Title
Rider, Ronald oral history
Catalog Number
102792878
Type
Document
Description
Ron Rider played key roles at Xerox PARC in building early laser printer prototypes and then in managing the engineering of what became a flagship product line for Xerox. Keen on building things since childhood, he obtained undergraduate and PhD degrees in physics and was introduced to Xerox PARC by its director, George Pake. Within two weeks of starting in 1972, he invented a major improvement to the mechanical "mouse" used for interacting with computer displays, which became the standard mouse for PARC's Alto personal networked computer. He was then enlisted to build the "research character generator," a rack of Schottky TTL integrated circuits, driven by an Alto or other small computer, to generate a video signal to produce images of text documents on Gary Starkweather's (see CMH OH) laser printer prototypes. The principal prototype was to have "the quality of a printing press," so was designed to scan at 500 lines per inch, one page a second, thus requiring a 50 Mbps video signal--a tall order at the time. In 1974, the prototype printer and character generator were placed in service at PARC as a "print server" driven by an Alto connected to the Ethernet.
The design for the character generator was simplified and adapted to become part of the very successful Xerox 9700 2page/second printer product. Ron was encouraged to manage product development teams that could market these technologies, and joined product development in El Segundo CA in 1977. He and his teams developed several products, culminating in the Docutech line of multi-function (scan and print) devices. The necessary computing speeds required multiple processors (as many as 20) and coherent shared memory. The software was developed using PARC's Mesa language, which the developers favored in part for its multi-processing features. In 1987, Ron returned to PARC to manage the Digital Imaging Technology Center, to serve as Xerox VP Corporate Architecture, and to share in the management of PARC itself.
Date
2023-06-21
Contributor
|
Rider, Ronald, Interviewee
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Sproull, Bob, Interviewer
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Publisher
Computer History Museum
Place of Publication
Mountain View, CA, USA
Extent
21 p.
Format
PDF
Category
Transcription
Collection Title
CHM Oral History Collection
Credit
Computer History Museum
