curiousmarc
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I have talked to Mr. Fancy Pants!
🕑 Added 2021-06-08 07:24:58 +0000 UTCI had a nice Zoom conference with Bob, the one and only "Mr. Fancy Pants". From the picture, one would expect a flashy personality, but he is in fact a straight talking and serious engineer, even a bit stern. He could rattle off the HP number of every instrument in the rack he is sitting in front of in the picture, and what each did.
For his first job, he wrote all the software to control this RF test rack, which happens to be a radio tester. He explained that this was one of the very first automated test systems using the newfangled HP-IB bus (still with us today under the GPIB moniker), and that it used almost every instrument that had HP-IB capability at the time.
He fondly recalled how powerful the HPL language of the HP 9825 was. To him, it is better than BASIC which would become prevalent later. Of course, he had many more accomplishments during his long career that spanned the HP, Agilent, and Keysight eras. He is now mostly retired, but still involved with Keysight. His title is Principal Engineer Emeritus. Title as fancy as the pants, if you ask me.
And yes, I had to ask about the famous pants. He gave me the scoop on the story behind it, but you'll have to wait for the video cut and for Bob to review and approve it, which I promised he'd be entitled to do.
Marc
Comments
CuriousMarc
I really like the idea! But that would cost a pretty penny and be a lot of effort if I had to acquire all the instruments in the rack just for a photo-shoot...
Jac Goudsmit
So will you be working on building a replica of Mr Fancy Pants' rack of HP stuff? Would be cool to take a "then vs. now" picture with Bob.
Graeme Hill
Thanks Marc for taking the time to chase this down. Looking forward to the video
