Podcasts about Intergraph

In 1990 Assistant Commissioner Ray Shuey called Chief Inspector Rob Bailey to his office, as Rob had already managed one force-wide project called TRIM (the tape recording of formal interviews) in the 80”sRob was asked to select a group of selected people to investigate the potential to introduce Computer Aided Dispatch to the Victoria Police.Ultimately in 1996 Rob decommissioned D24 at Russell Street and a combined EMS was implemented at the Police Centre (in what was a car park) and at Tally Ho at Burwood.Rob was initially the Project Manager and at the end the project, after 6 years, was co-ordinator for the estimated cost of around $360m project;Rob talks about the great team & environment which was created & shares some stories about the evolution including the fact;· He was offered a bribe· he WITNESSED CORRUPTION· the difficulties in POLICE COMMAND NOT UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT;· THE EVALUATION PROCESS AND POLITICAL INTERFERENCE;· BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANS AND INTERRUPTIONS· FALSE ACCUSATION OF INTERGRAPH CAUSING DEATHS· FALSE INFORMATION PROVIDED TO THE CORONER· DEATH OF A WOMAN AND BABY· PERJURY AT THE CORONERS COURT· CORRUPTION AT TALLY HO CENTRE· The waste of time & resources into a ROYAL COMMISSION· MISINFORMATION BY THE MEDIA, PARTICULARLY 3AW Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today's episode of Elevate Your Career, Nicole talks to Colleen Wolf, a seasoned C-level executive with nearly two decades of experience. As a CIO, Colleen is an inspiring leader in the tech industry. Colleen holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Alberta.Colleen shares her remarkable career journey, starting from her early days in programming at Intergraph to her roles at renowned companies like IBM and Mattel, eventually rising to the esteemed position of CIO. She will be sharing key principles that contributed to her successful career in the tech industry. Throughout the episode, you'll learn about the need to create an environment for courageous conversations in the organization, how curiosity played a pivotal role in her ascent to the CIO position, and the benefits of leveraging "other person's point of view" (OPPOV) to advance your career.The conversation touches upon the common experience of imposter syndrome and self-doubt, with both Colleen and Nicole sharing personal stories. Colleen also discusses her approach to handling self-doubt. She emphasizes the need for continuous learning and adaptation of new technologies and industry trends. Finally, in the Fast Five segment, Colleen shares some quick insights. Plus, Colleen will share not just one, but two interesting fun facts about herself.Join Nicole and Colleen for an enlightening and enjoyable conversation about navigating the corporate world, fostering a culture of courageous conversations, and the power of curiosity in driving a successful career in technology leadership.Enjoy!What You Will Learn In This Show:Career elevation and courageous conversations.What inspired her to pursue a career in technology?How remote work and flexibility can benefit women in the workforce.A valuable strategy called O.P.P.O.V. Fostering courageous conversations in the workplace. Leveraging vendor partnerships. A key piece of advice for individuals starting their careers.And so much more...Resources:Nicole McMackin LinkedInLinkedIn | Colleen Wolf

Noopur Davis, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Security and Product Privacy Officer at Comcast, joins Ann on this week's episode of Afternoon Cyber Tea. Noopur oversees the full range of cybersecurity and product privacy functions for all Comcast Cable businesses, including all products and services delivered to residential and business customers. Before Comcast, she held various leadership and technical positions in Fortune 500 companies such as Intel, Chrysler, and Intergraph. Ann and Noopur discuss how current customer trends shape security, the telecom industry challenges, and Secure by Design and Secure by Default concepts. Resources:  View Noopur Davis on LinkedIn View Ann Johnson on LinkedIn  Related Microsoft Podcasts:                   The BlueHat Podcast Uncovering Hidden Risks    Security Unlocked     Security Unlocked: CISO Series with Bret Arsenault Secure the Job: Breaking into Security Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at microsoft.com/podcasts Afternoon Cyber Tea with Ann Johnson is produced by Microsoft and distributed as part of The CyberWire Network.

In this week's episode of Data Unlocked, Jason sits down with Aric Zion, CEO of Zion & Zion.Aric is an entrepreneur with decades of experience in marketing. He has several international experiences, including positions with Intergraph, where he was based in The Netherlands, and additional assignments with Nortel Networks where he was based in Tokyo, then London.Today, he is at the head of Zion & Zion, a full-service agency with a fully-staffed CDP practice. They pride themselves on meeting their clients at what they refer to as “the intersection of strategy and creativity.” Some of their biggest clients include Sun Health, Goodwill Industries, and Walmart.In this episode, Aric and Jason discuss Zion & Zion's work, how CDPs can transform businesses, how to build an effective CDP strategy, what an efficient CDP deployment looks like, the importance of using the right key dimensions to build your CDP strategy, and more.Are you ready?Let's dive in.Key Takeaways:Intro (00:00)Meet Aric (00:44)What are the key dimensions required to build an effective CDP strategy? (01:50)What an effective CDP deployment looks like (08:06)The questions to ask around support for data before working on your CDP strategy (14:50)If you had to have this conversation with anyone else, who would it be? (21:33)Additional Resources:Get in contact with Aric here.Learn more about Zion & Zion here.>>Learn more about us here.Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform!

