Dave Tutelman's Thumbnail Biography

Education

Job

• Hardware development. I did electronic engineering -- circuit development -- early in my career. Among the things I got to do was early work in the architecture of bit-sliced microprocessor chips, a field in which I hold a few patents.
• Software development. I have developed software for telephone switches, PBXs, mainframe computers, personal computers, and Internet servers. I have programmed at the machine-language level, and as machine-independent a level as Java. In fact, I have even developed a real-time-critical application in Java -- that was an interesting challenge.
• Technical management. I became a supervisor in 1968. Until about 1980, a first-level engineering supervisor at Bell Labs was mostly a project leader, a role I loved. Then, fairly suddenly, the management work ("bean-counting", schedule tracking, etc) expanded and drove out any technical work -- and even mentoring kinds of management. I discovered I really didn't like it, and consequently wasn't very good at it. One of the nice things about the Bell Labs culture is that it is possible to "resign your commision" and go back to being a techie. In 1986, I did that and have been smiling about my job ever since.
• The Internet. Anybody whose career was data communications from 1962 through 2002 has to have been intimately involved with the evolution of The Internet. And I was! I used email in my daily work thirty years ago. I participated actively in newsgroups (an Internet forum before the World Wide Web came along) as early as 1982. My last few job assignments before I retired included development of PC-based internet mail software, a security firewall for big companies to protect their Internet access, and Voice Over IP servers (how telephone calls get transmitted over the Internet today).
  
• Technology forecasting. Over the period from 1979 to the early 1990s, I had quite a few opportunities to assess the implications of new technologies and to do 5-year forecasts of where computer and communication technology would be. These were very exciting work assignments. For instance, around 1980 my group did studies of the feasibility of telephone access via cable TV, broadband data via cable TV, and a high-speed packet network carrying telephone and video traffic as well as data. It took until the 2000s for those to become real businesses, but we blue-skied the technology back then. In fact, as of 2007, I get my telecommunications services at home that way: telephone and broadband data via cable TV, and my telephone calls travel over the Internet packet network.
  
• International negotiation. During the 1970s,  I was Bell Labs' delegate to several national and international standards committees involved in data communications. I wound up traveling all over the world, until we had our second child and I requested an assignment with less travel.
• Teaching. Bell Labs offers graduate-level courses to its employees in relevant technologies. I taught several of these courses. Notable among them was the course in Computer Networking. In 1977, I designed that course from scratch, and taught it the first time it was offered.
• Paralegal. At several times during my career, I was an in-house consultant to the legal and patent staff. But, for six months in 1983, my involvement with legal issues was much deeper. My group's assignment was to negotiate a half-dozen software development deals with software companies around the country. Bell Labs and AT&T lawyers were simply not up-to-date on software law, so I put my group and myself through a crash course in software law and we did the contracts ourselves. We must have done it OK; the legal department wound up using the form contract we developed as Bell Labs' standard software contract well into the 1990s.

Personal

• In graduate school, I learned to ski and sail. That's a nice combination, because the seasons do not overlap. I skiied for many years, until at about age 50 I decided my declining healing powers would make it too dangerous.
• I enjoyed sailing throughout the late '60s and the '70s. For much of that time, I belonged to the Monmouth Boat Club and raced in the Albacore class: a 15-foot planing sailboat. In 1975, I was the Northeast District champion and tenth at the US National championships.
• From 1967 through 1995, I was always in at least one recreational volleyball league.
  
• When my sons proved not to be interested in sailing, I turned to coaching them in soccer and getting my own exercise on a bicycle. While I was never a competitor in bicycling, I found it a good way to keep fit without the boredom or the pounding of running. In my 40s, I was cycling about 120 miles per week in season. I still ride once or twice a week.
• In 1986, I began playing golf again; I had played as a teenager and when I was in college. Now that I'm retired, I get to play three times a week.

• When I was sailing competitively in 1971, I built a centerboard whose design I optimized by computer, which was one of the early applications of Computer Aided Design (CAD) to sports. Having derived the equations, I had the computer draw the templates on hardboard using a flatbed plotter. For the next few years, nobody won an Albacore national championship without first borrowing my templates and building a centerboard.
• If you were a serious cyclist who did his own maintenance in the late '80s and also used a PC, there's a good chance you downloaded and used my "BikeGear" program to design your gearing ratios.
• When I got back into golf in the late '80s, I started building my own clubs from components. But, being an engineer, I wanted to know more about how golf clubs really worked -- and there wasn't much around except the propaganda from the club manufacturers. So I did my own research, and published my findings on the Internet. By the time I retired from Bell Labs, I was getting calls from companies in the golf business to do consulting. Most of it I do for free (hey, I'd do it anyway as a hobby), but larger assignments involving more commitment are a sideline business.