Oral History of Robert Norman

Interviewed via Zoom by Doug Fairbairn and Dave Eggleston on 2020-07-16 in Pendleton, OR X9314.2021 ©Computer History Museum

Bob Norman, born in 1948, lived a largely care-free life growing up in South Dakota. Both his parents worked, so he was responsible for entertaining himself during the day. Only requirements were that he got home by dark and didn’t get into trouble. In 1966, he entered the South Dakota School of Mines, where he earned an EE degree.

After considering multiple job offers, he went to work for Sperry UNIVAC in Minneapolis in 1966. He spent the first year on the test floor, where he got a lot of practical knowledge about various electronic products. However, his manager realized they were wasting his considerable talents in testing and got him moved to a design engineering group.

After a couple of design projects, he was placed on a team to design a new memory system using the recently announced 1103 1K DRAM from Intel. His team was competing against a second team and he was determined not to lose that competition. He came up with a very innovate design that won the design challenge and made a major impression on the management team.

He eventually decided he wanted to work more with microprocessors and left Sperry for a job with Texas Instruments. He worked on a variety of projects and got his first introduction to designing a disk controller.

He left TI after two years to join Storage Technology in Colorado. He made a major contribution to some of Storage Tech’s most successful products, the 8370, 8375, and the 8380, IBM compatible disk drives. He was later recruited by Monolithic Memories to come to California. They were later bought by AMD, where he stayed for a year after the acquisition.

After AMD, he was recruited to a new startup, Sandisk, where, as employee #5, he made his most significant contributions. He teamed up with Eli Harari, Sanjay Mehrotra and others to conceive and design a controller which could make Flash memory appear and function as a hard disk drive. It was called “System Flash”. His design has had a major impact on the industry and formed the basis of a new generation of non-volatile storage systems.

After Sandisk, he moved onto Micron and then onto various consulting jobs. Bob’s creativity in design has yielded over 200 patents. As of 2020, he is continuing his engineering work and expects to file many tens of additional patents before his design days are done!

Catalog Number: 102792075
Lot Number: X9314.2021