Bob Richardson

Tribute to Bob Richardson, written by Garnet Chaney

Bob described himself in this way on BobsGear.com in November 2003:

This site is authored and run by Bob Richardson, a long time technology worker. He started at Univac in 1975 where he became one of the top mainframe troubleshooters.  Later was he was chief programmer at MicroPro, and director of core technology at Borland. Bob was a member of the DPMI standards commitee which defined much of the interface used in protected (32 bit) mode in co-operation with Intel, Microsoft, Phar-Lap, Phoenix and others. More recently Bob has returned to a post-graduate school and is a big fan of sony, robots in general, wearable gear and the like.

I first met Bob at Borland International, sometime around 1989 or 1990. Prior to that, Bob was working for a company called "Surpass", which had a spreadsheet which became known as Quattro Pro. He joined Borland when Borland acquired Surpass.

He was in the R&D department at Borland, and he was one of my principle champions to help me into R&D. He gave me various projects to do related to core technology. Bob quietly left Borland at one point, receiving a very large severance pay, and I lost contact with him for a few months.

Later I happened to meet up with him at a small office, over the top of Mexican bar and grill called the Tampico Grande. He maintained this office a few miles from Borland International, in a town called Felton. That was the start of a much closer relationship between us.

Bob had been there for a few months, maybe a year or two, doing electronic day trading on the Stock Market. This was around 1995, when the tools were still much more rudimentary than they are today. Unfortunately I never spent much time to see what he was up to with the trading. He and I didn't colaborate too much when I was day trading in 2000-2001.

At the same time I met up with him again in Felton, he was working on a project to automate shop documentation for machine shops, and he hired me to work for him. Somehow we managed to share a small office, me, him, my amateur radios, and a tarantula he couldn't stand. A few months later when that startup ran out of cash, I went off to work for Metricom for several months, but I still maintained close ties with Bob, and frequently visited him at his office, and the Mexican Bar and Grill.

Shortly after Metricom, I met Seymour Rubinstein. Unknown to me, Bob had worked for Seymour at both Surpass and Micropro. I was hired by Seymour to develop some of his ideas related to document management. Eventually I was promoted to Vice President of R&D, and one of my first official actions was to go to Felton and hire Bob to work for me. Bob helped me develop some very cool "Registration Server" technology for copy protecting a meta search software program I was developing, and he and I co-invented some patents related to meta search and language independent phrase analysis while working for Seymour.

Even after that company ran out of money in the dot-com bust of 2000, Bob and I maintained a very close relationship. He was a very important mentor for me, and provided guidance for several important business deals. He started going back to school, and completed two years of an online law degree program at Columbia University. His dream was to become a lawyer, and perhaps even eventually a judge in technology patent cases. He felt there is an incredible need for judges who understand technology to ajudicate patent disputes.

Bob was a polyglot, speaking fluent English, French, and Arabic. He also was proficient in Gaelic, and was learning Zapoteca, and he probably also knew a reasonable amount of Spanish. Bob's other loves included his children, his mom, amateur radio, being a MARS radio operator, sailboats, Harley motorcycles, gunsmithing, machining, computer controlled hand weaving, and bugging me in a way only brothers can.

Bob died in November 2004, after a brief battle with pneumonia, and a longer battle with liver failure.

Bob originally created this site to focus on his love of Sony toys, like his Aibo dog, nick-named Violetta, which I adopted after he died.

I am sure Bob would be pleased that Bobsgear is being relaunched in March 2007 to support open source development of extensions for Confluence, and also to contain my blog entries about stocks and whatever else comes to mind.

Rest in peace Bob, we shall meet again when we gather at the river.....