All these new PC hardware announcements have us feeling nostalgic again, so we took another trip down memory lane to talk in-depth about the '90s 3D accelerator boom. The rise and fall of 3dfx! The OpenGL vs. Direct3D wars! All those .plan updates! Join us for some reminiscing about how we got from the earliest cards to the GeForces and Radeons of today.Computer Time vs. Human TimeSupport the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

durée : 00:08:34 - Des vies françaises - par : Charlotte PERRY - Mohamed Amaghar était ingénieur commercial pour l'entreprise Intergraph pendant 20 ans, de 1997 à 2017. Mais au moment de signer son contrat d'embauche, son futur chef lui annonce "qu'il faudra changer de prénom". Un choc et une blessure pour ce citoyen français, qui le conduisent aujourd'hui à demander réparation.

Computing In Poland Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we're going to do something a little different. Based on a recent trip to Katowice and Krakow, and a great visit to the Museum of Computer and Information Technology in Katowice, we're going to look at the history of computing in Poland. Something they are proud of and should be proud of. And I'm going to mispronounce some words. Because they are averse to vowels. But not really, instead because I'm just not too bright. Apologies in advance. First, let's take a stroll through an overly brief history of Poland itself. Atilla the Hun and other conquerors pushed Germanic tribes from Poland in the fourth century which led to a migration of Slavs from the East into the area. After a long period of migration, duke Mieszko established the Piast dynasty in 966, and they created the kingdom of Poland in 1025, which lasted until 1370 when Casimir the Great died without an heir. That was replaced by the Jagiellonian dynasty which expanded until they eventually developed into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. Turns out they overextended themselves until the Russians, Prussians, and Austria invaded and finally took control in 1795, partitioning Poland. Just before that, Polish clockmaker Jewna Jakobson built a mechanical computing machine, a hundred years after Pascal, in 1770. And innovations In mechanical computing continued on with Abraham Izrael Stern and his son through the 1800s and Bruno's Intergraph, which could solve complex differential equations. And so the borders changed as Prussia gave way to Germany until World War I when the Second Polish Republic was established. And the Poles got good at cracking codes as they struggled to stay sovereign against Russian attacks. Just as they'd struggled to stay sovereign for well over a century. Then the Germans and Soviets formed a pact in 1939 and took the country again. During the war, Polish scientists not only assisted with work on the Enigma but also with the nuclear program in the US, the Manhattan Project. Stanislaw Ulam was recruited to the project and helped with ENIAC by developing the Monte Carlo method along with Jon Von Neumann. The country remained partitioned until Germany fell in WWII and the Soviets were able to effectively rule the Polish People's Republic until a socal-Democratic movement swept the country in 1989, resulting in the current government and Poland moving from the Eastern Bloc to NATO and eventually the EU around the same time the wall fell in Berlin. Able to put the Cold War behind them, Polish cities are now bustling with technical innovation and is now home some of the best software developers I've ever met. Polish contributions to a more modern computer science began in 1924 when Jan Lukasiewicz developed Polish Notation, a way of writing mathematical expressions such that they are operator-first. during World War II when the Polish Cipher Bureau were the first that broke the Enigma encryption, at different levels from 1932 to 1939. They had been breaking codes since using them to thwart a Russian invasion in the 1920s and had a pretty mature operation at this point. But it was a slow, manUal process, so Marian Rejewski, one of the cryptographers developed a card catalog of permutations and used a mechanical computing device he invented a few years earlier called a cyclometer to decipher the codes. The combination led to the bomba kryptologiczna which was shown to the allies 5 weeks before the war started and in turn led to the Ultra program and eventually Colossus once Alan Turing got a hold of it, conceptually after meeting Rejewski. After the war he became an accountant to avoid being forced into slave cryptographic work by the Russians. In 1948 the Group for Mathematical Apparatus of the Mathematical Institute in Warsaw was formed and the academic field of computer research was formed in Poland. Computing continued in Poland during the Soviet-controlled era. EMAL-1 was started in 1953 but was never finished. The XYZ computer came along in 1958. Jack Karpiński built the first real vacuum tube mainframe in Poland, called the AAH in 1957 to analyze weather patterns and improve forecasts. He then worked with a team to build the AKAT-1 to simulate lots of labor intensive calculations like heat transfer mechanics. Karpinski founded the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He would win a UNESCO award and receive a 6 month scholarship to study in the US, which the polish government used to spy on American progress in computing. He came home armed with some innovative ideas from the West and by 1964 built what he called the Perceptron, a computer that could be taught to identify shapes and even some objects. Nothing like that had existed in Poland or anywhere else controlled by communist regimes at the time. From 65 to 68 he built the KAR-65, even faster, to study CERN data. By then there was a rising mainframe and minicomputer industry outside of academia in Poland. Production of the Odra mainframe-era computers began in 1959 in Wroclaw, Poland and his work was seen by them and Elwro as a threat do they banned him from publishing for a time. Elwro built a new factory in 1968, copying IBM standardization. In 1970, Karpiński realized he had to play ball with the government and got backing from officials in the government. He would then designed the k-202 minicomputer in 1971. Minicomputers were on the rise globally and he introduced the concept of paging to computer science, key in virtual memory. This time he recruited 113 programmers and hardware engineers and by 73 were using Intel 4004 chips to build faster computers than the DEC PDP-11. But the competitors shut him down. They only sold 30 and by 1978 he retired to Switzerland (that sounds better than fled) - but he returned to Poland following the end of communism in the country and the closing of the Elwro plant in 1989. By then the Personal Computing revolution was upon us. That had begun in Poland with the Meritum, a TRS-80 clone, back in 1983. More copying. But the Elwro 800 Junior shipped in 1986 and by 1990 when the communists split the country could benefit from computers being mass produced and the removal of export restrictions that were stifling innovation and keeping Poles from participating in the exploding economy around computers. Energized, the Poles quickly learned to write code and now graduate over 40,000 people in IT from universities, by some counts making Poland a top 5 tech country. And as an era of developers graduate they are founding museums to honor those who built their industry. It has been my privilege to visit two of them at this point. The description of the one in Krakow reads: The Interactive Games and Computers Museum of the Past Era is a place where adults will return to their childhood and children will be drawn into a lots of fun. We invite you to play on more than 20 computers / consoles / arcade machines and to watch our collection of 200 machines and toys from the '70's-'90's. The second is the Museum of Computer and Information Technology in Katowice, and the most recent that I had the good fortune to visit. Both have systems found at other types of computer history museums such as a Commodore PET but showcasing the locally developed systems and looking at them on a timeline it's quickly apparent that while Poland had begun to fall behind by the 80s, it was more a reflection of why the strikes throughout caused the Eastern Bloc to fall, because Russian influence couldn't. Much as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth couldn't support Polish control of Lithuania in the late 1700s. There were other accomplishments such as The ZAM-2. And the first fully Polish machine, the BINEG. And rough set theory. And ultrasonic mercury memory.

