Dave Oster, Digital Plumber

Nancy Oster

As a favor to Dave, and completely without his knowledge, I am writing my version of his CRL and post-CRL experiences.

Dave came to UCSB in 1967 after two years at MIT convinced him that there was more to life than icy streets and unrelenting academic competition. His visit to the Computer Rearch Lab on the 3rd floor of Engineering I, landed him a job working with, and learning logic design from Ray Bjorkman. Dave credits Ray with teaching him all he ever needed to know about hardware design.

I met Dave in the summer of 1968. At the end of the summer, Dave and Jan Vanderford found a house to rent in Mission Canyon. In the living room of that house we listened to radio coverage of the riots in Isla Vista, watched TV transmission of the first footsteps on the moon, and Walter Cronkite's footage of the war in Vietnam. Dave and I watched anxiously with our other roommates the day their birthdays were translated into draft lottery numbers.

Dinnertime discussion at that house often drifted to debate on design of data transmission devices which, roughly translated, meant animated descriptions of buses that went around collecting data in nanoseconds (pretty fast) but sometimes dumped bits on the floor.

Courtship took its toll on Dave's GPA so we got married and his grades improved. But into his 5th year as an undergraduate, the draft board began to get impatient and issued him his notice to appear for a physical. A marathon quarter allowed him to satisfy the requirements for his BSEE degree. An independent studies section supervised by Jim Howard provided him the opportunity to continue design of the High-Speed Data Buffer (sometimes referred to in CRL slang as the "Osterizer") while he completed his degree.

Carefully preparing for Dave's draft physical, we gathered asthma testimony from his pediatrician and the UCSB Med Center, borrowed a cat from the Humane Society to stir up the allergens a bit, and purchased a pack of Camels for Dave to smoke on his way to Los Angeles. He failed the physical with flying colors.

Meanwhile Jan had left CRL with the group that formed Culler-Harrison. My first up-close contact with Glen was on a Culler-Harrison water ski trip at Lake Nacimiento. Glen sat in the boat with a pad of paper solving critical design issues while the rest of us took turns falling off the skis.

I credit Glen's example as inspiration for Dave's shameless use of the paper placemats at restaurants to solve pressing design problems. It is not uncommon to find potentially critical design notes on backs of envelopes and cash register receipts -- making housecleaning a sensitive task.

As graduation approached, massive aerospace industry layoffs were occurring. Experienced engineers were out on the streets snatching up every engineering job that was available. John Markel, Dave's office mate at CRL, tipped Dave off to a job opening at Speech Communications Research Lab (SCRL). Interviews narrowed the selection down to Dave and the man with a megaphone voice. They chose Dave.

SCRL became home to a significant collection of UCSB Engineering/CRL alumni -- John Markel, Dave Retz, Steve Davis, Larry Pfeiffer, Jim Scheffler, Jon Miller, Bob Dolan, Hisashi Wakita. Dave did hardware maintenance and figured out ways to implement improvements. Fortunately he had a lot of WWII surplus stuff he had collected in high school that he was able to use to solve PDP-8 and PDP-11 hardware problems. A neon-transformer was used in one memorable fix.

Dave's contact with Roland Bryan increased as SCRL became more involved in ARPA Net development. When Roland decided to leave UCSB to form ACC, he asked Dave to come work for him. ACC's first office space was next to Culler-Harrison. There was a phone and some desks but no carpeting or heat. Roland's mother-in-law was hired to answer the phone. Ron Stoughton and Art Berggreen worked with them. The company grew quickly. At ACC Dave designed acronym-laden interfaces for acronym-laden agencies. The ACC technology team later included CRL alumni Bob Dolan, John McAfee, Ed Faeh, Harrison Walker, Dale Taylor, Larry Green... and some that I am probably forgetting.

Dave eventually left ACC and spent a year as a consultant doing hardware design around town. Larry Green and Dale Taylor asked him to join them along with Steve Roberts to form Communications Machinery Corporation (CMC). As VP of Hardware at CMC, Dave designed and built local area network devices. Rockwell bought CMC in 1988.

Dave left Rockwell, and co-founded MultiAccess Computing Corporation. He is CEO, by default. MultiAccess builds wide-area network adapter cards for switched digital services, frame relay, and SMDS.

Dave has one suit and three ties. He hates them. He's happiest in a flannel shirt and blue jeans, drawing circuit designs on the chalk board or on the backs of things and debating design criteria for high speed digital transmission devices with his friends.

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