File:Oral History of Allen Baum

Description
Interviewed by David C. Brock and Hansen Hsu, on 2016-07-18 in Mountain View, CA, X7848.2017 © Computer History Museum

Allen Baum was born in New Jersey in 1952, to a Holocaust survivor mother and an electrical engineer father. The family moved to Los Altos, CA in 1965 when his father started a job at SRI to work on communications satellites. As a teenager Baum was exposed to SRI's Shakey robot, and Doug Engelbart's oNLine System.

His interest in computers started with an HP programmable calculator demonstration is father brought him to. Baum met Steve Wozniak, who introduced him to computer design as a hobby, as well as to Steve Jobs.

Baum found his first job right after high school with Wozniak writing test programs for mainframes at Tenet. Baum and his father gave the two Steves a loan which made it possible for them to complete their first order of Apple Is, and his father later joined Apple as an analog electrical engineer. Baum wrote a disassembler and other software for the Apple I and II, and made suggestions to Woz that were incorporated into the Apple II slot architecture. Baum attended college at MIT, and had summer jobs working at Stanford AI Lab and HP on calculators (to whom he recommended Wozniak), eventually getting on the HP PA-RISC processor design project after graduating. He left HP in 1984, briefly joining a startup which developed a battery backed-up RAM disk, and then joined Apple's Advanced Technology Group in 1986 to work on a new RISC processor project called Aquarius. After the cancellation of Aquarius, Baum became Apple's liaison to ARM, which Apple was using in the Newton. Baum joined the MicroElectronics division of DEC in 1996, which designed both StrongARM and Alpha microprocessors. With DEC's purchase by Compaq, the MicroElectronics group was eventually sold to Intel in order to shed DEC's fab. Baum remained with the group through its various corporate ownership changes, and at Intel, helped design Xeon chips. Baum retired from Intel in 2012, but is currently at a startup called Esperanto Technologies.


 * Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterwards.  This may result in discrepancies between the transcript text and the video recording. Please see the transcript for further information: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102717165

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Catalog Number: 102717166 Lot Number: X7848.2017