drmpeg

In 1981, my first job in Silicon Valley was obtained by answering a blind (no company name) ad in the Mercury News. It was a kooky company that built burn-in ovens for semiconductors (mostly 2164 memory chips back then).

I had a lot of fun there. The purchasing manager was a Scottish guy and he had an after hours drinking club in a small conference room with a wet bar. I was only 24 years old and working crazy hours. I'd get a few beers around 7 pm and then go back to work writing 8080 assembly language code for a few more hours.

I also ended up smoking weed with the CEO and CFO a couple of times. The CFO was not a young guy. I'm not sure how old he was, but he had all white hair. The CEO gave me a mason jar full of his homegrown weed as a gift when I finished the project.

That company and even the building is long gone. It's now a Google parking garage.

I'll never forget Dennis Erectus on KOME 98.5 (the wet spot on your dial) in 80's Silicon Valley.

For sure. Just YouTube alone is a vast ocean of H.264 bits.

MPEG-2 video is still very much alive. In the US, almost all terrestrial OTA broadcast (ATSC 1.0) and all SD channels on cable systems. Even Comcast VOD was all MPEG-2 (including HD) until they shut down the QAM version in 2023.

I was the project engineer for the Air Force Space Command / NORAD DSP satellite ground network back in the 80's. The system used the 10MB 8" Bernoulli drive and cartridges to store the early warning message traffic. The system was installed in 1988 and was decommissioned around 2005.

I'm not sure if they used the 8" cartridges all the way to 2005, but I can find out. I'm still friends with the original system maintainer. I pivoted to video compression in 1993 and lost track of the program, but we found each other on Facebook in 2010.

Advanced Television Systems Committee. It's the US standards organization for terrestrial digital television. ATSC 3.0 is a new standard that's very similar to DVB-T2 (used in the UK for HDTV) at the PHY layer.

Little known Fabrice Bellard project. He worked with the ATSC to test the ATSC 3.0 PHY layer when he was consulting at DekTec.

The article kind of disses the Intel 8085. For those of us with 8080 code bases that were never going to be rewritten for the Z80, it was a welcome upgrade. On the paper dryer process control systems I was working on in 1979, the 8085 based Intel 80/30 Multibus SBC could be dropped in for the older 8080 based 80/20 SBC with no changes and provide a significant 2.5X performance upgrade.