What’s All This Widlar Stuff, Anyhow? (1991)

Pease and Widlar were two legendary engineers who ruled during the birth of the analog integrated circuit.

I heard an interesting story about Pease from someone who worked at National and knew him by sight. During the last great recession, around 2009?, my friend (another engineer) was using the services of California's state unemployment agency, when she saw the great Bob Pease walk into the EDD office to apply for unemployment. He had been laid off from National Semiconductor. The shock of this news spread throughout and a little later, National rehired Pease. But this event signaled to me that the sanctity of analog IC engineers had been pierced and no one was spared from the crushing recession. To me, it was the passing of an era, hardware engineering was losing it's prestige and dominance. Today, software has replaced hardware as the most vibrant and lucrative field in engineering. I can see that the brightest students are entering computer science, instead of going into electrical engineering.

I sometimes wonder who are today's engineers with as much influence as Widlar and Pease. Or if any engneers could be as dominant as those two in today's world where there are so many different technologies and directions in software.

Is there any context? Widlar is one of my heroes, right up there with Euler, Archimedes, Newton, etc. But I don't quite see why this is news today?

Pease was a hacker god; while Widlar was awesome there are so many other wonderful "what's all this xxx stuff anyhow" essays that would have been more fun.

It was exciting to get a message from pease!