In this episode of UAB Green & Told, we sit down with Tammi Thomas, a former Blazer athlete and current member of the UAB National Alumni Society Board of Directors. Tammi's path to UAB wasn't conventional. In fact, it wasn't even close to happening at all. Find out what led her to change her path and what challenges she faced as a student-athlete.

#GeorgeDziedzic spent his career in the channel, building Intergraph into a channel powerhouse. He founded and ran #FosterMcCallum helping start ups to the likes of #Cisco and #IBM build their channels by partnering with & onboarding the #rightpartners. Building on good decisions early in the relationship, George helped his client develop an ecosystem that serves both vendor and partners We focus on the ultimate objectives of growth, profitability, risk minimisation, speed-to-market and rapidly building critical mass We explore each phase of the lifecycle of a partner network, from conception and recruitment, to management and restructuring, as well as providing partner and partner manager training We discuss sales, accountability, codeveloping solutions, coopetition, partner with partner collaborations This interview is packed with valuable insights and advice for anyone considering developing a channel or wanting to work out why their channel isn't working and wanting to revitalise it - - I am looking for beta testers for 2 channel sales training programmes 1-day bootcamp - Channel Sales Excellence (for vendor channel managers) 3-day bootcamp - The Road to Channel Sales Excellence (for vendors to work with their best partners collaboratively to help both sides make considerably more money and build deeper understanding) We are offering 2 for the price of 1 for both programmes If you are interested in learning more about these programmes please call me on 07515 937221 or email me on mcauchi@sandler.com Thank you for listening. Please comment, like and share this episode and subscribe to listen to the other interviews 

Episode 170 is Jeff Robertson. Jeff is the General Manager of Pubilc Safety for RapidSOS. RapidSOS works to integrate a rich data link into every 9-1-1 Center nationwide. Jeff provides us with the interesting story behind the creation of RapidSOS, the technology, real-world use of RapidSOS, and the companies outside of public safety using RapidSOS's technology. Jeff has 19 plus years in the public safety working with 911 centers. Over the course of his career, Jeff's roles have included CEO of three 9-1-1 technology companies, executive director and original founding board member of the 9-1-1 Industry Alliance, VP and General Manager of Public Safety for Intergraph, consultant, and author.

