Interviewed by Roy Ogus on 2019-05-17 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

In this two-part oral history interview, Robert Garner recounts his 1977-2018 Silicon Valley career in computer, networking and storage architecture, working both engineering and management roles in both product development and research at Xerox’s Systems Development Division (SDD) and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Sun Microsystems, Brocade Communications, and IBM Almaden Research (ARC). Beginning in 1977 with an MSEE from Stanford University, Bob Metcalfe recruited him into Xerox’s System Development Division (SDD) in Palo Alto that had been established to commercialize PARC's groundbreaking Alto personal computer. There he co-designed the Xerox STAR Professional Workstation and its 10-Mbps Ethernet interface, announced ahead of its time in 1981. That same year, he joined Lynn Conway’s pioneering VLSI design group at Xerox PARC.

In 1984, he left PARC to join the start-up Sun Microsystems as the lead architect of SPARC, its Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), working closely with UCB’s Dave Patterson and Sun’s cofounder Bill Joy. There he also co-designed the Sun-4/200 workstation using the first SPARC chips. In 1989, he transitioned into management to lead the I/O-subsystem ASIC team for Sun’s flagship UNIX multi-processor system, the SPARCcenter-2000. After managing an endeavor to design a gallium-arsenide based SPARC microprocessor, in 1991 he became manager of the UltraSPARC-I microprocessor front-end architecture and logic design team, growing it to 80 engineers. In 1994, he became the SPARC unit’s director of advanced development for microprocessor architecture, performance, compilers and CAD. In 1995 he managed the development of a new instruction-set and graphics-oriented microprocessor called MAJC, the first multi-threaded microprocessor. In 1997, he managed a Java distributed computing software project at Sun called JINI. He left Sun in 1998 to join start-up Brocade Communications as its director of hardware engineering, responsible for designing its FibreChannel switch products.

In 2001, he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose where he co-designed an innovative 3D, liquid-cooled scalable server called IceCube, inventing its surface-based capacitive couplers. The project culminated in an operational 3x3x3-node prototype. In 2007, he was asked to manage a small team that designed and supported a million-lines-of-code, high-performance, software-based storage controller deployed world-wide in supercomputers called GPFS Native RAID (GNR). He later spearheaded a preconfigured system product based on it called the IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS). From 2004 to the present, he's led a team of volunteers that have restored two 1960’s IBM 1401 mainframes to full operation, exhibited weekly at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - https://www.computerhistory.org/colle...

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Catalog Number: 1102781304
Acquisition Number: X8869.2019