The Richard Sites papers, which range in date from 1967 to 1997, consist of materials that Sites collected during his professional career. Materials include manuals and reference guides, newspaper and magazine clippings, periodicals, and newsletters. About a third of the collection consists of manuals and user guides from companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), International Business Machines (IBM), Burroughs, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Cray Research Inc. Another third of the papers is made up of newspaper and magazine clippings, most of which pertain to the introduction of the Alpha architecture and microprocessors, as well as other projects that Sites worked on at DEC during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The collection also includes a number of periodicals and newsletters, such as Digital Technical Journal, Microprocessor Report, Forefront, Byte, and DEC Professional, most of which relate to Sites’ work at DEC. Also included in the papers are some marketing materials, correspondence, memos, and internal reports from DEC and IBM. Finally, the collection contains three VHS tapes, 1 CD for iPods, and a small number of photographs.
Biographical/Historical Note
Richard (Dick) Sites is a computer architect, software engineer, and professor of computer science who is considered to be one of the fathers of computer architecture and is known for co-architecting the Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha computers.
Sites earned a BS in Mathematics from MIT in 1969, studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 to 1970, and earned a PhD in Computer Science in 1974, where Don Knuth was his advisor. During his time as a student, he worked at several companies including IBM, Burroughs, and Hewlett-Packard.
In 1976, Sites became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of California, San Diego, where he taught until 1980. From there, he took a job as a corporate consultant engineer at DEC, where he stayed through 1996. While at DEC, he focused on VAX microcode, Alpha architecture, binary translation, and address tracing. One of his notable accomplishments was co-designing the 64-bit Alpha RISC chip with Rich Witek, which debuted in 1992.
After leaving DEC, Sites worked as an Adobe Fellow at Adobe systems, a senior staff engineer at Google from 2004 to 2016, and a visiting professor at National University of Singapore in 2016. Sites holds over 60 United States patents for hardware and software and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
This folder contains a letter from David Egan to Dick Sites thanking him for being a Digital NEWSmaker and awarding him with a commemorative plaque. It also contains a shipping receipt.