Visit from Don Gaubatz

After more than a decade of occasional emails about my Terak Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm/, yesterday I met with Don Gaubatz <dag at gaubatz.com>. He recently moved from outside Boston to Neenah, WI (45 minutes SE of Green Bay, at the top of that big lake on the left side of WI.) That puts him about two hours from me, or two hours from Madison. Formerly a VP at DEC, his groups in Palo Alto and Maynard delivered workstations based on the MIPS, VAX, and Alpha chips, as well as DEC's first 3D graphics and multimedia peripherals. Earlier at DEC, Gaubatz developed the first Ethernet and disk controllers for the MicroVAX. He's currently a consultant in the semiconductor industry. He's on the editorial board of Microprocessor Report, an semiconductor industry newsletter. He's on the board for NSF's sci-viz center, and a founding member of the Computer History Museum. We talked Terak for a few hours, looking over my docs and assembled hardware. It is always comforting to show my three-floor combo tree-fort / office / storage building and have someone say "Ah, yes, this looks like my place." Don said his computer stuff filled two 28-foot trailers in his move. The visit may spur me to update my inventory lists in order to better share docs and software with other Terak enthusiasts. Don would also like to track down ex-DEC people in Wisconsin, not to mention find the hidden caches of DEC equipment. - John