By Greg Walsh '76

Valley veterans Greg and Ruth Walsh find the region "a dynamic place where new, trendsetting things happen."

Silicon Valley has entered the popular consciousness. That fact hit home with me last summer when I watched "Pirates of Silicon Valley," the story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, on TNT. In recent months we've been dot-com'ed to death on prime-time TV. Books like Po Bronson's The Nudist on the Late Shift do a good job of describing the Valley's current frenzied activity, exposing the unfortunate shift from geek to greed. They also provide insight into its unusual culture. Activities that are quite normal here, like raising $3.5 million of venture capital money based on a few PowerPoint slides, must seem very strange to many outside of the Valley.

Silicon Valley has always been a special, dynamic place where new, trendsetting things happen. My first exposure to it and to the Internet occurred in 1973, during the summer of my sophomore year at WPI. Courtesy of MIT, Al Johannesen '67, then a young programmer in the Worcester Area College Computation Center (WACCC) and now WPI's managing senior UNIX administrator, and I got to upload and download files from the mythical SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab) at the then blindingly fast speed of 56 Kbits. This all happened over the primordial Internet, then called the ARPANET. At the time, the concept of distributed computing, running programs on another computer, and moving files around without using tapes or punched cards, was virtually unheard of. It was clear that cool things were going on out in California.

After graduating from WPI, I drove across the country to attend Stanford. There were already rumblings of the beginnings of the revolution. Xerox PARC, home of the Alto workstation, arguably the first true "personal" computer, was in full swing. I got a job there and ended up writing much of the "firmware" for the first WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) word processor at Xerox. It really is true that much of what we know and love about personal computers was first conceptualized and realized at Xerox. The story of how the company missed the boat is well told elsewhere and is held up as a constant example of the consequences of slow moving, limited thinking.

Back in the Silicon Valley of the early 1980s, "fast moving" meant a product-development cycle of 18 months. That's an eternity on today's Internet time, but it wasn't really much time at all when developing a computer system meant building your own hardware, writing your own operating system, and developing your own applications.

Eccentric engineers laboring long hours under impossible deadlines were a fixture in the Valley then as they are now. More typical then were business-savvy types exploiting the fact that most technophiles are motivated not by monetary reward, but by the pure desire to engineer something and feel part of a winning team. There is a bit more knowledge today among new grads concerning the real risks and rewards of the Silicon Valley business world, at least among those who have read books like Nudist.

In my own case, life in Silicon Valley provided some valuable lessons about money and engineering. Contrast the value of a tiny equity position in a company with an initially silly sounding idea of a "single board computer upgrade" with the value of a much larger equity position in a company with an apparently well-thought-out and well-funded idea of a "graphics supercomputer." The former was Convergent Technologies, which set a record for the early 1980s for time-to-IPO and rapid growth rate. The latter was Ardent Computer, by some accounts one of the largest investment "craters" in the history of the Valley.

In 1995, Ruth and I were lucky enough to take a yearlong sabbatical from the Valley, courtesy of her role in setting up the customer support organization for yet another company that made it across the IPO finish line. Still not a big hit by Valley standards, it was big enough to enable us to take a break and regroup. We spent a year on a 42-foot sailboat visiting remote places in the South Pacific. A year later, when we stopped in the relatively civilized port of Papeete, Tahiti, and saw our first Pepsi can emblazoned with www.pepsi.com, we realized that new and possibly wonderful things were going on back home. Returning to San Francisco, we found that we had missed the entire browser wars, but were just in time for the rise of e-commerce and the expanding role of the Internet in business infrastructure.

After hooking up with three former associates who had also been both educated and chastened by previous successes and failures, and after producing the previously mentioned deck of PowerPoint slides, we set sail on a new venture, E.piphany Marketing Software. Three years later, on Sept. 22, 1999, in the final months of the 20th century, E.piphany joined the long and growing list of Silicon Valley success stories as the symbol EPNY was first listed on the NASDAQ.

Greg Walsh was born in Long Branch, N.J., in 1955, the year after IBM introduced the first mass-produced computer, the 650, and the year before another IBM team developed the first high-level programming language, FORTRAN. He earned B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science at WPI in 1976, as a member of the last class to enroll before the start of the WPI Plan. The following year, he received an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford. He stayed in northern California to launch a career that has included work in hardware design, microcode, operating systems, compilers, office applications and, most recently, Web-based enterprise software. In his 22 years there, he has been part of some of the successes and "craters" that can result from the fast-paced, high-stakes life in Silicon Valley.

The Walshes are a true Silicon Valley family. Greg's wife, Ruth, also a longtime Valley resident, has been involved with two successful software start-ups. Their son, Eric, who earned a degree in history at UCLA, has continued the family tradition and now sells enterprise software for GO.com. Greg and Ruth enjoy long-distance ocean sailing and have plans to circumnavigate the globe in a few years.