Changing the History of Computing

Our favorite quotes from of our interview with Steve Casselman

The Invention

“I saw all the flaws and I designed a board that would cover those flaws, and it helped to alleviate them.” 

“I like to think of boards as art. A good board, when you look at it, looks good. That’s a good board. There's a certain amount of pride that goes into making everything look just right.”

“But we made the thing and it actually worked. And that was really hard. I had never worked so hard in my life. I worked 20 hour days, slept on the floor, and did that for months and months.” 

Building a Business

“When you're an entrepreneur, especially if you're just a bootstrapper you have to learn all that stuff on your own.”

“If you get somebody who's run a hundred startups and made money on every one, then you're gonna get money.” 

“And you can't convey that kind of urgency and stuff to somebody and say, imagine you're on fire, you have that long to make this thing work.”

“That was one of my goals, as the CTO there, was to show that we could do something better than anybody else in the world. Something, just something.”

Open Source

“The world could use hardware object technology being open source.” 

“I just think that we've gone a little too fast down the path of HLD to hardware.”

“And that's, like I said, the key problem now is changing the behavior of the FPGA. You have to change the behavior of what it does in an extremely short amount of time, to keep up with the GPUs and the CPUs, if you really wanna do it right.”

“There hasn't really been a breakthrough in low level state machine work since 1970, basically.”