There were so many of you that contributed to the design, documentation, test, build, management, support and sales & service of Dicomed products that I can't begin to list who worked on what and when. But anyhow the following is some of my recollections and a few glimpses of early Dicomed.
My first job out of school in 1960 was working for Boeing Aircraft Company in Seattle, WA as a missile/rocket research engineer. After working on the BOMARC (surface-to-air), Minuteman (ICBM) and SATURN S1-C (Apollo) programs for about five years I went to Sperry-Univac in St. Paul, MN where I prepared design requirements for many of UNIVAC's graphic displays and one in particular was a general purpose graphic display that did point plotting, vectors and alphanumeric. On one of my assignments I met Dick Hilden and Wayne Huelskoetter who both worked in Ken Fechter's graphics group. Dick and Wayne invited me to lunch one day to discuss spinning off and getting into the alphanumeric display business. I said thank you, but no way since there were already about twelve other companies doing that. I said if you come up with another idea for an outside venture let me know. They Did! A few months later they thought we could do an image display for radiologists to view computerized x-rays. I said: "That's a new market; count me in"! By December 1968 I was busy reviewing what Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was doing in image processing. They were using computers to do image enhancement and image restoration of the moon photos from Mariner. I asked Hilden to book me into an image processing conference in Washington D.C. and by January 1969 we had formed a new company called: " The Medical Computer Corporation" (MCC). I wrote the proposal for technology, Wayne did the marketing section and Dick put the financials together and completed the overall business plan. Dick got ten investors to kick in $15,000 each and we were on our way. All three of us gave our notices to UNIVAC. Shortly after, due to a name conflict with a company in New England, we changed the name of the company to Dicomed Corporation.
To continue my pursuit of a masters degree in Electrical Engineering, I enrolled at the University of Minnesota and began night school in the graduate program. While there I took classes in solid state electronics and advanced mathematics. I continued my night school until I went to work for Dicomed and then had to give it up due to the heavy work load. At that time I was eight credits shy of a masters in mathematics.
The first space MCC had consisted of two small offices with a reception area. Margie Pool [employee #3] (Secretary) and Steve Posey [employee #4] (Technician) sat in the reception area. Dick [employee #1] (President & product design) had an office with one desk. He sat behind it and Dick Lundell [employee #6] (Manufacturing) sat facing him. Wayne [employee #2] (VP Marketing) had the other office with one desk and I [employee # 5] (Systems Engineering) sat facing him. Our proposal to investors stated that we would design three systems each having an image scanner and one or more image displays and be on the market within a year.
Since Dick and Wayne had just finished the design of a display we chose to design the display first rather than the scanner. The display was to show an image of an x-ray to a radiologist, who is trained to look at black and white images. These images are entirely black with white showing the detain of interest. Most displays up to that time had a white background and black detail such as text or lines. Dick had done some research on CRTs and found a "dark trace" CRT for our use. It was ordered, design proceeded (Hilden - logic, Duerr - circuits, Grimaldi - instruction set & interface protocol & Lundell - mechanical design & packaging) and the first unit was built. It was then I discovered that Dick was colored blind and the CRT he got for us was to be back-lit with a white fluorescent circuline bulb. When information was formed on the CRT face it was a "pinkish-purple"! I couldn't see any radiologist in his right mind looking at a pink-purple x-ray. We were in deep trouble here. Dick was always the optimist and declared that the purple was actually the magenta color of the KCl (Potassium Chloride) CRT screen. He proposed that we use the complementary color of green instead of white. When we did this the radiologist would see a black image against a green back ground instead of a pink image against a white background. Well you have to understand this was progress. We were all a little more relieved when Dr. Richard Lillihei (brother to the heart surgeon Lillihei) thought it might fly with the radiologist. We sold our first one to Dr. Sam Dyer of the University of Missouri's Radiology Department {see other memory recollection from U of Missouri). Dicomed took the lemon and made lemon aid. It was re-marketed as the D 30 high resolution (1024 by 1024) digital image display and we immediately started aiming at the digital image processing market (think satellite and aerial recon imagery).
