A Rebel...

While at MIT working on his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, Dad had a summer job that allowed him to work on his senior thesis. So while the other students were struggling with their topics, he was getting paid $1.75/hour to work on his. Apparently there were PhD students that were unable to solve the problem that his amplifier solved and they were shocked to learn his plan was successful. 

According to Tim Jackson in the book Inside Intel, Dad was a rebel: 

Political radicalism was not dead inside Intel. Its leading exponent was a gifted young circuit designer by the name of Joel Karp. With bell-bottoms and long hair, Karp was willing to risk the consternation of his employers by carrying anti-Vietnam petitions around Intel parties.

Karp displayed a wonderful ability to wind up his more conventional colleagues. On one occasion, a new sales executive bumped into him as he was about to leave the office for a technical meeting with a client. The shocked sales chief took one look at Karp's shoulder-length hair and ordered him to get it cut before attending the meeting. The following day, Karp reappeared in the office with his hair blow-dried and styled with great skill, but only one-eighth of an inch shorter than the day before. There was silence from his colleagues as Karp walked down the lab, informed the sales chief with a smile that he was going to claim the haircut as a business expense, and presented him with a receipt for the then astounding sum of $25. 

It was no surprise to me that Dad bonded easily with Jimmy over computers. They spent many hours over the years discussing techie stuff. Dad bought me my first computer in 1985, just in time for my final semester at San Diego State. It was a Compaq desktop with dual floppies and no hard drive along with a dot matrix printer. As much as technology has progressed during my lifetime, it’s crazy to realize how Dad was in the thick of things as he helped design game-changing memory chips.  

Dad was interviewed by the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley in 2003. He arranged for a private behind-the-scenes tour of the museum for me and the girls during our visit in 2007, which Jimmy was really disappointed to have missed. I stupidly put off opening the link Dad sent me about his interview because I wrongly assumed it was an audio recording. Granted, I had to skip many pages that were far too technical for me, but I learned so much about Dad and what he worked on during his fascinating career. How sad that I missed the opportunity to discuss with him the many stories that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. And how disappointing that I failed to tell him how much I would miss him when he was gone.