Chris Gardner is organizing the DevSpace conference. This episode is sponsored by Smartsheet. Show Notes: Redstone Arsenal is a U.S. Army post The U.S. Space & Rocket Center is in Huntsville Company mentioned: Intergraph & Hexagon The "hallway conference" is a term referring the elements of a conference that take place outside of the normal breakout sessions. Follow-up conversations, networking, maybe even impromptu learning and hacking. We talked briefly about embedded development. Be sure to listen to Episode 083 with James Munns For another episode about conferences, be sure to check out Episode 040 with Matthew Revell The University of Alabama in Huntsville Other conference mentioned: Code PaLOUsa and THAT Conference "Gaines" was also mentioned. This is Gaines Kergosien, the director of Music City Tech, where this episode was recorded. And last but not least, Chris’s conference: DevSpace Chris Gardner is on Twitter. Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical. Music is by Joe Ferg, check out more music on JoeFerg.com!

Charles Pfeil and Judy take a look back on the days of manual design, before exploring today’s very different eCAD competitive landscape and the tools that take designers to the next level. Join Altium’s Judy Warner and Charles Pfeil for a conversation on PCB design, autorouters and the future of software design tools.   Show Highlights: Introducing the iconic and award-winning Charles Pfeil Tape ups and touch ups with red pen precision Artistry not OCD, PCB design for form and function Charles on joining Altium and Activeroute “You know we’re paid by the hour, right?!” Where are we going to be in 10 years?   Links and Resources: Charles Pfeil and Happy Holden at AltiumLive A lifetime designing PCBs: Surprising acquisition brings stability A lifetime designing PCBs: Focus on functional specs A lifetime deisgning PCBs: early design adventures Job Shopper to Service Bureau Changing Roles Switching to eCAD From Design to Software Merging Design and Fabrication An Excellent History of CAD Improving Autorouting and Design Software See all of Charles Pfeil’s articles on EDN here Hey everybody, Judy Warner here, Director of Community Engagement for Altium. Welcome to the OnTrack Podcast. If this is your first time listening, we're glad to have you. If you're returning, we're happy to have you back. The OnTrack podcast is produced every week, so please add the OnTrack podcast to your favorite RSS feeds or iTunes. You can also follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter @AltiumJudy, and be sure to follow Altium on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. So let's get into the show. Well, I have a treat for you today. I have a guest, Charles Pfeil, who is, he won't say it but I will, he's iconic in the industry and we're gonna talk a little bit about the history of routing. So, I want to tell you a little bit about Charles, forgive me for reading here for a moment. Charles has been in the PCB industry for over 50 years as a designer and owner of a service bureau and has worked in marketing and engineering management at Racal Redac, ASI, Cadence, PADS, VeriBest, and Mentor Graphics, so pretty much everybody, and now Altium. He was inducted into the PCB Design Hall of Fame through UP Media in 2013 for his contribution to PCB design software. Charles has been working at Altium since 2015 as a Senior Product Manager. So, welcome Charles, we always have a blast when we talk together, so thanks for doing this adventurous podcast with me. You're welcome, glad to be here. So, you are on the other side of the country from me right now. I'm here in La Jolla as you know and I get to see you sometimes once a month, and you and I have had some interesting conversations here in the office, kind of a shared belief that we're sort of losing some of the history, right? Of our industry, particularly design, sort of where we've come from and where we're going, and I really value people like you, Happy Holden, Lee Ritchie, these people in the industry really that carry this whole history inside of them, so I'm always happy to have a chance to sort of glean some of that from you and you've told me some great stories, so thank you again for doing this. So, how I met Charles was when I was a journalist from iConnect 007 and I interviewed him to learn about ActiveRoute, which was a new product for Altium at the time, and just sort of casually at the end of the conversation I mentioned to Charles "So, what's your history?" not knowing who Charles was and then, out he comes with the history of PCB design. So yeah. I felt like a knucklehead, but it ended up being a good article, so you were a good sport. So let's start talking about where at least you and I remember things which is tape-up. So, tell us about your earliest memories of doing tape-ups and what that was like and sort of what some of the problems were. Okay, well my first job, I worked inspecting Rubyliths, and at that time the way that people routed boards was to essentially cut away the things that they didn't want, so what was left was the routing. So there's a process in which they used an exacto knife and my job was to look for scratches on the Rubylith and patch them up, and I would have to say from that to what we do today is a tremendous change, and it went through an evolution where for manual design that the methods changed, the materials changed, and also the complexity of the design changed, and the same thing has happened once we started working with computers to design, right? The materials change in the sense of the board materials. The methods change in that there's constantly an evolution of how much the software is able to do to help the designer, but just a note on the manual design and where this term 'artwork' came from. That, the interconnect would be done by drawing it, right? Usually with red and blue pencils and most of the designs are two layers, and you would try and interconnect them and, you know, erase a line if it doesn't work out, but generally, you know, the type of components back then were DIP high C's if you had any at all, and it was, it was fairly simple and you could draw with red and blue pencils what you wanted