Sindhu, Pradeep oral history | 102738120

Description

This oral history captures the fascinating story of Pradeep Sindhu’s professional journey from an itinerant life in India to becoming one of Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs. Pradeep’s father was in the Army, so the family moved every couple of years for most of his early years. He was always fascinated with how things worked, constantly taking things apart or building new things with mechanical assembly toys.

He attended IIT in Kanpur at the age of 15. It was there that he was first introduced to computers and was fascinated by these wonderful machines. He eventually switched his focus from electrical engineering to computer science. From IIT, he moved onto the University of Hawaii to study communication theory. From there he earned a scholarship at CMU, where he finished his PhD in the study of distributed operating systems.

Upon graduation, he received offers from Bell Labs, IBM and other prestigious research organizations, but chose to go to Xerox PARC in 1984. He found the people, working style and projects to be most to his liking. While there, the primary project was called “Dragon” – an effort to build a 100 MIPs personal computer. This project involved a multiprocessor design, several custom chips, as well a major innovations in the operating system and software.

Before that large project was complete there was an opportunity to take what they had done and learned to date and help Sun Microsystems get into the multiprocessor server market. A joint program was formed and the result was a major new product for Sun.

After returning to PARC he realized that Xerox was not likely going to provide the kind of environment to accomplish his personal goals, so he decided to take an entrepreneurial path to build a company which could make a substantial contribution to the industry.

So in June of 1995, he took a leave of absence from Xerox and put together the plans for a new company, Juniper Networks, which took advantage of the explosive growth of the Internet by developing a unique router architecture to address a critical bottleneck in that network. The company was phenomenally successful. Pradeep goes into some detail about how the company was formed, managed, and the critical decisions which were made along the way which propelled its success.

Date

2016-04-25

Participants

Hancock, Marguerite Gong, interviewer

Sindhu, Pradeep S., interviewee

Weber, Marc, interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Duration

02:31:54

Format

MOV

Collection Title

CHM oral history collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X7781.2016

Artifact Details

Title

Catalog Number

Type