Brian's Brain

Welcome to my little corner of cyber-blog-space. I’m Brian Dipert, EDN’s technical editor for mass storage (HDDs, and optical discs and drives), multimedia technology (audio, displays, 2-D and 3-D graphics, and still and video imaging) and PC core logic and peripherals. I’ve been with EDN since January 1997, and until recently I also covered programmable logic and semiconductor memory. I'm also the author or co-author of four technical books.

Looking back, I realize that I was a budding engineer even as a young child growing up in Mishawaka, Indiana. Many of you can undoubtedly relate to my rabid fascination with the U.S. space program (Neil Armstrong’s ‘One step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ took place a few months beyond my 3rd birthday), aviation (I vividly remember a flight in a small airplane that my father arranged for he and I as a birthday present) and trains (I always insisted on waving to the engineer and conductor from our automobile as their cars passed by on the tracks in front of us). As I grew older, my involvement with technology became more intense and increasingly fraught with potential peril; for example, I recall a ‘shocking’ episode involving a wall socket and some wire my uncle the telephone electrician had given me, and an unsuccessful attempt to mate a portable record player and a clock radio (my initial experience with failed convergence).

My first love affair with the computer was in 7^th grade, and the object of my affection was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1; in high school I explored the capabilities of the Apple II. I studied Electrical Engineering at Purdue University beginning in the fall of 1984, and I graduated in December 1988. For about two years (cumulative) of that time, I was a co-op engineer working for Magnavox’s government defense division in Fort Wayne, Indiana (and going to night school at Indiana-Purdue University, Fort Wayne). Throughout college I was exposed to a diversity of computer systems; several different types of mainframes, IBM PC-XTs and PC-ATs, Apple Macintoshes, and the legendary Commodore VIC-20 and 64.

After graduating from college and prior to joining EDN, I worked at Intel’s Folsom, California facility for eight years, beginning in January of 1989. For the first year-and-a-half or so of that time, I was an applications engineer in the EPROM group where, among other things, I supported the company’s ill-fated Port Expander specialty memory experiment and wrote assembly code for Intel’s prom programmer systems on an ancient and enormous 8085 emulator run by an 8” floppy drive. I was one of the first transplants into the embryonic flash memory group and held a variety of positions during my time there; applications engineer and manager, chip design engineer, and development tools manager. Products I helped introduce include the 1 Mbit BootBlock memory (the first flash BIOS chip), Intel’s first 8 Mbit flash memory (notable for its world-rocking sub-$30 introductory price point) and a series of 16 Mbit flash memories with DRAM-emulating hardware interfaces and burst read access speeds. Peer inside the tuple structures of Intel’s Series 2 flash memory PCMCIA cards and you’ll find my initials, along with those of the other three engineers who designed the cards’ two control ASICs.

Off-hours in my Sacramento, California home office, my passions expand beyond technology to encompass music listening and recording, photography, reading, traveling and other hobbies. I’m an avid backpacker, mountain climber and trekker (when I can find the time and the fitness capability), a Soto Zen Buddhist practitioner, and my wife and I are the proud parents of five dogs and three cats. EDN’s search engine and Google are good ways to find my past writeups, and you can visit my personal home page to learn more about me, including journals and photos of my past trips to Africa, Nepal and elsewhere. You’ll probably notice it doesn’t include any recent outdoors adventures; a string of family health crises has kept me grounded for the past few years but I’m hoping that circumstances will allow me to re-engage with my travel passions going forward (and to pick up running again!).