Job at NEC Electronics - 1992 through 1997

Also see NEC Reunion party in 2005 and how I ended up in HR for taping a piece of tin foil on my cube wall.

After two years of doing medical claim software at QMA, I was excited to be working on the software that ran one of the most advanced wafer fabs in the world at that time.

 

Since QMA didn't provide business cards to programmers, this was my first business card:

 

For the first few years my job was to maintain and enhance the Comm Terminal, which was a DOS  C application that interfaced fab equipment with the mainframe for factory control, and provided a user interface for fab operators to manually move product to next steps. Art's team was developing a factory backup system "NFAS/12," but in order for it to work, the Comm Terminals had to route message communicate with the NFAS/12 "Interceptor that David Milligan was working on instead of direct to the mainframe. The Interceptor would then route messages to the mainframe if it was available, otherwise transactions would be handled by the NFAS/12 server, and queued up to be fed to the mainframe when it became available. (Factory downtime was very expensive. But the wafer production was dozens of steps, and one misstep in the process would cause that lot of 50 wafers to scrapped - at a cost of about $50k.)

The technical challenge was that the Comm Terminal communicated with the mainframe via a set of proprietary TSR (terminate and stay resident) drivers written by a vendor in Japan.  It was surgery getting it to talk to the Novell NFAS server using the IPX wrapper "RV-IPX" that Vikas Gupta had developed.

Art Hager's team launched NFAS/12 in April 1993. Managers traveled from Japan to see the system because this was the first NEC wafer fab that could continue running when the mainframe was down.

With a larger budget an support by management we then developed NFAS/48. I worked on the complex C++ internal communication components, now having to convert the "RV-IPX" to TCP/IP.  The GUI components were written in Delphi - which I had initially introduced to the department.

For more info see this Borland Case Study

NEC gave a course in Business Relations with the Japanese.  On my second trip to Japan in 1998 I ran into instructor Doug Lipp at the Tokyo train station.

 

During lunch I would often go jogging for a few miles with Neil Taylor - the site had a locker room and showers. Twice I was on an NEC team for Eppies Great Race. The second time I did the kayak.

 

 

Susan Kansier and Art Hager didn't get along. And after a re-org placed me under Susan nothing I did was good enough. Still I formed many key business contacts during my time at NEC:

In 1997 Art Hager got a job as a manager across the street at Hewlett-Packard and hired both me and Howard Calkin, so I was reporting to Art again and working at a better company. Mark Blackburn later got a job at HP and I see him in Toastmasters.

In January 2000 I left HP to work for my father's dot-com startup Activesoft. When that dot-bombed a year later I got a job at Prestwood Software, working for Mike Prestwood, who was hired as a contractor after the seating chart below was done. (Nancee Toft now works for Prestwood.)

In February 2005 I went to SGS, reporting to Neil Taylor (and Robert Budd was later hired by Neil at SGS). Then in December 2005, after running into him at an NEC Reunion, I went to work for esurance, reporting to Sundar Rajan.

So it's safe to say that if I had not gotten this NEC job my career would have been very different.

 

Dilbert was huge at the time. I kept this one - seemed to capture NEC:

 

When I joined NEC I had hoped to be sent on a business trip to Japan. But when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, in June 1994 I took a vacation trip to Japan on my own, going places that impressed even the Japanese, who had not been to those places.

These are photos of my going-away lunch at "Jimmy's Indian Buffet" that used to be in old Roseville.

Ron Cole - my last supervisor - next to the Closed sign

Steve Beach, Todd Leber, and Gary Hamilton with the happy-meal smile.

Chris Deets, Kim, Howard Calkin