August 21, 2000
Here is the obituary for my dad in the Springfield newspaper.
Henry Burkhardt III, 55;
made mark in computers
BOCA RATON, Fla. - Henry Burkhardt III, 55, of this town, died Monday at a local hospital. He worked in the computer industry, held eight patents in the fields of high-performance computing and parallel processing and designed the Nova computer. He was a founder of the former Data General Corp. and became chief financial officer. He also was a founder of Encore Computer Co. and Kendall Square Research Corp. Born in Ann Arbor, Mich., he grew up in South Hadley, Mass., and was schooled there. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Princeton University. He leaves his wife, the former Ruth McDaniel; a son, John of Arlington, Mass.; a daughter, Karen Simas of Acton, Mass.; his parents, Dr. Henry and Ruth Burkhardt of South Hadley; two brothers, William of Warren, R.I., and Robert of Sudbury, Mass.; and three grandchildren. A private memorial service and burial will be arranged in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. Forest Lawn Funeral Home of Pompano Beach is in charge. Memorial contributions may be made to the American Cancer Society, 31 Capital Drive, West Springfield, 01089.
John
Burkhardt
John Burkhardt
September 15, 2000
Dear John,
I regret that I am unable to attend
the Memorial Service tomorrow for Henry.
Henry and I first met when I
convinced him to work at Digital in 1963 after he decided to leave Princeton to
work with computers. From our very first meeting, his brilliance and enthusiasm
shown through. We worked together on
various projects including the ill-fated PDP-X that he helped architect. While
I was at Carnegie Tech in the late 60s, I was solidly behind the project. The project was cancelled and that may have
prompted he and Ed to found DG. This
was a great loss for Digital, since it created a competitor with a superior
product.
As a founder of DG, he was the Nova
architect as well as head of software at DG.
Many of us regard it as one of the great architectures. (It bore no
relation to the PDP-X.) The other thing that amazed me from afar was
the breath/depth as a CFO, chief counsel, architect, programmer, and CTO. His ability to look at a contract or make a
credible business model was incredible.
This same ability was often applied to meetings and people... not always
with the greatest success. Like myself,
he simply wants to "cut to the chase" so we can do the next
interesting or great thing.
In 1983, he and Ken Fisher
convinced me to found Encore. We
created one of the first (three, I believe) "multis" or
microprocessor-based, shared memory, multi-processor -- "Multimax",
that was archetypical of virtually every multiprocessor computer that is
built. Multimax was the best of that
time. We also convinced John Hennessey
to form MIPS. "Founderitis" developed set in at Encore and when he
left in 1985, I followed him. The book, High Tech Ventures that I wrote in
1991 benefited greatly from the Encore experience and Henry's insights about all
sorts of critical issues for startups.
Henry was a Computer Museum founder
in Boston and was a key (with his contribution) to helping it open in 1982.
He founded KSR that introduced the
first scalable (to 1024) processor multiprocessor. From the beginning, I was
proud to be a technical advisor and investor in the company that made many
contributions. The KSR patents were purchased
by SUN. The basic ideas embodied in the
patents are likely to be present in computers for several decades.
I'm sorry that most of what I say
about Henry is about his contributions and our technical interactions (but
that's how we were), because it omits the various personal sides that I also
enjoyed. I really enjoyed all of our interactions and friendship over these
last years.
Those of us who sort of knew him
well, will really miss him, his enthusiasm, and his particular warmth with his friends.
Regards,
g
Saturday, September
23, 2000
Gordon Bell
Dear Gordon,
My nephew forwarded me your
comments about his dad (my brother), and
I gave at Henry's memorial
service, along with a font you will most
be reading from the Bible,
and I thought Henry would appreciate some
As I was quite young when
Henry went away to school, I have always
I have heard from you, Ed
DeCastro, and other former colleagues of
Henry always spoke of you
and your wife in the most respectful terms,
#3- I imagine that #1 was
snatched up right away by some gov't
I hadn't realized until
reading your note that the KSR patents had
Thanks again,
Bob Burkhardt (Henry's baby brother)
Skinner
Chapel
Holyoke,
Massachusetts
First,
I would like to say something about this place where we have gathered
today. This sanctuary has stayed just
as I remember it from childhood (we used to come screaming through here after
choir practice on Friday afternoons- the echoes are great- but please don’t try
it just now); it remains untouched by time inside here, even though the city
outside has changed unrecognizably over the years. My parents were married in this place, and later my brothers and
I were too. And when our son Mark was
born we were still living in this area, and so he was baptized here. So in many ways, this is the place from
which all of us started out on our various journeys through the world.