There was another incident involving our first display product. Right after we delivered the first unit to Dr. Dwyer, he called and had an excited conversation with Wayne. "As I sit in front of the unit it appears that the CRT is melting and there seems to be something like cellophane crinkling and sticking to the inside face of the tube! What is happening?"
We discovered that the CRT manufacturer added a clear plastic 'implosion shield' to the front of the CRT and it was not properly grounded causing a large electrostatic field to develop. This caused the fragile membrane inside the tube to be sucked into the faceplate destroying itself. We frantically called the manufacturer to see what could be done. He immediately recommended removing the shield. We had ordered and received three tubes: one was shipped to Dr. Dwyer, one was in our lab (and just destroyed the same way Dr. Dwyer's was). Our last, one and only, CRT had not been powered up yet.
Dick sent Steve Posey, our technician out to the drug store to buy 50 tongue depressors. When he got back we all sat around the CRT carefully tapping these wooden sticks between the CRT face and the implosion shield . Our industrially designed product now looked like a porcupine! It worked! Finally, the shield popped off . We powered up the unit and did not repeat the disaster. Problem solved - no implosion shields until a proper grounding method can be found.
We next designed and built interface boxes (Tom Diede - logic and Larry Wright - test) between the display and the several computer types to which it would connect. Next we designed and built magnetic tape units since these were the only devices that had enough storage capacity then to store a one million byte image (1024 X 1024 X 8). After the tape unites we added image scanners to scan images and record them on magnetic tape. The largest scanner we ever built was to scan 11 inch by 17 inch x-rays. It was sold to UCLA for a project to study miner black lung disease. We now had our first system consisting of a scanner, storage unit and display. You could buy any one or set of two or all three. I designed all of the command sets for the products as well as all of the interface protocols.
The early hardware model number scheme kind of went like so: DXX for units and D1XX for systems. With D0X for accessory devices, D1X for storage units, D2X ??, D3X for display units, D4X for film recorders, D5X for digitizers, D6X, D7X and D8X for design stations and D9X ??
An 8-bit microprocessor, called and ATRON 601 [200 nanosecond cycle time - 4,096 BYTES of core memory [yes core] and 1,024 bytes of RAM), was added to the system and now we had the capability of doing some of our own image functions. These systems were dubbed the D172 and D173. In 1971 a black & white film recorder was added to our product line. When this film recorder was combined with a D172 we could take on some special applications. One such application was doing multiple listing catalogs. We delivered such a system to International Graphics Corporation and was the first to bring digital processing to the Real Estate market in 1971. The catalog was produced monthly and printed from film made from our film recorder. The film was about 2 1/2" wide and in a long strip that held several frames. Each frame had a scanned picture of a house and a scanned status card. Data was manipulated off line by an IBM 360 that would shuffle and arrange the houses (frames) by location and price. By 1972 we had done several interface boxes, displays, scanners (image digitizers) and systems. It was also this year that I got invited to give a technical paper in Geneva, Switzerland at the International Electro-Optics Conference. The paper was on the Dicomed D36 Image Display and the technology of producing high resolution 2048 by 2048 pixels images on a dark trace CRT (Cathode Ray Tube).
Our next biggest challenge was the system for remote sensing Institute at South Dakota State University (SDSU) called SADE. I designed the system and two of my engineers, Tom Diede and Mel Duerr did the product modifications and special circuits. SADE consisted of a D172 plus a color image display with a frame buffer to show the flight path over an area prerecorded with an airborne FM tape recorder running at 30 ips. The frame buffer used a fast FABRI-TEK memory feeding three parallel shift registers feeding a digital-to-analog converter running at 5 MHz. I spent a month or more on loan to SDSU and became a proficient programmer in three languages: IBM 360 assembly language, FORTRAN and ATRON 601 micro code. During the day I would write assembly language programs for the interface between SADE and the University computer located 1/4 mile away and connected by cables. In the afternoon and early evening I would write FORTRAN application programs for SADE. In the evenings I would write in micro code and update our D172 system. I gave a paper on SADE at the Remote Sensing conference that year.
