Oral History of Dave Ditzel

Описание: Interviewed by Kevin Krewell, on 2015-07-31 in Mountain View, California, X7554.2016
© Computer History Museum

David Ditzel was born in the mid-1950’s and grew up in the Midwest. He was a precocious child who was involved with electronics and then computing at a very early age. He was fixing neighbor’s TV sets while still in elementary school and wrote his first computer program in fifth grade. While in high school in Ames Iowa, he was able to work on the SYMBOL computer at the local University, a privilege normally accorded only graduate students and professors. Through this contact and studying the architectures of the microprocessors that were emerging, he had a very early introduction to the key concepts and tradeoffs in computer architecture.

His early accomplishments led him to a job at Bell Labs where he was the youngest engineer working with the team developing C and UNIX. Bell Labs subsequently sent him to UC Berkeley for graduate work where he developed a strong collaboration with Dave Patterson. They ended up co-authoring the seminal paper, “The Case for RISC”, where they laid out the advantages of a Reduced Instruction Set Computer architecture.

Ditzel later became CTO at Sun Microsystems where he led the development of several generations of SPARC processors. After Sun, he co-founded another processor company, Transmeta in 1995 where he served as CEO. He and his team raised over $250M in venture funding, but the company eventually failed due to manufacturing issues. Dave subsequently joined Intel, where, at the time of this oral history, he is Vice President of the Digital Enterprise Group and chief architect for Hybrid Parallel Computing.

Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - http://www.computerhistory.org/collec...

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Lot Number: X7554.2016
Catalog Number: 102737948