Now,
when Henry went off to school at Exeter, I was only about eight years old, and
we never really lived full time under the same roof after that. So a lot of my memories of him, particularly
from long ago, are of a kind of episodic or snapshot nature. I’d like to share some of these snapshots
with you.
First, about our house. In the 1950’s, decades before there was an Internet, or even an
Arpanet, Henry saw to it that our house was online, at least in an
analog sense. We were totally wired. There were wires and cables everywhere,
through the cellar and the attic, and up and down inside the walls, connecting
everything in the house with everything else.
Back in the days when the phone company owned all the equipment in your
house, he had rigged up magnetic pickups to allow phone extensions and
recording without direct connection to the phone lines. There were capacitive proximity detectors to
warn him if Mom or Dad were coming down the hall. There were speakers and microphones strategically located around
the place so that he could give us all orders and figure out what we were all
up to.
Now all this wiring extended outside the house as
well. We went to visit our grandparents
in Detroit every summer, and while we were there for a few weeks in August, their
house went online too. And then
there was the incident with the Dodge Dart.
We had a 1960 Dodge Dart station wagon, which was the first car to have
a pushbutton transmission. It also had an electric window in the back that you
had to open to get the tailgate down. Well, one time we were locked out of the car in a parking lot somewhere when our parents weren’t
around. So Henry borrowed my official
Cub Scout pocket knife, and used the blade as a screwdriver to remove the lens
from one of the rear brake lights. He reached
in and managed to find just the right wire, the one which, when shorted to
ground, activated the tailgate motor and rolled down the back window. By the way, I don’t think this trick was
something he had learned about by reading the owner’s manual! Some people were walking by just then,
looking at us rather suspiciously, so Henry said something like “Hmm, I guess
this tail light is burned out, we’ll have to replace it when we get home”. Once the people had left, I crawled in
through the hatch and opened up the doors.
Our parents were quite surprised to find us sitting inside the car when
they got back.
In the course of our many long family trips, there
were always interesting conversations going on about various subjects. For example, there was the following lesson
in chemistry: Now our Dad always liked
to get Sunoco gasoline for the car, but one day we needed gas when there was no
Sunoco station in sight, so he stopped at a Shell station instead. So in the back seat Henry starts up with,
“well, Bob, do you know what happens when you mix two different kinds of
gasoline in the same engine?” At the
tender age of 7 or so I fell for the bait, as usual, and said “no, what?” to which he replied “Well, nothing. At least, nothing at first. But you can be driving along ten minutes or
half an hour later, when suddenly the whole car might just blow up”. Of course I believed him. I always believed everything he told
me. I don’t think our parents ever
understood why there was always so much screaming coming out of the back seat
on these trips, but this may help explain some of it.
There was one year when I came home from summer camp
and noticed a balloon under my bed, next to a solenoid (electromagnet) with a
needle attached in such a way that the needle would pop the balloon when some
electrical current passed through the solenoid. I was very proud of myself when I traced the circuit back to a
mysterious wire that disappeared into the heating duct, and presumably from
there into the Matrix of Henry’s analog network. He was quite disappointed when the balloon didn’t pop in the
middle of the night, because I had disconnected the wire.
Down in the basement, there was a corner area full
of electronic equipment. When Henry was
still quite young he had built all sorts of things, like oscilloscopes and
voltmeters and Tesla coils and a radio controlled scale model of the US
Missouri, and an electromechanical implementation of the Game of Nim (using
telephone interchange stepping relays).
When he was in about the 8th or 9th grade he
designed and built his first computer, using vacuum tubes, 12AX7 dual triodes configured as flip-flops- I
still have a notebook in which he drew a schematic of one of the modules to
explain it to me.
Which leads to the subject of Henry the
teacher. He taught me lots of things-
how to ride a bike, how draw a schematic diagram of an electronic circuit, how
to use a soldering iron and a slide rule.
I was the only kid in the second grade who knew Ohm’s Law. When he came back from his first semester at
Exeter he tried to teach me German. And
then, of course, there were the
infamous math lessons (which our mother remembers so fondly). When I was 9 or 10 he decided it was time
for me to start learning calculus. Later in life I figured out that he
had probably learned calculus by that age, and he wanted to see if I measured
up. Well, I am sorry to have to report
that I did not, at least not at the age of 10.
I think I was probably about 12 or 13 myself when I finally realized
that Henry was somebody I would never be able to catch up with. He was always way off there, just over the
horizon, and no matter how hard I tried I could just barely keep sight of him.
