Liddle, David oral history | 102792011

Description

David Liddle has had a rich and successful career as an engineer, business executive, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Born in 1945, he grew up in Michigan and received a BSEE from the University of Michigan. After graduation in 1968, he went on to work at Owens-Illinois in Toledo OH. He was attracted there to work on a plasma panel display, in a program partially funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). While working at O-I, Dave earned a PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Toledo.

His work on this new flat-panel display technology attracted the interest of other researchers, and he was enticed to come to the San Francisco Bay Area to work with Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, a pioneer in new forms of human-computer interaction.

However, upon arriving in the Bay Area, he was asked to make a presentation at Xerox PARC. Based on those interactions, he made a last-minute course correction and in 1972, joined PARC’s Systems Science Lab, working with Alan Kay and the Learning Research Group as well as with Bill English on the POLOS (PARC Online Office System) project.

In 1975, Liddle was asked to join a team headed by Harold Hall whose goal it was to identify potential products which capitalized on the work done at PARC. The result was the formation of the System Development Department in 1977 to create a Professional Workstation. David Liddle led that development effort. The team created not only a whole new hardware system, but a new operating system, network-based file system, and a range of pioneering WYSIWYG applications. The product was announced in 1981.

When Xerox decided to move the sales force for the product outside of their control, Mr. Liddle and his boss at the time, Don Massaro, left to form Metaphor Computer Systems in 1982. Metaphor was a startup focused on a workstation similar to Star, but with a different application target. Metaphor was sold to IBM in 1991.

In 1992, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, asked Liddle to become CEO of a new research company called Interval Research. The goal was to develop new technologies and either license them or spin them off as separate companies. The company was closed in 2000 and David Liddle moved on to become a venture capitalist at US Venture Partners.

Date

2020-02-04

Participants

Fairbairn, Doug, Interviewer

Hsu, Hansen, Interviewer

Liddle, David, Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA, USA

Duration

02:50:08

Format

MOV

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X9260.2020

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