Over the years we designed several more products and systems for customers such as Control Data, General Electric, American Optical and several others. In 1975 we designed our first color film recorder, D47, and sold it to Jet Propulsion Laboratory [see Livermore reference on Doug's site] (JPL). I designed a 35 mm slide making language (like a programming language) called DICOMEDIA. You could sit down and write the code to describe a graphic or text for a 35 mm slide.
DICOMEDIA I Code (WTS-1)
Code Function
@ End of Slide
@@ End of job
/N/ Type size
(Text Phrase inside) The actual text to be displayed
!! Start/End of Bold text
&& Start/End Extended text - stretch it horizontally
%% Start/End Condensed text - shrink it horizontally
#N# Slide number - start slide
##N## Job Number - Start job
**L,C or R** Justification - Left, Center or Right
... etc. Any other similar commands ...
Example: ##1## Job number 1
#1#/4/ Slide number 1 w/text size 4
**C**!!(A Slide)!! Centered bold text "A Slide"
@ End of slide or film frame
@@ End of set of slides or a job end
The code would be punched on paper tape using an ASR 33 Teletype [think before Hazeltine 1500 display]. The tape would then be read into a D173 system using a paper tape reader. The computer would read the code and produce the graphic or text on the color film recorder. In 1976 our one programmer, Art Olive, worked on a time-share slide making system using my DICOMEDIA language. We were able to produce various slide types such as: text, bar chart, column chart and pie chart. From my work at UNIVAC on a general purpose display system I got the idea for a total image machine, i.e. a general purpose film recorder capable of doing alphanumerics, lines and images and in color. This was the D48 [designed by Diede, Duerr and Lundell] and when combined with the DEC computer system it became the D148 system. We sold over 200 of these systems world wide. Over the next 3 to 5 years nearly every Cray computer in the world (including NCAR, SANDIA, LLL, CIA, etc.) had a Dicomed color film recorder connected in some fashion.
It was near Christmas in 1977 when my only programmer, Art, quit and went to work for Medtronic. This was right after he learned that DICOMED had won all three contracts (SANDIA Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and National Center For Atmospheric Research [NCAR]) for D148 film recorder systems; each requiring unique software. The first system deliverable in eight months. When Wayne and Dick heard that Art was leaving they were in my office immediately asking what I was going to do. I said I am going to take the Christmas break as usual and begin recruiting in January when I come back. In January and February I reviewed over one hundred resumes, interviewed about 30 candidates and hired seven programmers for DICOMED: David Yam, Terry Lambert, Gerry Magin, Tom Sederberg, Rich Asleson, Larry Moe and Harold Nelson. When they all arrived I held a meeting in the conference room with them and told them they were specially selected as the team that would write all of DICOMED's software for all of its products and deliver released programs bug free in eight months for three contracts. This of course would have to include a new operating system since DICOMED didn't have one. I said I knew they could do it and I walked out of the meeting. I later learned they were stunned; and rightly so. I had to somehow bring lightning to this group that had never worked together before and find out fast who be contributors and who would give up without trying. The gamble paid off! They all contributed, lasted several years and DICOMED's software department was born. Yes we did deliver on all three contracts. Only one of them was one month late. We had our operating system and also for the first time application software running on a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) minicomputer: a PDP 11-34 with 16 Mbytes of RAM and 10 Mbytes of removable hard disk.
These demanding customers, when using our system, would specify a high resolution color film output by saying: Let's "Dicomed the image". The D48 film recorder could draw lines, plot points, paint images on 16 mm, 35 mm, 70 mm and 9 inch film. It could use several interchangeable optic modules and film transports. A D148 system would typically cost $150,000 to $200,000. Tom Diede; an extremely bright logic designer and Mel Duerr; an outstanding discrete circuit designer; together with Dick Lundell and his team designed the majority of Dicomed products during the early and mid years of the company. Later there would also be many more talented technologists, artists, technicians and Dicomed team members that I had the privilege to work with.