and then you would either use black tape or red and blue tape in order to create an artwork that would be used in fabrication in order to get the design made. Well, there were many different styles when you get to the artwork side. Some people like to use the black tape and create curves and arcs on everything, and some would not care about concentric arts, others, like me, would be very OCD and want to make every single corner perfect and make it look like some kind of art. It's not really art, but it's just the implication is that the person who's doing it is really caring about how it looks. Absolutely, which by the way, one question I want ask you I know the answer to but I think the listeners will appreciate, what were you touching up that Rubylith with? Just a red pen. Yeah, a red pen. I would just, because I had a magnifying glass to find the scratches 'cause with an exacto knife they would be really small, you know nicks. Right. And, so I'd go through looking at it with a magnifying glass and then use a red pen to fill it in so that there's no place with the light to shine through, because the way they were doing it back then, if enough light shined through then there'd be a hole in the mask for etching the board. Yep. Which could, what would that- Well, you'd have a- -well, it could have an open, well you'll have an open if the scratch went all the way across, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So anyways, continue on. I just- Yeah. It's okay. -it's just a funny thing, like, when I think of how much precision we have now, to think of us touching up artwork with red pens just cracks me up. Yeah, yeah, and when using black tape I think it was common to start out with arcs and you'd do that by kind of using the knife to create a little cinch in the corner, but eventually arcs became the less productive method, let's put it that way, and so you would start making 45-degree corners by just cutting maybe three quarters of the tape and folding it over to create a corner, and so then the art was to make sure that everything was right on the grid, and when you did a 45 it'd be perfectly 45, and it got kind of excessive, but when computers came. Yeah. That's where it changed, and I do have an experience in that area when my service bureau switched to computer design as opposed to manual design. So you were right in that transition then, you went on your service bureau right from Rubylith black tape right into computer-aided design. Yeah, from tape-ups in 1978, from tape-ups to computer design, and that was a Racal-Redec system, and I lost all my customers because the only customers who wanted the computer design were people who already had it themselves. Most people who didn't have computer systems, they didn't trust it. We would give them plotted artwork and they couldn't edit it, so as a service bureau, I had to go out and find customers who not only used computers but Racal-Redec computers. So was Racal-Redec's price point, was there a barrier to entry there, kind of for that kind of system for OEMs? Sure. So, I bought two used systems, you know with a basic vector graphics monitor, PDP1134 with the software. I bought two used systems for, I think, my memory is not great on this, but I think it was around $125,000. Holy cow, that's a lot. It was a lot. For used. It was an investment and it paid off over time. I did increase my price per IC by a factor of 10. Wow. -which helps, you know, because you gotta pay for the apartment, but that's what happened in the industry. So, routing in a computer system was different because with the computer of course you're effectively laying down the edge as you route as opposed to going through a stage and sketching the, you know, red and blue pencils Right. -but, so interactive routing was really, click-click click-click at every corner, okay? And if you wanted to make a change then you would either delete those and reroute it or some more sophisticated systems allows you to move the track around, and it was either that or autorouting and at that time autorouting, well it hasn't changed much but autorouting was primarily just an X&Y; exercise and adding a lot of vias. In a sense it was similar to the way that I see routing. I see routing doesn't care about vias and they just, whenever you got to make a change in direction you just pop a via and go, and with printed circuit board autorouters that's what they would do. They didn't care about how many vias you added and really vias, the only problem with vias back then was the cost of drilling them. Right. At that time there was, wasn't. Yeah, it was nominal. It, yeah, well the cost was still there, but in terms of vias affecting the high-speed behavior- Right, uh-huh. -there weren't high-speed designs. There were companies of course who were doing that, but vias didn't become a cost for signaling performance. Right. So, people still didn't like vias. They could see with their mind that, "Hey I could route that without vias" so they would rather just go ahead and route it without vias, and so even though autorouters, every company tried to come out with the ultimate autorouter, and it could never match what the designer was thinking or what the designer really wanted as a final result, and I'd say generally that's been the problem with autorouting. Too many vias, not really ending up with a route path that the designer had in his mind, and also the most common thing I hear is that it would take more time to clean it up than it would to just route it manually. Now I remember back in my early fabrication days knowing designers that would autoroute a portion, say 60% of the board they would autoroute, and then they'd do all the rest by hand. Was that because of what you're talking about or was that just the speed to design at the time? That would be a method. There's so many different ways of approaching it, but a method would be to route the critical signals first manually, and then just give it to the autorouter to finish everything else, because that would save time. Now, autorouters evolved. The early autorouters really didn't care about anything but is there an open channel and is there space for a via, right? Then it evolved over time