November 6, 1988

THE PROBLEMS OF 2: Talk inside a local Unisys plant is that a memo is about to be circulated bringing uncool tidings to employees. The company’s peripherals division in Santa Clara has too much inventory and may need to shut down production for a month. “They’re trying to avoid the layoff festival,” says my source. Some employees may be taking a two-week, unpaid vacation at Christmas. And manufacturing laborers may only be working 30-hour weeks until March.

“That really is speculation,” says a Unisys spokesman. “There are times at the end of the year where you make relatively minor adjustments to production during the holiday season, one way or the other. Historically that has been the case, but until there’s something to announce, we obviously aren’t in a position to comment on the speculation.”

Since Sperry and Burroughs became Unisys, known in ad copy as The Power of 2, many changes have gone down in facilities in the Valley — one indication being that the current American Electronics Association directory lists what turns out to be a disconnected phone number for the plant.

HERE’S YOUR CHANCE: If you ever wanted to hobnob with the hottest names in the electronics biz, break open your piggy bank and head for the upcoming Twelfth Annual Awards Dinner, a fund-raiser for The Exploratorium. For a mere $175, you can rub elbows with (or at least gaze upon) physicist Carver Mead, known as the co-father of VLSI (very large scale integration) chip design with computer scientist Lynn Conway. Mead, who is being honored at the dinner, will talk about “Silicon Neurocircuits,” and I think this is worth missing Comdex for.

Physicist Sydney Drell is also being honored for taking a stance against irresponsible use of science and technology in national defense, as well as his advocacy of better physics education at the high school level. And Dan Rathjen of Foothill High in Pleasanton will be awarded the Exploratorium’s first Outstanding Teacher Citation.

If your company just finished a particularly good fiscal year, you can hit up your president to pay for a table of 10, ranging in price from $2,500 to $50,000. Call 415/956-1010 for ticket info.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: I recently saw a chart lining up yet another statistic, revenue per employee, for some computer companies including Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems. Companies don’t always break out their numbers this way, but it’s easy enough to do and it’s another way to let investors know the relative stud factor of a company.

I got to thinking about what long hours everybody works at both those companies. Then I got to thinking about how many people I know in high-tech companies who are contractors or temporary workers. And then I got to wondering whether people compiling these statistics included overtime, contractors or temps in their “rev-per” figures. After all, if you work 20 hours of overtime every week, shouldn’t that count as another half an employee?

Curious, I called Sun and Apple to see how they tallied their rev-per figures. Sun’s representative said that its rev-per was $166,207, and includes contractors and temps. Apple, whose revenue-per-employee is an astronomical $504,000 for fiscal 1988, includes regular Apple employees — neither contractors nor temporaries — in its tally. Just thought you ought to know.

TO XANADU AND BEYOND: The Hackers Conference, Version 4.0, took place a while ago, but I’m still hearing smatterings. You may have seen what attendees are calling “the slime job” CBS News did on the conference. The team sent to cover the event, according to press babysitter David Gans, was obviously looking for footage that could be used in what he called “a very classic network hatchet job” of grouping all hackers into the “cracker,” or criminal, classification of electronics experts.

Aside from the slime job, lots of neat things happened off-camera. Organizer Mary Eisenhart recalls sitting at dinner with rocker/hacker Todd Rundgren and a Xanadoid, a member of the classically hackerish Xanadu hypertext team that recently joined president/hacker John Walker’s fold at Autodesk. “The Xanadoid was talking about how he wants to be frozen and (have his brain) loaded in ROM,” recalls Eisenhart.

Leo Schwab, the hot Amiga animator who runs around in velvet capes, took center stage for a while, too. After the CBS News debacle, someone said, “So Leo, what can you do with the CBS logo?” Schwab replied that no amount of Jolt Cola, the “all the sugar and twice the caffeine” hackers’ dream drink, was going to make him write any more code. But, of course, the next morning, to great cheers, he showed an animation of the words “Hackers 4.0″ shaped like an ax descending on the CBS logo, smashing it to smitherines.