Sharath Sury

Greetings. This is my personal story.

I grew up as the son of immigrants. My parents bravely moved from India to the US in the 1960s as students. My father is a mathematician and received his PhD at the University of Michigan, while my mother was trained as an economic historian (receiving India's coveted Gold Medal for academic honors).

From an early age, I was set on a path familiar to most first generation Indians in the US: I was to become a medical doctor or an engineer. I diligently worked towards that goal. I ended up skipping (advancing) several grades and finishing high school at 15 (The Science Academy of Austin).

During my high school years, I was somewhat brazen and brave in directly approaching senior management and CEO's of various technology companies in an attempt to get a job. The hook I used was that I was fluent in 8 different programming languages (thanks to my father). One of those languages was Ada, (at that time) a Department of Defense programming requirement. I was also highly proficient in C programming and Object Oriented Programming, something that was just getting off the ground at the time.

I gained an internship at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). The Company was the first of its kind in the US. Its model was to adopt the "keiretsu" system that was so highly successful in Japan in the 80's: pooling together the best talent from multiple companies in the technology sector (even those that were ordinarily competitors). Given that this novel enterprise could be viewed as a breach of the Sherman/Clayton Antitrust statutes, MCC hired retired Admiral Bobby Inman, who had been a Deputy Director of the CIA and NSA, to make the case to Washington. In the end, the Justice Department granted approval and MCC began its work. There were 400 employees, consisting of the top researchers and engineers from member companies like IBM, Lockheed, 3M, Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, etc. Nearly 75% of the employees had PhDs, with the remainder having advanced degrees of some sort, plus 1 high school student (me!).

I soaked up as much knowledge as I could, being around the "best of the best," some of whom became the pioneers of the internet (internet protocols, and packet switching), VLSI, distributed databases, and (in my group) artificial intelligence.

Within 6 months, I developed a fully functional syntax-directed expert system, written in LISP. The system was commercialized a