the company shortly before I joined, because, in his opinion, "all of the interesting problems in computer graphics were already solved" :-).
  At Evans and Sutherland, one of my jobs was on a team of designers trying to put part of a computer-graphics pipeline onto a custom VLSI chip. We failed miserably. I decided it was the fault of the dumb, inadequate EDA tools, so...
• MS in Computer Science. I went back to school to get a CS degree; specifically, to work in EDA tool algorithms. I also signed up to get a PhD in exercise physiology. However, I finished the CS degree first, and was ready to stop being a poor student, so I got a job instead of finishing my PhD. Anyway, back in the day there really was no way to combine physiology with micro-electronics or computing.
• Digital Equipment Corporation, 1986-1998. When I joined Digital, they were (along with IBM) synonymous with computers, and their stock was over 200. Twelve years later (after their CEO, Ken Olsen, famously said that "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home"), they were on a downwards spiral and were bought by Compaq.
  Nonetheless, it was a great place to work for 12 years. I got to work with perhaps the best circuit designers in the world, designing what were certainly the fastest microprocessors in the world -- Alpha CPUs. We then learned the hard way that while having bragging rights on the world's fastest CPUs (and the first commodity 64-bit CPU) is kind of cool, that and a dime will buy you a cup of coffee. Fast hardware is only useful if somebody writes software to run on it.
• Compaq Computer and Hewlett Packard, 1998-2002. In 1998, Compaq was on top of the PC world. A few years later, they weren't. They got bought by HP. And then HP decided they no longer wanted to be in the semiconductor industry. So they sold their entire CPU design team to Intel. And they sold me too :-).
• Intel, 2002-2014. A dozen years at Intel, working in design for test and in post-silicon debug. It has been argued that Intel is a really great manufacturing company, with a few good architects and circuit designers thrown in. That's certainly an exaggeration (they have excellent architects and circuit designers, and their process-design expertise is second to none). However, Intel's post-silicon expertise is phenomenal, and so I got to learn quite a lot in those dozen years, from some really smart people (many of whom are still at Intel).
• 2015-present. Retired from Intel, mainly to help care for an aging parent. Taught a class or two at Tufts as a lark, and then discovered that I enjoy teaching, and that Tufts is a nice place to teach. So here I am!