When a D148 was used wholly in image mode for 35 mm slide making it was called a DICOMEDIA II system. We designed several design stations (D38 -"Rainbow Machine", D80 - Imaginator, D60 - Producer, etc.) that artists and illustrators could use to design graphics. Our original DICOMEDIA I slide language was just that, a language, like a programming language. When you made 35 mm color slides from the code you didn't know what the image would look like until you saw it. This needed to be changed so image composers could preview the image on a monitor before committing it to a color film run and color film processing. Thus the birth of the D38 the first color workstation to use polygons to describe outline text and figures [prior to Bitstream, True Type, Adobe, etc.]. I designed the command structure for the D38 and Bruce was the lead D38 software engineer. This was finally the machine that would produce on film what you saw on the monitor. David Yam wrote the slide making software for the D148. We began marketing the D38 and the D148 as the DICOMEDIA system that guarantees the artist: "What you see (on the D38) is what you get (on the D148)". This was the birth of that phrase and it is screened on one of the blue T-shirts I still have that was made up in Engineering by Mike Newman at that time. The phrase later got the mnemonic: WYSIWYG, and was used throughout the industry. Today it stands for matching text on monitors to text on printers, etc. So when you see those crazy letters WYSIWYG (Wizzy-e-Wig) you now know the rest of the story. This was in 1980 prior to CorelDraw and Adobe PhotoShop software that later ran on personal computers (PCs). Note also that the D38 was one of the very first systems in the industry [PARC was first] to use icons as command functions.
I was the architect for over 50 products and systems for Dicomed, many of which were "a first in the industry". These "Dicomed firsts" and guiding raw talent to new levels of achievement is what gave me the biggest high at Dicomed . Although I was deeply involved in the direction of color film recorder and color display design at work; at home we still had a black and white TV. Our daughters thought it a treat to go to their friends house and see color TV.
I used one of the color film recorders together with DICOMEDIA and Graphic COM software to generate the first computer generated color microfiche at 24 X containing over fifty color images. Again I gave a technical paper. This time at the SPIE conference entitled: "Computer Generated Color Microfiche".
In 1981 I was asked to start a chapter of the National Computer Graphics Association (NCGA) here in Minnesota. This I did, being the first state director and president of the Minnesota chapter. This work continued until 1985 when I left Dicomed and started my own consulting company; Socrates Systems.
Dicomed grew to be a $28 million company with over 200 employees and Wayne wanted to build a building. We moved from Penn Avenue to Burnsville with a stop on the way at 12 Avenue South. Yes right up the street from my home I was Director of R & D with about $500,000 worth of computer and color video lab equipments. At this facility in 1984 Cal Kirchoff used a D148 color film recorder to make a computer generated color movie that used close to 1000 reels of magnetic tape to produce a 12 minute film. The Film was recorded on the D148, rushed to California for film processing and then flown to Los Vegas for screening and editing. Eddy Garrick, a former producer at Disney Studios, put the whole thing together. There were 26 contributors submitting their computer generated tapes to DICOMED for recording. One of the contributors was, Bruce Lindbloom, one of the greatest engineers and programmer I have ever known. Bruce did a fractal segment called Seven Days (Creation of the Earth). The "Magic Egg" was shown around the world in IMAX theaters. Bruce was the principal designer of the D38 Design Station, D80 Imaginator, Color Advantage, Shadow and made many other significant technical contributions to Dicomed
In 1984 I went to Tokyo, Japan to assess technical progress at NELCO, our D38 distributor, who was working on a Kanji version of the D38. While there I got to visit the Japanese equivalent of New York Institute of Technology [think Ed Catmull - later founded PIXAR] (NYIT) computer graphics (film animation) laboratory called: Japan Computer Graphic Laboratory (JCGL). I had known Nelson Max, a physicist at LLL and a D148 customer, and he was now at FUJITSU teaching them solid modeling graphics rendering. Nelson prepared a nice dinner for another Dicomed employee, Torbin Holmes(?), and me in his apartment. My wife, Ilene, joined me after I was there a week and later one of the engineers, Heroshi(?), at NELCO took Ilene and I to Nikko, the shrine city. When he brought us back to Tokyo we went to his home for dinner which his wife had spent all day preparing. We sat on the floor at each side of a square. His wife served us. It was excellent!
