Page 20 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

Jim Williams

1. The Importance of Fixing

Fall 1968 found me at MIT preparing courses, negotiating thesis topics
with students, and getting my laboratory together. This was fairly unre-
markable behavior for this locale, but for a 20 year old college dropout
the circumstances were charged; the one chance at any sort of career. For
reasons I'll never understand, my education, from kindergarten to col-
lege, had been a nightmare, perhaps the greatest impedance mismatch in
history. I got hot. The Detroit Board of Education didn't. Leaving Wayne
State University after a dismal year and a half seemed to close the casket
on my circuit design dreams.
All this history conspired to give me an outlook blended of terror and
excitement. But mostly terror. Here I was, back in school, but on the
other side of the lectern. Worse yet, my research project, while of my
own choosing, seemed open ended and unattainable. I was so scared I
couldn't breathe out. The capper was my social situation. I was younger
than some of my students, and my colleagues were at least 10 years past
me. To call things awkward is the gentlest of verbiage.
The architect of this odd brew of affairs was Jerrold R. Zacharias,
eminent physicist, Manhattan Project and Radiation Lab alumnus, and
father of atomic time. It was Jerrold who waved a magic wand and got
me an MIT appointment, and Jerrold who handed me carte blanche a lab
and operating money. It was also Jerrold who made it quite clear that he
expected results. Jerrold was not the sort to tolerate looking foolish, and
to fail him promised a far worse fate than dropping out of school.
Against this background I received my laboratory budget request back
from review. The utter, untrammefed freedom he permitted me was main-
tained. There were no quibbles. Everything I requested, even very costly
items, was approved, without comment or question. The sole deviation
from this I found annoying. He threw out my allocation for instrument
repair and calibration. His hand written comment: "You fix everything."
It didn't make sense. Here I was, underpressure for results, scared to
pieces, and I was supposed to waste time screwing around fixing lab
equipment? I went to see Jerrold. I asked. I negotiated. I pleaded, I
ranted, and I lost. The last thing I heard chasing me out of his office was,
"You fix everything."
I couldn't know it, but this was my introduction to the next ten years.
An unruly mix of airy freedom and tough intellectual discipline that

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