where there is a recognition that, well what can we do to try and eliminate vias, and I say eliminate because they would route with vias and then they'd have a pass to remove vias if they can, right? So, but it really wasn't fundamentally in the algorithm of the router to try and route without vias. Now, a number of autorouters gave the designer control, like CCT with a DO file where you could, you could put costs on the router to try and minimize vias, but it was difficult. You really had to be an expert and I went to a number of companies where they had one person who was the router specialist and the designers would place the board and then send it to the router specialist who would do the automatic routing and that person would know how to set it up and it would be pretty good, but when it came back there still had to be a quite a bit of editing. Who was, who created the best sort of autorouter of that time, and what kind of time frame are we talking about now, as we're moving forward? Yeah, I would say, well it depends on who you talk to, okay, because- Everybody has their favorites, right? -everybody has their favorite. So I would say though, obviously the Cooper Chan Technology, CCT. Their autorouter was the favorite, especially among Mentor, Cadence, PADS. Those companies all had interfaces to it and relied upon to do their autorouting, but once CCT was bought by Cadence for a measly four hundred and thirty or four hundred and fifty million dollars- Whoa. -whoa. All the other companies, Mentor, Very Best, and also PADS felt "whoops we can't go down this road" because, as usually happens in a competitive environment, those who have a relationship with one of their competitors, it's possible that that relationship could diminish over time. Right of course, and we have to remind listeners right now that at that time PADS was not part of Mentor. Correct. Correct. Neither was Very Best. Very Best, right, so it was a whole different environment. So Very Best, they had autorouting capability and it was different. It was, it had some different data structures and different algorithms and actually that was one of the primary reasons why Mentor bought Very Best, was for that autorouting capability. Oh, okay interesting. See, I love, I mean, people that are around our ages know this but so many now that are, I don't know maybe 40 and under don't. You know that how, this used to be a, there used to be more than three or four players in this space, right? Sure, sure. And we kind of all, ate each other up until we have what we have today. I would say the 90's and early 2000's there were so many mergers and acquisitions. Yeah. Unbelievable-Unbelievable. -and you know, I went from Intergraph to PADS to Very Best to Mentor, right? And then now I'm at Altium, and looking at the evolution and the tools over that time the autorouter was a key thing, but realistically designers still preferred to route it just by themselves and manually, right? It's true. It's, it really has a lot to do with what the designer thinks about when they're placing the board. They know that a certain bus needs to go in a certain direction on a certain layer, and to set up those kind of controls and cost adjustments for an autorouter is a lot of work and it requires a lot of knowledge about the core capabilities. So, I think routing in general after, yeah after CCT was bought started turning in a different direction where rather than just autorouting, let's see what we can do to give the designer the kind of control with interactive routing that they want, and increase their performance. What can we do to increase the performance? Right, and is, tell me again now is this around the time that you joined Mentor's team? Yeah, I joined Mentor in 1998. Okay, so late 90's. Yeah, it was- And you helped, and you helped architect that vision right? Yeah, I was part of it. I mean- Part of it right, it's a team. -it's always a lot of people involved, and I was involved in it, and I always tried to put my designer perspective into it, right? And I think that's my contribution, is not only being able to work with the development people but to be able to communicate the knowledge and expectation of a designer so that the software that we develop is something that a designer would appreciate. Right, you had a designer- Not that.you had a designer brain so you knew, which by the way, as you, as you alluded to in the beginning, is an artistic brain, really. It's, there's a lot of creativity there and an appreciation for not only function but also aesthetics and to put things in really neat, tight patterns, or. Well, yeah- Yeah, you call it OCD but there's that. -there is that. You know, this is a topic that has come up quite a bit in the last 10 years and I like to say the following, that yeah there's that artistic side but ultimately I believe it's about efficiency. And in the context of CAD design, efficiency means that the routing is as direct as required, of course if you're doing some kind of, you know, tuning on it it's not going to be direct, you're adding lights to it, but you want it to be as direct as possible. You want to manage many more things than we had to manage, you know back in the 60's and 70's, right? Right, absolutely. Now you have to manage high-speed requirements, so you don't necessarily want to have everything tightly packed in parallel. I remember I was demonstrating some ActiveRoute capabilities to a high-speed product manager, probably a little over a year ago. And there was a bug in the routing where it was, it was kind of messy, you know and the high-speed engineer says, "Oh that's great!" Right? Because it would totally eliminate cross-talk, you know? Exactly. Yeah, so there has to be the balance and that fundamentally, that is the job of the designer. How do you figure out the compromises, right, to achieve the right balance where you fulfill manufacturing, you fulfill high-speed requirements, and ultimately the design works, right? And if it comes out looking where everything is nice and neat, that's a bonus because the next person who has to make edits on it - it'll be much easier, right? Right. And yeah, frankly most of time or many times if it's not a high-speed net, those geometries don't matter so much, but if it doesn't take any extra time to make it nice and neat what's the problem with it? Yeah, I get what you're saying, yeah. There's sort of some elegance about the design, and like you said, many boards go into respins and you're not always doing that on your own work, so that totally makes sense. So, you joined Altium what two years ago about, approximately? Yeah, in May of 2016, excuse me, 2015. 