Life
As a young man, Felsenstein was a New Left radical. From October through December 1964, he was a participant in the Free Speech Movement and was one of 768 arrestees in the climactic "Sproul Hall Sit-In" of December 2–3, 1964. He also wrote for the Berkeley Barb, one of the leading underground newspapers.
Felsenstein received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972. He had entered UC Berkeley first in 1963, joined the Co-operative Work-Study Program in Engineering in 1964 and dropped out at the end of 1967, working as a Junior Engineer at the Ampex Corporation from 1968 through 1971, when he re-enrolled at Berkeley.
Felsenstein has been employed at Osborne Computer Corporation from 1981–1983, at Interval Research Corporation from 1992–2000, and at Pemstar Pacific Consultants from 2001 - 2005. All other times he has worked either as a free-lance consulting designer or for his own design firm.
Many of his designs were leaders in reducing the costs of computer technologies for the purpose of making them available to large markets. His work featured a concern for the social impact of technology. The Community Memory project, begun as a project of Resource One, Inc. in 1972 and later incorporated in 1977 by Felsenstein with Efrem Lipkin and Ken Colstad, was one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in such places as Berkeley supermarkets to attract casual use by persons from all walks of life passing through and facilitate social interactions among non-technical individuals, in the era before the Internet.
Felsenstein was influenced in his philosophy by the works of Ivan Illich, particularly "Tools for Conviviality" (Harper and Row, 1973). This book advocated a "convivial" approach to design which allowed users of technologies to learn about the technology by encouraging exploration, tinkering, and modification. Felsenstein had learned about electronics in much the same fashion, and summarized his conclusions in one of several aphorisms, to wit - "In order to survive in a public-access environment, a computer must grow a computer club around itself." Others were - "To change the rules, change the tools," and "If work is to become play, then tools must become toys."
Felsenstein was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, which formed in 1975 in response to the appearance of the Altair 8800 computer kit. With a handy yard stick, Felsenstein "moderated" meetings at the SLAC Auditorium. He was less a chair than a keeper of chaos. In this heyday of the development of the first personal computers, Felsenstein designed the Intel 8080 based "SOL" computer from Processor Technology, the PennyWhistle modem, and other early "S-100 bus" era designs. These existed in a market space with early generation hobbyist microcomputers from Altair, IMSAI, Morrow Designs, Cromemco, and other vendors. Felsenstein's shared-memory alphanumeric video display design, the Processor Technology VDM-1 video display module board, was widely copied and became the basis for the standard display architecture of personal computers.
Felsenstein was the designer of the Osborne 1, the first mass produced portable computer.
In 1998, Felsenstein founded the Free Speech Movement Archives as an online repository of historical information relating to that event, its antecedents and successors.
In 2003, while working with the Jhai Foundation of San Francisco, he designed an open-source telecommunications and computer system for installation in remote villages in the developing world. This system was dubbed "the Pedal-Powered Internet" by The New York Times Magazine due to its reliance on pedal power generation. Installation of the first system in Laos was unsuccessful, but the design has been tested on an Indian reservation in the US and continues in development in India. In 2003, Felsenstein was named a Laureate of The Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose, California) for this work.
Felsenstein has also been named a "Pioneer of the Electronic Frontier" in 1994 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and in 2007, he was named the "Editor's Choice" in the Awards for Creative Excellence made by EE Times magazine.
Felsenstein is the Founding Sensei of the HackerDojo in Mountain View, California, and was featured on a Fox News segment in late 2009 covering the non-profit facility.
Felsenstein's older brother is the evolutionary biologist Joseph Felsenstein, a National Academy of Sciences member whose PHYLIP system was one of the earliest examples of bioinformatics. Early versions of PHYLIP were developed on the "SOL" and Osborne 1, computers developed by Lee.
Read more about this topic: Lee Felsenstein
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.”
—Richard Blake, and William Cameron Menzies. Narrator, Invaders from Mars, at the opening of the movie (1953)
“Innocence is lovely in the child, because in harmony with its nature; but our path in life is not backward but onward, and virtue can never be the offspring of mere innocence. If we are to progress in the knowledge of good, we must also progress in the knowledge of evil. Every experience of evil brings its own temptation and according to the degree in which the evil is recognized and the temptations resisted, will be the value of the character into which the individual will develop.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)
“There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)