Artifact Details

Title

Sites, Richard oral history

Catalog Number

102740474

Type

Document

Description

Richard Sites is an American computer scientist. He showed early promise in technical subjects, writing his first program at age 10 on the ORACLE custom mainframe at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, original site of uranium production for the Manhattan Project. Sites worked every summer at a variety of companies, including IBM, Burroughs, Hewlett-Packard, as well as the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sites attended MIT, UNC, and Stanford University, graduating in 1974 with a PhD in computer science, under the direction of legendary professor Donald Knuth.

Sites became an assistant professor of computer science at UCSD, then moved to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where he was a key member of the Alpha microprocessor development team until 1996. The next year, he moved to Adobe, where he worked on Photoshop and Acrobat products. Finally, in 2004 he began working at Google on improving the performance of several key products, including Gmail and Search, via trace analysis of CPU, disk, and network metrics across Google's massive datacenter infrastructure. Since retiring in 2016, Sites has been a visiting professor and a consultant to Tesla Motors. He holds 66 US patents.

Date

2018-12-03

Contributor

Sites, Richard L., Interviewee
Spicer, Dag, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Extent

70 p.

Format

PDF

Category

Transcription

Subject

Oracle; Hewlett-Packard; MIT; University of Tenessee; IBM; Stanford University; Knuth, Donald; UCSD; Digital Computer Corporation (DEC); VAX; Adobe; Google

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X8868.2019

Related Records

102740475 Sites, Richard oral history