I was born in northern Michigan a few days after D-Day. My father was a Mennonite dairy farmer and my mother was a Mennonite farm wife. We were rather poor during the war and my mother made dresses for my sisters from the feed sacks we had for the cows. The farm was the most wonderful place I could imagine growing up although I didn’t realize it at the time. I remember the hard work of getting up before school, going to the barn, pitching frozen silage from the silo to feed the cows. Beautiful mornings in the winter with glistening ice coating the twigs of the maple tree by the house. Subzero mornings with white frost sculptures crusting each branch. Magical nights with dancing northern lights so bright we imagined a hissing sound. A milky-way that was never obscured by city light haze. The snow prints a pheasant’s wings make when taking off from the snow. Collecting maple sap in the spring before the snow is gone, from buckets hung on spigots in the trees. A tractor drawn trailer with a collecting tank. The welcome transition from the cold into the steam filled evaporator shed, sampling the new maple syrup.

As a boy I was active in 4-H, building a butterfly collection, an electric motor, and learning to back a tractor and trailer and later a tractor and wagon. I won a district FFA prize for a demonstration called "More and better baby pigs". Summer bible school was spent listening to hot humid cicadas and memorizing bible verses. I spent endless hours with my BB gun shooting English sparrows and starlings while protecting the "good" birds. Coon hunting after dark with the black and tan hound. Taking a high school girl friend on a date ice fishing for northern pike through the ice while sitting in a cozy kerosene heated shanty. Swimming in a cold lake after a hot summer day putting up hay covered with sweat and dust. Those are days whose sweet memories bring a lump to my throat. We learned to work and we learned to pray.

My parents encouraged us to get an education so my Dad helped me buy six Yorkshire gilts and I raised baby pigs to sell for college money. Then I got a summer job working in the woods cutting pulpwood. Northern Michigan has large expanses of jackpine forest, whose scrubby trees are used primarily for making paper. A neighbor picked up another fellow and myself at 4 AM each day and drove 15 miles to the woods without a single word. He cut the trees down with a chain saw and I trimmed branches with an axe and helped stack the 8-foot lengths. That money plus a grant and a scholarship paid my way to go to Goshen College, a Mennonite college in Indiana where I studied engineering. Two friends and I decided to spend our junior year abroad. So, taking advantage of a relationship between Michigan State and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, we attended this English speaking university in the rural Ibo country of eastern Nigeria during the 1964-65 school year. That year opened my eyes to an international perspective for the first time in my life. The following summer I flew to Madrid, hitchhiked from Barcelona through Switzerland, down through Yugoslavia to Greece, then crossed the Bosphorus to Istanbul. Then back up through Europe to Amsterdam, London, then to New York and a shocking return to the US while hitch hiking back home to northern Michigan.

After my senior year at Goshen, during which I left engineering and decided to major in pre-med, I was unmotivated to apply to medical school and didn’t get accepted where I did apply. I then spent a year at Crozer Theological Seminary, became involved with the Upland Institute for Social Change, protested the war in Vietnam and marched on the Pentagon. I moved to Philadelphia where I spent a year doing alternative service as a Mennonite conscientious objector to the war. I worked with a cancer research lab at the University of Pennsylvania, helping collect blood samples from dairy cattle (via a syringe inserted under the base of the tail). This was a miserable job followed by another stint working in another research lab.

While in Philadelphia I attended the Philadelphia Folk Festival, went to Woodstock, and participated in the peace movement and the seemingly related socialist movement. We frequented the Philadelphia electric factory and wore bell-bottoms. I neglected the basic values of my upbringing. I finally came to my senses and started taking evening courses at Drexel University where I eventually became a graduate student and received a Masters degree in Biomedical Engineering in 1971.

I applied to Caltech, was accepted, and after a summer job to make a little money, I drove an old jeep mail van across the country to Pasadena, California. I thus began the most important educational period of my life, with $20 in my pocket and a letter offering a research assistant position for support. Switching to information science, I worked 4 hard years and received a PhD in Engineering and Applied Science. For relief from the tough schedule, I would head for the Sierras after finals and go backpacking. Kiersarge pass is an all-time favorite. I got married during these years to a lady working as a lab assistant in our department. My thesis work had introduced me to image processing and 3D computer graphics, which were to become my main interests for the next 25 years. After a year of post-doc work we moved to Palo Alto where I took a job doing medical CAT scanner image processing at Varian Corporation. Aversion to Vortex moved me to FACC then to DeAnza Systems, an excellent company where I programmed PDP 11-45s in Fortran to do image processing and diagnosis of the DeAnza image processing peripherals.

Three years later, itching to get back to Unix and C which I had used briefly while at Caltech, I saw a place holder job advertisement in the paper "Unix, graphics, startup" or something like that. I called the number and Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems answered. It was May of 1982 and my daughter had just been born in January. I became employee number 12 at Sun Microsystems doing 2D and 3D graphics programming. Sun was an amazing rocketship. It seems the only problem we ever had was how to ramp production fast enough. We worked hard, it was exciting, and I fell in love with entrepreneurial capitalism. Technology was our love and the 1968 language of socialism sounded more and more irrational. My marriage fell apart, I divorced and married my current wonderful wife of 20 years.

After eight remarkable years and plenty of stock options, I foolishly left Sun to join a new startup called BioCAD. It looked promising but didn’t make it. My wife and I built a new house in the hills, I took six months off, then went to work for Intel in 1994 to try to help make 3D graphics work well on PCs. Six years at Intel trying to prevent Microsoft from telling Intel to kill my graphics software projects was enough. I retired in April 2000. Perhaps the best memory from Intel was of building a 3D scene manager, research on physical models of articulated bodies, and working with Sun Microsystems to help define Java3D. And, whether assisted by or in spite of my efforts, PCs now have great 3D graphics software and hardware, it couldn’t be stopped!

I have never been happier than I am now, helping the boy scouts (our son earned Eagle!), doing some travelling, and pursuing various hobbies such as this webpage.