Chang, Szu-Chi Thomas oral history | 102738736

Description

Szu-Chi Chang was born in 1934 in the city of Ningbo, Zhejiang province in China, and grew up in Shanghai during the occupation of China by Japan. Chang’s father was an engineer on a British ship and fled to Yunnan, but Chang and his mother could not make it across the border, and had to return to Shanghai, where his mother worked as a laborer to raise Chang and his sister. Chang’s father reunited with the family after the end of World War II and became Chief Engineer on a Nationalist government steamship. During the 1949 Communist Revolution, Chang’s family moved to Taipei, Taiwan. Chang attended National Taiwan University and graduated in 1956 with a degree in electrical engineering.
After 2 years of mandatory military service, Chang moved to the United States in 1958 to attend graduate school at Kansas State University. After receiving his master’s degree in EE in 1960, he started a job at RCA in Camden, New Jersey, where he tested computers. Despite his poor English, Chang was able to be successful because his manager at RCA was also Chinese. Chang went back to school to obtain a Ph.D. studying computer science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963, where he met his wife, also a Chinese immigrant from Taiwan. Upon finishing his Ph.D. in 1967, Chang joined Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he joined a group doing research into building computers using the recently invented integrated circuits.
In 1969, Chang decided to move his family to southern California to avoid the dangers of East Coast winters, and joined XDS, formerly Scientific Data Systems that had now been acquired by Xerox, hired by his former Chinese manager at RCA. At XDS in El Segundo, Chang worked on the 500 Series of timesharing mainframes. The work was very high pressure as XDS was attempting to compete with IBM, and failing, leading to the closure of the division.
After this closure, Chang was transferred to Xerox PARC in September of 1975 to work on the later versions of the Alto, under Chuck Thacker. Chang moved his family north to Saratoga in Silicon Valley in 1976. At PARC, Chang was known to his colleagues as “Tommy.” Chang was greatly impressed by his colleagues at PARC, who could design both hardware and software. Chang helped implement Alto microcode based on specs by Thacker and Butler Lampson. Chang also worked on Alto bus systems, memory and cache systems, and an Ethernet controller. After helping to reimplement the Alto from ECL to TTL logic, Chang volunteered to maintain the SIL logic design program written by Bob Sproull, Chang’s first foray into software.
When Chuck Thacker joined Xerox SDD to create the D-series of computers, successors to the Alto, Chang came along and helped to work on the D0 (Dolphin), the Dorado, and the Dandelion, the basis for the Star 8010 workstation. One of Chang’s key contributions was a disk controller, which he designed with one other engineer working under him.
Due to stress dealing with his family’s health issues, Chang decided to leave Xerox in 1989. Chang worked at a computer division of IBM in San Jose from 1990 to 1996, leaving due to a round of mass layoffs. Chang found it difficult to find work over the age of 50, and worked various short-term technology jobs, including at various startups and a stint at LSI, until 2000, when he stopped looking and retired.

Date

2018-02-21

Participants

Chang, Szu-Chi Thomas, Interviewee

Fortier, James, Camera person

Hsu, Hansen, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Duration

01:58:40

Format

MOV

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X8501.2018

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