There were years, particularly when I was off in
college and graduate school, when most of what I knew about his activities
actually came from the news media. I
had a roommate who was a student at the Stanford business school and also an
intern at the Palo Alto office of Dow Jones, where they put out the West Coast
edition of the Wall Street Journal, and he would come home and tell me what my brother was up to. I’d hear things like “Well this week he’s
opening up a plant in Thailand”. Well-
I couldn’t even begin to imagine what would be involved in an activity like
“opening up a plant in Thailand”- it was all I could do just to keep up with my
studies, which in those days amounted to translating Plato and Virgil. But it was strange at that time to feel that
I was related to a celebrity.
Now it was always very important to me to know what
Henry thought of me. I think during
this period he had pretty much written me off as a hopelessly naďve and liberal
hippie type person. I think he finally
decided I was okay when I told him that I’d written some software, an assembly
language program that ran on what had been Enrico Fermi’s personal computer
(the MANIAC II) down in the basement of the physics building at the University
of Chicago.
Now over the years, I have been a student at
Harvard, Chicago, Stanford and the University of Massachusetts, where I worked
for a professor who won the Nobel Prize in physics; later, I worked about 10
years for MIT at Lincoln Laboratory.
And so I think it’s fair to say that in the course of my life I’ve gotten
to know a lot of very smart people. But, I have never met anybody who even came
close to being as clever as that guy
I’d watched disappear over the horizon way back when I was a child.
Earlier I mentioned Henry as a teacher. This is one of his great legacies. He didn’t just found companies to
manufacture products and open up plants in Thailand and provide employment for
people. What he was really doing was
running a series of post-graduate schools in which bright people could grow and
learn how to carry on and innovate in their own way. He will be remembered by many people whose lives he touched and
inspired in this way.
Being remembered by those you have left behind is of
course the oldest form of immortality.
It is, for example, the principle component of the Indo-European
warrior/poet culture, as evidenced from India to Ireland, from the Mahabharata
to Beowulf. The idea is that as
a warrior you achieve everlasting glory by performing some great deed or series
of actions that win you an eternal name in the songs of the poets. For people of our modern era, the deeds of
an ancient warrior can be replaced by other activities, but the result is still
the same.
So I would like to draw an analogy between Henry and
a very famous ancient warrior named Achilles, a man who also died at an unseasonably
young age. As you may recall, Achilles
was the son of a goddess and of a human father, and so though mortal himself,
he was given a gift by Zeus that most people don’t get- he was allowed to choose the time of his
death. However, like all gifts from
those ancient gods, this gift came with a very unpleasant condition. And that was, that he had to choose between
just two predestined alternatives. You will have to bear with me while I read
his description of this choice in his own words, as reported by Homer (Iliad
9, 410-415):
mh/thr ga/r te/ me/ fhsi qea\
Qe/tij a)rguro/peza
dixqadi/aj kh=raj fere/men
qana/toio te/loj de/.
ei) me/n k' au)=qi me/nwn Trw/wn
po/lin a)mfima/xwmai,
w)/leto me/n moi no/stoj, a)ta\r
kle/oj a)/fqiton e)/stai:
ei) de/ ken oi)/kad' i(/kwmi
fi/lhn e)j patri/da gai=an,
w)/leto/ moi kle/oj e)sqlo/n,
e)pi\ dhro\n de/ moi ai)w\n
In
our language, it goes something like this:
You
know my mother is a goddess, Thetis, the silver-footed one
And
she has explained to me that I carry two divergent fates to the end of my days.
On
the one hand, if I stay here and continue fighting around the Trojans’ city
My
safe homecoming is lost, but my glory will be everlasting.
On
the other hand, if I head homewards and arrive back in my beloved country,
My
glory is lost, excellent though it was, but my life will long and quiet.
The hero of the Iliad was exceptional, he had
the talent and courage to take risks and try things that others would not dare
to try, to make consequential decisions on the basis of incomplete knowledge,
and take responsibility for those decisions, and perhaps even to break the
rules sometimes. And it has been
realized almost since the Iliad was composed that it is people like this
who provide the driving force behind our civilization. We can all be grateful that we were lucky
enough to have known one of these exceptional people.
Achilles’
choices were to die young and be remembered forever, or to live a long boring
life in obscurity and then be totally forgotten about. For a person of that ancient warrior class
this choice was no choice at all, it was just another cruel trick played by the
gods; a glorious death in battle was the only acceptable course of action. Well, Henry did not have a choice
either. But long before he became ill
he had done enough to ensure that his glory would be everlasting:
kle/oj a)/fqiton e)/stai
Bob
Burkhardt