 |
|
|||||
In This Issue DEPARTMENTS President’s Letter NEWS Campus News Restoring the Quad Christopher Speech Campus News Sci & Med Fiscal Challenges Ants Yield Clues Sci & Med News Sports Olympic Coaches Sports News FEATURES Engineering Leadership James Gibbons John Hennessy Martin Luther King Jr. Clayborne Carson King Papers |
||||||
HOME GUEST SERVICES SEARCHING ST COLLECTION NEWS SERVICE ALUMNI EMAIL THE EDITOR COMING UP |
ON AN OVERCAST MORNING in early December, while most of the campus sleeps, a
parade of shiny luxury cars
slips into the Tresidder Memorial Union parking lot. Some of Silicon
Valley’s
most important players emerge. There are “suits” like venture capital legends
Burton McMurtry of Technology Venture Investors and Franklin P. “Pitch” Johnson
of Asset Management Co. There are academics like the white-thatched and
sandal-wearing computer scientist John McCarthy, one of the “fathers” of
artificial intelligence, and electrical engineer John G. Linvill, one of the
forces behind Stanford’s Center for Integrated Systems.
And there are
hybrids,
like computer science visionary John Hennessy, the incoming dean of the School of
Engineering, whose idea of a sabbatical in 1984 was to start the microprocessor
company MIPS Computer Systems.
Who
could assemble such a pedigreed group at this hour? Inside Tresidder, the
meeting room door opens and a grinning Jim Gibbons, retiring dean of engineering,
who characteristically is running a