Saturday, September 6, 2008

My brag, this is also a very good design in US story.

Do you know who built the very first US made CD-ROM? Not one, but a small team, and I was one of team. Time was 1993, at then, all CD-ROM were made from Japan. They were either 1x or 2X and they had a ribbon cable connect to a AT card and plug in to an AT bus slot (if you remember what that was.) Anyway, we were a small company at Sunnyvale California (yes, Silicon valley) and had a CD-Rom decoder chip. We teamed up with Philips and use their mechanism (a 2X drive) and built a very first CD-ROM outside of Japan. I was one of three programmers working on the 8032 processor. The story didn’t just end at here. A year later, we had the world’s first CD-ROM decoder chip that uses IDE interface. (The ribbon cable connects to your had drive) So we saved a card and the whole world converted over. For couple of years, every signal CD-ROM made on this earth has our chip in them. And that’s also the time period CD-ROM became popular.

The picture on left is me (Boy was I young?) The right picture is entire s/w team.

Daddy's little girl is 2














Elva just turned 2. Here are some pictures.