Six, Seven and Eight years ago today (August 2003, August 2002, August 2001)…

Between 2001 and 2002, I was working on the SCP project – SCP was a networking protocol that was designed for an embedded controller that was intended to be used for home automation.  It was a power line carrier based protocol and was designed for an ultra low bandwidth (1 bit per millisecond) link.  The SCP was designed by Harry Pyle and Rich Hasha who had worked on the home automation systems that were used in Bill Gates house.  The final SCP chip was bout 10cm on a side, and contained 64K of hard metal ROM, 64K of RAM an embedded ARM CPU and a ton of custom circuitry developed by ITRAN Communications.  For the SCP project, I was working on building a bridge between SCP controlled devices.

After the SCP project end-of-lifed in 2002, Dennis Flannigan who was the dev manager of the WMDG group at Microsoft (Windows Media and Devices Group) asked me to use my experience with SCP on a project to surface UPnP devices as PnP devices working under Frank Yerrace.  I built a prototype for the idea and hit a dead end.  Frank then asked me if I’d be interested in helping out on the sound team and I said “sure”.  I’ve since had 3 different managers on the sound team, but it’s been over 6 years at this point.

2001 was a particularly bad year for me, I had a fairly serious back injury that put me out of work for 6 weeks and continued for another 6 months beyond that.  My back’s been healthy since that, but it was NOT a fun 6 months.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2009
  Larry, I can understand what you went through, regarding back pain. I think we all take for granted our backs until something goes bad.

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2009
  The comment has been removed