From Director of R & D I became Director of Strategic Technologies (a Fellow position - or "phase-the-old-guy-out-slot") where I was to look ahead and provide a technological path for the company. Neal Nordling (Director of Engineering) and Gerry Baiel (Director of Operations) were being groomed as my replacements. When Wayne brought in these and other people "to grow the company", I decided that I needed a change and started Socrates Systems. In 1984 I resigned from Dicomed after 16 years. In a way it was sad to leave but I also had wanted to try my hand at consulting and being on my own. This was interesting work but not as challenging as moving technology from wires and bytes to the market place.
About three years later George Walker (COB) and Ken Hootnik (Pres.) of Dicomed gave me an offer to return to Dicomed as VP of Engineering. Bruce had left the company for DataCard then returned. Bruce encouraged me to come back and straighten things out. This was after the departure of Wayne Huelskoetter (Pres), Jim Kubiak (Marketing) and Neal Nordling (Engineering). Gerry Baiel was in charge of Engineering and Operations and Jim Russmeyer was acting Marketing Director. I agreed to come back and this caused Gerry Baiel to leave Dicomed; followed shortly thereafter by Russmeyer. After reviewing the progress on several stalled engineering projects I made changes to move products forward.
By the end of 1988 Dicomed was courted and acquired by Crosfield Electronics, and English firm that was one of four in the world making color prepress systems. Crosfield eliminated Ken Hootnik. They kept me and my engineers for the technology and installed one of their own, Trevor Hayworth as President. After about a year they removed George Walker. Jerry Madvig was brought in as Marketing Director. The Engineering team [Duerr, Papke, Norman, Finks, Dillon, Albers, et al.) developed several new products during that time including a new color film recorder, a modified Producer, enhanced Presenter PC and a new color image workstation for artists. My technology team was viewed by Crosfield as a strong asset [we demonstrated we could link into the Crosfield system with our technology at IMPRINTA] which got the attention of Jim Salmon, Managing Director for Crosfield. All of the other functions of Dicomed were eventually eliminated or replaced with Crosfield functions and personnel.
About that time Crosfield also acquired a Boston company, Lightspeed, that made a software program that ran on the Macintosh that artists could use. The Crosfield sales force concentrated on selling Crosfield's traditional products and the new Lightspeed MAC products, neglecting the Dicomed products; consequently Dicomed sales fell off considerably. Along comes DuPont and Fuji, two $30 billion corporations that had formed a joint venture (DuPont Fuji Joint Venture - DFJV) to capture the electronic color prepress market world wide. They bought Crosfield and a little while later put Dicomed up for sale. There was an initial interest by a company from California but it died. DuPont was about to give up and close down Dicomed. Jerry Madvig, Harry St. Onge and I made an offer to buy Dicomed from Dupont-Fuji for $3,000,000 to keep it intact. We presented our proposal [$1M debt + $2M equity] to Bob Harbor of Dupont and were being considered when another bid came in from a local individual.
Dicomed was acquired by a private investor Orin [Kirshbaum], who along with Trevor ran the company. Things were not getting better with all these changes going on and Bruce and I decided to leave Dicomed and form a new company called Candela, Ltd. Nine years later we sold Candela to Wayne's company Pictographics International. Bruce and Tracy Finks work there and I have retired from the high technology business world.