The Extremely Unprofitable Transmeta
Dave Ditzel grew up in the American Midwest, a few minutes from Iowa State University. Both of his parents had university educations, and his father worked as a chemical engineer. His early interests in science and tinkering were encouraged by his parents, and he eventually started doing electronics repairs (mostly televisions) for neighbors. This eventually led to him having a decent collection of electronic components, and the young Ditzel became interested in amateur radio. By fifth grade, he had become interested in computer programming as well. He had a Teletype Model 33 and timeshare access, and the school computer had a BASIC interpreter. At the age of twelve, he built his own card punch and reader. By junior high, he had firmly established interests in both hardware and software, and this culminated in high school. Eight bit CPUs were commercially available, so he made his own logic board, memory board, storage system with cassettes, paper tape, and a keyboard. For this endeavor, BYTE magazine was his primary instruction manual. While tinkering on his own, he also picked up summer jobs at the University working on the SYMBOL computer system (started by Fairchild, but Fairchild cancelled it, and the machine ended up at Iowa State). This is a job he kept when began attending Iowa State University. He also worked with System 360, PDP-11, and a few other contemporary machines.
Around the time Ditzel was completing his undergraduate education, some recruiters from Bell Labs were on campus. He mentioned that he had an interest in building a computer for C programming, and they responded well. At that time, Bell had a group at Murray Hill in New Jersey working on that very same idea. Ditzel got the interview, and Bell offered to pay for his graduate education. At work, he was on a team of about thirty people. For graduate school, he attended U.C. Berkeley where he studied under the tutelage of Dave Patterson who had coined the term RISC and led the Berkeley RISC project.
