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August 23, 2008
Bill Mann - A Mann That Changed the World
If you ever used a fax machine or a computer with a modem, it is likely that Bill Mann touched your life. This evening about eighty of us will help Bill celebrate his 65th birthday. I could use this space to tell you of his friendship, of his loving family, of his love of his family, of his many and varied interests. Or I could use it to tell of his longtime leadership of the IEEE's Southwest Test workshop, the world's première integrated circuit test conference. But today, for this post, I want to focus on how Bill has affected all our lives. Some other time I'll tell you about Bill the person.
That's a picture of Bill over there on the left. He's holding a probe card, a key part of an integrated circuit test system. For many years, Bill was a product engineer for the Semiconductor Division of Rockwell International. The division actually changed names more often than some people change socks. It was finally spun off as Conexant Systems in 1999. Whatever its name, for 35 years Bill was part of it. Over time, as his capabilities were recognized and his responsibilities increased, he became a manager and then a director and finally an executive director. But he never stopped being a product engineer. As a professional Bill, now retired, liked to make things, to make them as inexpensively as possible for customers and as profitable as possible for shareholders. He didn't design the products. Design engineers did that. He prepared those designs for production and continued to improve their manufacturability and trim their costs while maintaining performance long after the designers had moved on to other things. While Bill worked with many diverse products, the most numerous fruits of his labor were modem integrated circuit chips. Most manufacturers of the modem cards, fax machines and computers you likely bought used these chips from Rockwell and later Conexant. Nearly every reader of any blog had or has at least one of Bill's products. Bill made modems increasingly affordable. And he did it for millions and the millions of chips and millions and millions of people.
But it wasn't just that he brought these modem chips to production and maintained their manufacturability through an ever advancing technology evolution, or that his efforts contributed to the profitability of the division, his efforts helped finance the unrelenting advances in modem performance from less than 150 bits per second to 96,000 bits per second with actual compressed data rates even higher. And in so doing, his work helped bootstrap whole industries that weren't even thought of when he first joined the company. And those industries brought us email and the internet, blogs and electronic commerce and many other things we take for granted. Yes, those old modems also paved the way for many of the wired and wireless data communications systems and even many of the digital voice communications systems that we now enjoy. Had the products Bill worked with not continued to be profitable, we might not now have those even faster downloads and faxes based on newer technologies. Bill worked on many of these new technologies also.
Did Bill Mann do all this singlehandedly? No. No one ever does. Even at Rockwell Semiconductor or at Conexant it would be hard to name or even count all those who played important roles in the widespread use of modem technology. And while Rockwell was by far the largest player, they were not the only player. But this good man, this outstanding engineer, made a disproportionate contribution and that's why I refer to him as a Mann that changed the world.
Happy Birthday Bill!
Posted by Duane Smith at August 23, 2008 1:09 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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