Bennet's Work History:

The two primary themes to my career are telephones and instrumentation ( and you never know where you are going to next ).

I went to school at the University of Washington in engineering department. Back in the mid '70s, I was really into computers. Unfortunately, all we got at the U-dub was timeshare on the CDC 6600. Then in November of 1976, Popular Electronics announced the Altair 8080 kit and the world was changed. Unfortunately, I couldn't convince any of my professors of it at the U. There was a pecking order at the U. The graduate students got to play with the CDC 6600, and the EE department's PDP-8, and the undergraduate students got to run PDP-8 simulations on a time-share basis on the CDC 6600. The Intel 8080 was seen as a cheap PDP-8 and not worthy of the time of a professor. I survived by getting a job at the UW hospital where I got to assemble and program several IMSAI 8080 computers for research projects.

Thanks to some help from my dad, I got a position at the Boeing company with a laboratory group working on microprocessors. The group was responsible for all of the ground based test labororatories. Some really cool stuff like the transonic and supersonic wind tunnels, nozzel test facilities, acoustic test lab, and the iron bird structure test facility. My first project was building a smart terminal for the technicians working inside the wind tunnel. Lots of fun.

After a few years of doing the same projects over and over again, I decided to quit and join a rock and roll band. Played ( starved ) around the Northwest for about a year and a half before deciding that living on rice and beans does have it's downsides.

I decided that I liked engineering much better, so I got a job with Pacific Western Engineering. It was here that I met Dana Reinke and Kent Walter, a pair of people that would change my life.

My first project at PacWest was working on an automated cord board system. These cord boards are still used in the 3rd world. The big problem with them is fraud. The automated cord board system we were building was designed to automate the billing recording process where most of the fraud occurs.

I then got dragged onto a automated billing project, designed to capture toll records on a step-by-step switch and send them electroncally to the billing center. A very cool project, but the company was sold in the middle of it and the new management was a miserable bunch.

When things got intolerable, I left for a company that was making 3D laser measurment systems. They had a contract with Rockwell to scan the cavities created a tile came off the space shuttle, and send the exact coordinates for the new tiles to a CNC machine. I also got to design some optics for a machine vision system. Way fun.

Back to the world of telephony, I got a call from Dana Reinke, who had left Pacific Western Engineering to start up a new company along with Kent Walter: Telecom Design. Dana asked me if I would like to work in the south of France for about a year on a consulting project. It didn't take much arm twisting to get me to accept that offer.

Telecom Design was working with IBM on a system for British Telecom to automate the collection of billing information. The Telecom Design part of the system would sit right in the middle of a step or crossbar office and collect the dialed digits and meter pulses and forward them to an IBM Series 1 minicomputer that would then forward them to a big IBM mainframe. The project was never sold to BT, but IBM France took over the project and sold it to Israel and South Africa as a security system.

After this project, IBM bought Rolm, so they didn't need Telcom Design for telecom consulting work. This made life rather difficult for us. We went from about 35 people down to about 5 over the course of about a year. It was when we were scraping the bottom that Dana started his own company (Danar) and I started working on an automated horoscope system for a local 1-976 provider.