2015, and so you've been working on ActiveRoute here, so what, you know, you've always throughout your whole career been pushing for trying to make things better, what are you trying to accomplish sort of on the work you're working on now, on the ActiveRoute? Yeah, so it is one of a number of things that I have worked on, but I would say most of my time has been spent on ActiveRoute, and the intent of ActiveRoute is to give the designer another tool in their interactive tool set, okay? It's not for everything, but the intent is that when you have a group of signals that you want to route together, whether it be, you know, a bus or just individual nets that start and end in approximately the same place, I want to give the designer the ability to just, through a couple simple clicks, have those routes the way that he's thinking, okay? And what is the designer thinking? That's the key. But I would say that, you know, it, with most boards is pretty clear. You see the connections, that's where they start and end, and I'm looking for a tool that can allow that designer to just select those connections and have it route on the layers that he wants them on, ability to spread them out, ability to pack them together. These little techniques are there as options so that ultimately it looks like he would do manually. It's not a replacement for interactive routing, it's instead an accelerator. Oh, okay. By the way, along the lines of accelerator, I was talking to somebody, I have to share this story with you, I was talking to a designer and he was telling me that he was sitting in your session at AltiumLive where I think you were showing ActiveRoute, and he said someone in the room said, "You know we're paid by the hour, right?" because it was making it more efficient, so I think that's a compliment to you Charles, to the work you're doing. There is that trade-off, but that's been there forever, that designers fear being replaced by the computer, right? Right, so that's gonna be my next question, just, so get ready about, to talk to me about AI and designers being replaced. Okay, well, we can go there now. Okay, you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. So, I know there is this fear or I've heard there's fears of designers being replaced by AI or computers and all that. So, what say you, Charles Pfeil? Well, I say that it's going to be a while, all right? If you can imagine all the energy and all the time and talent that has been focused on auto routing over the years since, you know you have companies like ASI in the 60's, late 60's had automatic routing for IBM, okay on mainframes- Oh I didn't know that. - and, you know, programming it with punch cards. So, from there until now the ability to get autorouting to succeed has failed all right? And this is just- Or has it gotten us there since the 1960's, right? We're still not, you know. It's not there, and generally designers have rejected it and it's not because they're afraid they're going to lose their job. And, besides that, like I say usually, you don't sell these tools directly to the designer, you sell it to their manager, and if they can get the job done faster they're all for it okay? Right, right. But the problem is that it hasn't been adequate, the autorouting capability. It's a tough, tough problem. Every design is different, right? It's different. And- And it's very, and because of that it's such a complex brain task, really. Right, and there are standard circuits, of course you know, standard interfaces and memory circuits that need to be routed the same way, but then the placement's different, the board size is bigger or smaller or a different aspect ratio or it's flex or, you know, could be a lot of different variables. There's many, many more variables right now, too. So, to fully automate that is going to take a completely different perspective for design I believe, and it's going to take a huge investment, and the interesting thing is okay in ten years, let’s suppose somebody started on- You know, are you reading my mind? My next question was gonna be where are we gonna be in ten years Charles? So- Yeah, exactly. Let's suppose somebody started a project to use AI and that's in the, in the context of doing machine learning and analyzing databases and building decision trees, and even if you got that working over five of those ten years, a lot of the things will change. They'll evolve and this is one reason why software vendors can't keep up with the technology. There's always something new, always something new and on our list of enhancements to work on, it's always the latest technology, right? And there's only so much we can do so we have to pick and choose which technology we're gonna focus on with each release. Well, and, I was just talking to Ben Jordan here about this. Well, until I came here, since I came from the board and assembly side, I had no real appreciation for the time and discipline it takes for development and for coding that software. It takes a lot of time and a lot of discipline to put in all these new features and we're so, sort of instant gratification, we're just like "oh, well, put it in your next release." Not so easy. Yeah, it's just a fact of life, and our customers, they want these things and we want to give them to them, but it has to be an evolution. So if a company decides okay we're going to use AI to automate the design process, sure they could analyze all the different types of designs and understand them and how to use them, but then when they start with a new design, how could an AI decide on its own what the board size should be? What the stack up should be? Whether or not to use micro vias? What are the critical signals? I guess it would have to be able to read a data sheet, that is hard enough for humans to read. That aren't always accurate, may I add. Yeah, that's true. I mean, most of the time they are, but. I'm not saying it's not possible, it certainly is possible. But, it's going to be a long time. Yeah. And maybe, who knows, maybe MCM's will come back and we won't have printed circuit boards. There's always that possibility. Yeah, yeah. We just don't know, and the, even, you know, printing circuit boards - where is that technology going to be in 10 years? Exactly, yeah. 3D printing and there's, gosh, so much that they're grappling with, so who knows? Yeah, and the core problem is that a company is not going to design a product, let me rephrase that, a innovative company is not going to design a product that uses all these standards and circuit technology of the past. They have to have something new and different. Right. This is why Intel stays in business, and all the other chip manufacturers, because you know they need higher performance, they need more capabilities, and so it's a complete redesign except for like I say standard interface is a memory, that's not a redesign, until the next standard comes out, but those tend to last a couple years and then, you know, you look at memory DDR 2, 3 & 4 they just change over the years. And the interesting thing about, I wanted to comment here, about memory in terms of the PCB designer, the DDR2 circuit was the most difficult to route because of the T branching. Then the DDR3 came with the fly-by signal technology, that was much easier for the designer to work with as long as you have some kind of electrical signals, and DDR4 is really just a minor evolution, significant in terms of performance over the DDR3, so who knows where that's going next. Will the next phase be like the change between DDR2 and 3? I don't know. They have the specs for DDR5 and I'm just unfamiliar with them. But, so technology will continue to change. Maybe AI will be able to support a segment at a time, and I know that there's people in the industry who are talking about this and wanting to do something with it, but I'm unaware of a officially funded project to do it at this time. I'm with you there, and I would think you would hear about it from your connections, I don't know. Maybe, we don't know. And would a company you know like Cadence or Altium or Mentor fund a project that they know is going 2 to 3 years and maybe, maybe not work? It's a risk. A potential risk, so. Yeah, so I would say to all the designers who are concerned about losing their job, don't worry. But what will be extremely important is that they make sure that they continue to be educated and understand the latest technology and what requirements those bring to the design process. Then you have your value. Yep. And you won't lose your job. And I would say to that, that almost through the OnTrack newsletter and now podcast I hear that message over and over and over again from leaders saying, "the key to my success was I continued to learn and evolve" and so it's been great to talk with you Charles I always learn so much from you. I wanted to ask you one last question. I have this part of the podcast I like to call "Designer After Hours". I've just noticed a lot of designers have a creative bent and usually have some interesting hobby, so what are maybe one or two of your favorite hobbies? Well, I could list three, all right? Okay. One is playing golf. I love to play golf. Second would be, photography, taking pictures, mostly landscape pictures.You can see behind me a couple landscapes, but I like to say that I prefer landscapes because they don't move very much. I've tried to do a few weddings and it was a total disaster, so I'm just not that, but and then third I do write a lot and I've, you know, written poetry and I really enjoyed doing that, so those are the three things. Speaking of writing, I wanted to let our listeners know that Charles has written, which I'm delighted about my passion for history being preserved, how many parts are we now up to, ten? How many are we gonna finish at? Well, actually 8 of them have been published in EDN magazine. EDN Magazine, right, so there's a whole series of Charles' experience over all these years and goes into depth, so if you want to learn more please go to EDN.com and probably just search by Charles Pfeil and you'll find that. How many are you gonna, I know eight have been published, so how many- It'll be, eight have been published, I think it'll be twelve or thirteen in the end. Twelve total, okay. Okay, well thanks again Charles, we've gotta run, but I could, I'm never tired of talking to you. You're a dear and thank you so much for your contribution to the industry, and it's always great to talk to you. Well, that's all we have for today. Please remember to subscribe to the OnTrack podcast and follow us on social media, and remember to always stay OnTrack.

Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure’s technology is changing the way agencies respond to both planned and unplanned major events. Join us as we discuss Intergraph’s Planning and Response platform and its ability to help manage and streamline public safety concerns in real time.

Jack Williams of Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure talks to us about the all new Intergraph InSight Suite and its smart data tools.

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Intergraph®, a global leader in public safety solutions, and Esri®, a global leader in GIS technology, are collaborating to enhance geospatial capabilities for public safety and security agencies. Through the collaboration, the companies will work to more tightly align Intergraph’s Computer-Aided Dispatch system, I/CAD, and Esri’s ArcGIS® Platform.

Brad Ward, senior vice president of geospatial solutions for Intergraph Government Solutions discusses the role of activity based intelligence in national security and where Intergraph’s priorities lie.

Intergraph SG&I’s Senior Communications Manager, Matthias Alisch discusses the technology that won the 2013 innovation award for “Best Geospatial Product” and how this technology can improve business and government operations.

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